Mercy Kills Save Time

Dragging a project that’s lost its spark feels like carrying a heavy weight—slow, exhausting, and demoralizing. Every day spent on a fading idea drains your energy and clouds your focus.

Why Mercy Kills Matter

Indie projects do not fail in dramatic ways. They fade while you keep them on life support. A month turns into six. Your attention splits. New work slows because the old work still tugs at you. Mercy kills prevent that. You prewrite stop rules and follow them without ceremony. You pause or archive before a project eats you alive.

Write Rules Ahead

Write rules that match your stage. Decide the rules on a calm day. Sunday works well. State them in plain language you cannot lawyer your way around. Put them at the top of your weekly note so you see them when you score the week.

Examples of Kill Rules

• If discovery is the goal and three waves of outreach bring no replies, switch channels or switch the audience.
• If you are shipping but your finish rate sits under thirty percent for two weeks, halve scope across the board and enforce strict boxes.
• If you ship for four weeks and see zero meaningful signals—no replies, no signups, no usage—archive for a month.

None of these rules judge your worth. They protect your time.

Act Fast

When a rule triggers, act in one step. Change the channel. Slice the scope. Archive the repo and make a dated note. The speed of the action matters as much as the action. It frees attention.

Archiving Without Drama

Archiving is not a funeral. It is a boundary. You move the project out of your daily field of view and onto a shelf you can revisit with fresh eyes. Most ideas look different after a month. The distance lets you see whether the core still excites you and whether external signals exist that you ignored. If you return, you return with a specific test and a short runway.

Not Quitting Too Early

Mercy does not mean quitting at the first headwind. It means refusing to pour months into a path that does not move. It also means refusing to let sunk cost drive decisions. You protect the habit of shipping and asking on projects that respond.

Micro-Rules for Tasks

You can write micro‑rules too, cutting loops that waste time:

• If a single task resists progress for three sessions, redefine the slice or change the goal.
• If an ask returns only “interesting” without action twice, reframe it so the next answer is a click or a no.

Team Benefits

Teams benefit from shared rules. Agree ahead of time on what constitutes signal and what triggers a pause. Make it boring to stop. Boring means it happens without drama and without blame. The decision is not about who worked hard. It is about whether momentum exists.

Build by Moving On

Mercy now saves months later. You do not build a body of work by clinging. You build it by moving toward the projects that move back. As you develop these habits, you prepare yourself to rescue momentum where it’s truly possible—setting the stage for the next chapter on momentum rescue and retention.