I have a graveyard. Not a physical one—a digital one.
It lives in my Notes App, my abandoned ClickUp docs, the productivity apps that I paid for but only used twice. But most of all it lives in my mind and my bones.
It's full of "systems" I swore would be the one.
📓 The bullet journal I spent 3 hours meticulously designing for the month that lasted exactly 4 days.
🗓️ The calendar I created to time-block my routines so each day was "consistent" which worked great until one day nothing went according to plan.
🧘 All the morning routines that boosted my ego only to fail the first time I had a flare up, leaving my mindset to crater like a Tower of Terror elevator.
☑️ The habit tracker that tracked nothing as well as they tracked my guilt.
Each time, starting with so much hope.
And each one faded away quietly as I tried to bury the shame of failing (yet again.)
I touched on productivity graveyards back in August. I'm revisiting it today because understanding why things end up in the graveyard is extremely important.
So we're going deeper. I've seen this pattern play out in my own life and in the lives of many high-achievers I've worked with over the last 15 years.
The productivity hacks that made you so anxious you just avoided focus work all together because other people's emergencies were easier. The routines that held more guilt about not being perfect than joy for being present with yourself.
It starts to become a cycle:
Find new tool/system.
All the hope that this will fix “it!” (whatever it is.)
Implement with enthusiasm.
It works! (For a bit.)
Then it stops working.
Blame and guilt knock on your door ("I'm not disciplined enough.")
Find next tool/system.
Repeat.
Each time I walked through this cycle, every thing I added to the graveyard seemed to become evidence of my failure. When it was actually evidence of something else entirely.
I've come to find there are lots of reasons that things end up in the graveyard that have nothing to do with personal failure:
REASON ONE: They were designed for someone else's brain.
Neurotypical-focused tools that don't work for neurodivergent brains. Linear thinkers' systems that don't work for multi-passionate folks. High-energy systems that don't work for disabled bodies.
REASON TWO: They only addressed one part of the problem.
"Fixed" your calendar without looking at your capacity to hold it. Changed your habits but not the environment to support them. Set boundaries but didn't renegotiate the agreements that broke them.
REASON THREE: They required you to override your energy and actual patterns.
🙅🏻♀️ "Just be more consistent" (instead of redefining what successful consistency looks like for you.)
🙅🏻♀️ "Just say no" (instead of ensuring you have a plan for when boundaries are tested.)
🙅🏻♀️ "Just push through" (instead of figuring out what baseline is and what your push limits are.)
REASON FOUR: They worked for a season, then your life changed.
New client load. Health diagnosis. Family changes. Business evolved. Needs changed. You outgrew what used to fit you.
REASON FIVE: They assumed capacity you didn't have.
Time you didn't have. Energy you didn't have. Support you didn't have. Recovery time you needed.
99.9999% of the time, it's not a personal failure. It's a mismatch.
It seems just as we were conditioned to believe not fitting into a size [insert whatever size is decided each year to be “ideal”] jeans meant we were failing at health or beauty, we were also conditioned to believe not fitting into every productivity tool or system meant we were failing at productivity and success.
Which, nope, not believing any of that shit anymore.
There's a lot of layers here. In my own journey, I had to do a lot of unlearning—sexism, ableism, racism, capitalism among others—to be able to stop looking at the graveyard as evidence of failure.
Instead it was evidence that I tried and things were just misaligned.
Because having a graveyard of abandoned tools doesn't mean you lack discipline. It means you haven’t found a system that supports you.
What I see when I hear about your graveyard:
✨ You've been trying and never gave up (that's admirable!)
✨ You're learning what doesn't work (which can be more telling than what does!)
✨ You're ready for something different (because everything so far hasn't worked!)
✨ You're collecting information of what you actually need (and that's revolutionary!)
Every thing that lands in the graveyard tells you something, maybe:
👉 This was too rigid for how I work
👉 This required capacity I don't have
👉 This worked until X changed
👉 This ignored my actual patterns
This shift changed the way I looked at productivity all together. It also redefined the way I looked at routines, tools, and systems for me.
