Delete Your Drafts on Leap Day! or not!

As of this writing I have 8 drafts in WordPress.

Some of them are more than a year old.

Aaron Jorbin has a post called Leap Day is Delete Your Drafts Day!

Jeremy Felt replied with a post saying that he would be participating. He wrote something I identify with:

Some drafts are fun markers in time and are hard to delete, yet still somehow impossible to publish. Even just a flippant incomplete sentence can communicate a feeling I had 10 years ago. I think I’ll let some of those be.

I like it when drafts evoke a positive memory.

Sometimes they read to me like failure. Like technical debt. Unfinished manuscripts. Expired coupons. Overripe avocados.

Why didn’t I make that guacamole? What a failure I am!

I’m mostly kidding.

I don’t like a feeling bad about blog drafts. They are not hurting anyone. They take no real space. Just a few bytes of database storage in WordPress. Blogging has been positive and useful to me. It’s weird when aspects of it feel bad.

I don’t want it to feel like drudgery.

So a few years back I decided to fix this bad feeling. Remove the negative dynamic.

I needed a regular reminder.

I tried adding an item to my TODO text file.

I tried regularly sending myself an email reminder.

I didn’t heed either very much.

The avocados just kept sitting there.

After a lot of false starts I landed on a solution that has fixed it for me.

It’s a calendar event: “Revisit Blog Drafts”

Every 23 days is the interval that works for me.

When it was weekly or monthly I tuned it out. If it was always on a weekend there were better things to do. If it was always a weekday I could use work as an excuse. If it was weekly I would see it coming and sometimes would push it forward. Or delete it.

And so. Every 23 days assures it’s alway a on a new day of the week. It also assures that I’ve not thought about them in a while. It’s like I took a walk around the block. My head is cleared. My palate cleansed.

So to honor Aaron’s idea I’ve reset my weird every 23-day draft revisit event to fall on the 29th.

Leap Day Blog Draft Revisiting!