#10 — Dec 23, 2024
Innerhelm is back; the power of agentic quitting; New Years' resolutions
Hello! I’m Tyler Mercer, a writer exploring agency thinking.
You’re getting this email because you subscribed to the Innerhelm newsletter, probably a long time ago. If you don’t want to continue receiving these emails, hit that unsubscribe link—no hard feelings.
It’s been a long time since I wrote—almost nine months. If you thought I had abandoned the project, well, I don’t blame you. I got derailed by a different project—and that’s actually the subject of today’s blog post.
Unlaunching: choosing focus through agentic quitting
Earlier this year I spent seven months building a web application called Logwise in my spare time. It’s an app for logging things: sleep quality, focus levels, health symptoms, or anything else you’d like to monitor over time and understand better. It works offline and allows you to easily change the schema of your logs over time without data loss.
It’s been a compelling side project for me—the kind that I wake up thinking about, and for which I’ve had a constant flow of exciting ideas.
But I’ve decided to open-source and archive the code repository, and to throw away my roadmap. I’m “unlaunching” Logwise: putting it out into the world, but with the intent of ending it—launching in a negative direction. This essay explains why.
Hopefully this idea of “agentic quitting,” alongside agentic persistence, can be helpful to you as you set goals in the new year.
It’s something that’s been on my mind a lot—what makes New Years’ goal-setting effective? New Years’ resolutions are almost defined by the fact that they are rarely kept, and yet, New Years’ is still a common time for goal-setting. What have you found makes your goals effective or ineffective? (Shoot me a reply! I’ll read every response.)
One of my goals is to write here more often. Still thinking through what that looks like—as I’ve mentioned before, writing that I feel proud of takes time. But I can promise that I won’t lapse into nine months of radio silence next year. 🙂
Thanks for sticking around!
Best,
Tyler Mercer ⛵