Because while I talk about systems here a lot, including today’s topic, most of what we’re actually talking about in productivity (and what’s probably in your graveyard) are actually tools.
Tools are the apps, methods, and techniques we use: Pomodoro, time-blocking, bullet journals, habit trackers, morning routines. The things that you try.
A system is a foundation, a framework, that holds all the different tools so they can work together sustainably. It’s the infrastructure for how you operate—in life and business.
Most of us have been trying tool after tool without ever building the system those tools are supposed to serve.
So instead of looking at every piece of productivity advice as a system to implement, they became tools that I played with inside the flexible, resilient, and sustainable productivity system I built.
A system that could grow with me forever.
A system that could adjust to new tools to support new needs.
A system that didn't breakdown when one tool didn't work perfectly.
This week, I just have some questions for you to sit with (or journal about if you like.)
Because your graveyard holds the data you need to equip your sustainable system with tools that work with who you actually are, not who you think you should be.
Try This
The Graveyard Audit
This exercise is to help look at your graveyard with curiosity. Choose some, all, write them down, or just ponder on them.
What is a tool or system you've tried and abandoned? This can be methods, routines, boundaries, business processes, health habits—anything that was supposed to "fix" something. Choose 1 or 5, whatever you have bandwidth to reflect on.
Identify the hope you had for that system. Ask yourself:
Why did I think this would work?
What about it appealed to me?
What was I hoping to get out from it being a solution?
Identify why there was a breakdown. Think about:
When/why did it stop working? Things that weren't pure willpower.
What was it asking of me that I couldn't sustain?
What changed (in me, my life, my business) that made it stop fitting?
Identify any patterns across your graveyard.
Do rigid tools always fail for you?
Do you need more flexibility than most methods have allowed?
Do you start strong and then fade?
Do tools work until life changes?
Do you need tools that evolve or stay static?
Complete the following sentence for each system you explore:
This system taught me that I need [insert need—flexibility, structure, support, adaptation, etc.] and I don't do well with [insert breakdowns—rigidity, complexity, assumption of capacity, etc.].No fixing. Remind yourself that this system didn't fit your needs and that's valuable data.
You’re just noticing. Collecting data to best support yourself, not evidence failure.
Hit reply and let me know the most interesting thing you noticed about your graveyard.
Currently Obsessed
Music. A few years ago I would consistently listen to 20,000+ minutes of music a month which has significantly died down over the last 6 months to always under 10k. I’m also as much a mood listener as I am a mood reader. But every once and awhile a full album catches me, and I’ve had this new Labrinth album on repeat. (Apple / Spotify)
Filet Crochet. My ADHD is showing but filet crochet is having a moment and I’ve really enjoyed practicing this delicate style. It’s more relaxing that amigurumi since you are pretty much only doing double crochets and it’s grid based so once you get the foundation, everything else is mostly mindless. Since crochet is one of my favorite regulation activities, this has quickly become a favorite style. My current practice is the Slow Down piece from this video which does have a good beginner’s guide to filet crochet.
Vision Boards. Every January (sometimes February) I create a new vision board and make it the background for my laptop so it stares at me all year from at least 1 of 3 screens at all times. This was 2024. Last year was this. And I finished up 2026 last weekend. It’s interesting to look at them all consecutively and the story they tell about how the last 2-3 years have evolved around me, and me within them. I’m excited to see how that story evolves more over another 2-3 years.
P.S.
Quick heads up: 2026 is a year for unfolding (my word of the year.) With that, I’m keeping ACR for deep dives, but I’ve started sending shorter updates on Tuesdays in a series called The Bridge. That’s where I share what I’m building, what’s opening, and first access to new things before they go public.
If you’re curious about what’s happening behind the scenes, you can join The Bridge here by updating your email preferences. The tech gremlins will get you automatically added!
Fair warning: I’ll be making an announcement there on February 10th about something I’ve been working on since last summer, and I’m really excited to finally be able to share it.
