What is weighing you down?

Do you really want to delete all 92,452 emails in your archive?

I stared at the question for a solid minute. This was serious business. If I hit the button, I would be erasing my past. It would all be gone. I hadn’t carefully sorted through the messages looking for value. There could be important stuff in there: Letters from friends, questions from readers, passwords and PINs, half-written articles that I could still finish someday. Was I really crazy enough to hit the button?

The mind is a curious device. Somewhere in the back of it there’s a place that keeps track of all the things you should be doing but aren’t. It doesn’t matter whether they are good things or bad things, they just keep echoing in the back of your mind. You should be cleaning the kitchen. You should be losing those extra pounds. You should be finishing that blog post. You should be figuring out why the check engine light has been on for 30,000 miles. You should be watching that Freaks and Geeks DVD that Netflix sent you last November.

There are four things you can do about your unfinished tasks. You can do them, you can delegate them, you can renegotiate them or you can decide that you’ll never do them. That last one is tough, but necessary. You can’t do everything you want to do, everything you need to do, and especially everything you feel like you should do, but don’t really have to do. At some point, you have to eliminate some of the things on your list. Eliminating the wants is hard. It is hard to give up on something you want to do. Eliminating the shoulds is also hard though, because somewhere along the line you made an agreement with yourself that you would take care of these things. It doesn’t matter that they aren’t really important or enjoyable; you made an agreement with yourself. At some point though, you have to cut out the shoulds, or you’re going to end up eliminating too many wants.

So, I hit the button. I deleted the 92,452 emails. There was a momentary feeling of regret, but there was also relief. Those 92,452 things had been eliminated from my to-do list with the click of a button. I was free. I could start over.