The Page of Things I Didn't Make: Six Ideas I Parked on Purpose
Photo: Pink Sherbet Photography from USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Every creative I know has a list of things they want to make. Almost nobody keeps a list of things they have decided, deliberately and in writing, not to make. I started mine about three years ago, mostly out of frustration, and it has quietly become the most useful page in my whole setup.
I call it the anti-portfolio. It is a single document, plain text, no tags, no colour coding. Each entry gets a date, the idea in one or two sentences, and the reason I parked it. That's the lot. It is not a graveyard and it is not a scorecard. It is a record of restraint.
Here are six of the entries, and what each of them protected.
1. The bespoke notebook line
Foil-stamped covers, decent paper, made in small runs, sold to people who care about that sort of thing. I spent about a fortnight pricing it up before admitting that a two-hundred unit minimum order would have turned my spare room into a warehouse and me into a stock controller. I would have been running a small logistics business with a side of design.
What it protected: six months and the illusion that I enjoy spreadsheets.
2. The weekly podcast about making things
I like talking. I do not like editing audio at eleven at night. Those are two very different hobbies and I had been treating them as one. The entry for this one just says, in my own handwriting, 'You will quit in week nine.' I did not need to test that.
What it protected: a Sunday evening every week for a year.
3. Commissioned furniture with a waiting list
Every time somebody asks me to build them a specific thing I get a lovely warm feeling and a terrible idea. A waiting list means clients, and clients mean emails, and emails mean I am a project manager with a chisel. I now make what I want to make and sell it when it exists.
What it protected: the reason I took up woodwork in the first place.
4. A daily drawing subscription
On paper, brilliant. A small monthly income, a built-in practice, a lovely community. In reality, a deadline every single day, attached to something I currently do for pleasure. The fastest way to ruin a hobby is to invoice somebody for it.
What it protected: drawing still being the thing I do when nobody is asking.
5. An online course on creative discipline
The irony was not lost on me. I would have spent four months recording modules about not getting distracted while being comprehensively distracted. I also know exactly the sort of person I would have become at the end of it.
What it protected: four months and a certain amount of self-respect.
6. Enamel pins and tote bags
I have seen the margins. I have also seen the storage boxes. I have seen the version of me who checks a fulfilment dashboard before breakfast, and I did not fancy him much.
What it protected: the difference between making things and selling merchandise about making things.
How to keep one without it becoming a shame ledger
A few rules, learned by breaking them first.
Keep it separate from your to-do list. The moment a parked idea sits in the same document as your actual work, it starts nagging. Mine lives in its own file with its own name.
Record the reason, not the verdict. 'Parked because it needs capital I don't have' is useful in two years. 'Bad idea' is not, because it isn't true and you won't believe it later.
Do not score it by money. The obvious trap is turning the anti-portfolio into a list of things you reckon would have made a fortune, which is just regret with extra steps. Score it by what it protected: time, taste, momentum, a friendship, a good night's sleep.
Review it twice a year, not weekly. Once in the spring, once in the autumn, over a cup of tea. Anything that still pulls at you gets a fair hearing. Most things do not.
Have an exit rule. If I am genuinely going to start something within the next ninety days, it comes off the page and goes onto the real list. That keeps the anti-portfolio honest rather than decorative.
Don't delete anything. The whole value is in the pattern. After a couple of years you can see what you keep being drawn to and what you keep wisely refusing, and those are two different kinds of information about yourself.
None of this is about being negative or precious. It is about admitting that a UK creative's time is genuinely finite, that the evenings are short, and that every yes is quietly a dozen nos. My anti-portfolio is just the nos written down where I can see them. It is the least glamorous document I own and the one I would least like to lose.
