Choose a different door

02 Apr, 2025

Open Door, Brittany by Henri Matisse, 1896

Me and sunk cost fallacies are breaking up.

I'm bad at knowing when I should quit something. That's mostly because a lot of the things I usually want to quit are things I put a lot of soul bending effort in to and it would feel like the biggest waste of everything if I just gave up without anything to show for it.

It wasn't until I heard the term sunk cost fallacy that I could finally name this feeling I had every time the urge to give up on something I had been working at for what feels like forever, came over me.

The sunk cost fallacy is our tendency to follow through with something that we’ve already invested heavily in (be it time, money, effort, or emotional energy), even when giving up is clearly a better idea.¹

Reading this definition was a pivotal moment for me. It also made me realize that the very thing I encouraged others not to do was exactly what I did all the time.

You could say the call was coming from inside the house.²

via GIPHY

With the new discovery in my toolbox, I recently decided to put it to work in an area of my life that's been causing me some grief lately: my note taking software. I have been using a combination of Notion and Apple Notes for years, almost a decade, and have developed an attachment to how I've organized things. This isn't generally a problem, but where the issue arises is when I compare the way I've always kept notes against what my needs are today. Believe it or not, things can change in 10 years.

I have been saying that I need to leave Notion for about a year. It's become a graveyard of information I no longer need mixed in with stuff that is still relevant to me which can cause issues when I need to look for something. The same with Apple Notes which has housed the notes for random story ideas, to-dos, and other ephemeral information. Although I've created a pretty obvious-to-me folder system, I've come to realize that if I don't actually see what's in the folder before opening it, I won't be inclined to add stuff to it. So things usually just end up in my designated inbox folder to rot and be forgotten.

As someone who usually likes to have a separate app for everything, I felt a little resistance at the idea of trying to condense everything into one place. But now that my needs for my notes and how I manage other areas of my life have changed and continue to shift, I've grown to need more simple tools that can do many jobs effortlessly.

Which has led me to a new(to me) app called Craft. It's like Canva and Google Docs had a sophisticated baby with a task manager app. Check it out!.

Anyways, I am super excited by the idea of starting fresh in a new app with information that's relevant to who I'm becoming and not who I was. Over the next few weeks or so, I'll pop in with updates about how the move from Notion and Apple Notes is going and what, if any, improvements in managing my creative ideas occurred as a result of trying something new. It's the first step towards making better, and quicker, decisions about when it's time to pivot to something new in other areas of my life.

If it's not broken, don't fix it. But if it's not working, change it.