Thursday, 4pm: The Hour I Spend Killing My Own Ideas

I have a note on my phone from March with forty-one ideas on it. I have made two of them. The other thirty-nine are not a treasure chest. They're a tax.

Here's what I've started doing about it, and it is the least creative thing in my week.

The trouble with generating more

Every UK creative I know has been told, at some point, that the answer to a quiet quarter is more ideas. More concepts. More pitches. Another workshop with biscuits.

But the bottleneck has never been supply. Look at your own list. If you're anything like me, the problem isn't a shortage of things to make — it's that the genuinely good ones are buried under nine months of things you felt enthusiastic about for roughly four days.

Ideas don't decay politely. They sit there generating a low hum of guilt, and that hum makes choosing slower. A cull fixes it. Not a brainstorm. A cull.

Why Thursday, why late

Thursday at four is a dead zone anyway. Too late to start anything substantial, too early to write off the week, and far enough from Monday that you're no longer in love with whatever you dreamt up at the start of it.

That distance is the point. On a Monday morning everything sounds possible. By Thursday afternoon you know what actually happened.

Three scores, out of five

Every live idea gets scored on three things and nothing else.

Energy. Not 'am I excited' — excitement is cheap and it lies. The question is: when I picture doing the actual work, in an actual week, do I want to start? Score it honestly. A two is a two.

Evidence. Is there anything outside my own head suggesting this is worth doing? A client who asked. A brief that exists. A gap in a schedule, a search term, a conversation on a train. Ideas with a scrap of evidence beat ideas with a lot of adjectives.

Earning. Does it pay, directly or plausibly? Not everything has to — some projects are portfolio, some are craft, some are just good for the soul. But you should know which one you're doing. 'It might lead to something' scores a one.

Add them up. Fifteen is rare. Nine or above gets worked on this month. Six to eight gets parked. Five and below gets cut.

The one-page sheet

Nothing fancy. A single landscape page, or a plain text file if you're allergic to printers. Columns: idea, energy, evidence, earning, total, verdict, date checked.

The date column is the whole trick. It means an idea can't be quietly resurrected three times a year without you noticing. Three checks, three parks, no movement? That's the universe telling you something.

My rules for the hour: no new ideas. No rewriting an idea to make it score better. No 'but what if we...' — that version can apply next week as a fresh entry, with a fresh score.

Cut and park are different words

Parking isn't cowardice. Parking means: there's something here, the timing or the evidence isn't, and I'll look again in a quarter. It gets a date and it goes in a folder.

Cutting is different. Cutting means deleting the entry, and ideally the file, and yes, the note on your phone. The idea won't vanish from your memory anyway — good ones have a habit of coming back wearing a different coat. If it's really good, it will find you again.

What cutting actually removes is the hum. And the hum is what makes you tired.

When to break the ritual

A cull is a good servant and a terrible master. Five exceptions.

Someone else's deadline eats the hour — skip the week, don't shunt it into Friday.

A paid brief lands that reshapes the whole list — run the cull, but only on the things the brief touches.

You're ill, or the week's been a bin fire. Skip without guilt. The list will wait.

Everything scores nine-plus and you genuinely can't choose — that's not a cull problem, that's a capacity problem, and it needs a different hour.

And the big one: if the ritual starts feeling like admin for its own sake, if you're scoring things you already know the answer to, cancel it for a month. Rituals earn their keep by changing decisions. When they stop changing anything, they're just another meeting.

Six weeks in

My list went from forty-one to eleven. Two of those eleven became work I'd have been embarrassed not to make. The rest sits on one page, checked, dated, and genuinely small enough to hold in my head.

Nothing about any of it is creative. That's rather the point. The making is the creative bit; the keeping and the killing is housekeeping, and housekeeping is far cheaper on a Thursday afternoon than it is at eleven at night in March.