Did You Know That Nov 15 is National Clean Out Your Refrigerator Day?
Me either and ewwwwww.
--
One day a year nasty people clean out their fridge? Ick. And people wondered why I would never partake in potlucks at work. I’m not waiting that long to get busy.
I’m cleaning out my Drafts. I read somewhere this week that you should publish or delete but don’t just let them sit there. I’ve never tried that. I’m thinking of it as rotating the food in the fridge. If you’re like me, you toss out anything that has overstayed its welcome, write your grocery list, and then off to the store you go for fresh stuff.
Currently, I have 187 drafts including this piece.
Of those, four are scheduled to post at various points this week. In order to keep my drafts from piling up I may on a weekly basis, clear it out so that come Sunday/Monday I’m sitting at zero again.
I get ideas all the time from all over the place. But some drafts I’ve gone back and looked at and thought WTH was I thinking and deleted them. I know at the very bottom are all of my submissions to Chicken Soup for the Soul from earlier this year. I haven’t heard a peep from them so my guess is I don’t have squat coming. Yes, I could resubmit to new calls for submissions but for me, it just wasn’t worth it. It was a lot of prep work upfront. Then to sit and wait for months with no word?
Nah. Imma pass on that one.
It can’t be said that I didn’t try though. However, I still have my original stories here on this platform and the submissions are in so do I really need something like 30 old drafts of already published stories? Rhetorical question of course.
Whatever I’m left with will be coming out next week or will be in the trashcan for good.
I decided I would work on deleting channels on YouTube first. Since I was there anyway receiving the *Big News anyway. Now I am keeping good on my word and going through my Drafts. At first, there were 185.
After the initial pass through.
I cut 60 a drift into the cyber trash can right off the bat. Some I couldn’t tell by title alone what the stories were supposed to be about so those I had to open one by one. Uck.
Here’s where I am now.
From 185 to 63 in 24-hours. Another 62 gone. Not bad at all.
What I did on this most recent pass-through is this. At the top of each one, I left one of the following headers.
Delete This
Has Possibilities
ARCHIVE
Finish This
Delete this is obvious so once I got to the bottom of the list I hit the refresh button and scrolled once again through the list and deleted the ones that couldn’t be saved. (Eh hem Medium Staff. Can we please delete from inside the story instead of the draft file? Purdy please?)
To clear out the ones marked ARCHIVE I’m seriously considering publishing them and then unlisting them all in the same minute. It’s ridiculous that it has to be done this way but it’s info I want to keep but will not be publishing for various reasons. (Eh hem Medium Staff. Howz about a drag and drop option with more options than just draft, published, and unlisted?)
Has Possibilities
They all have titles, subtitles, images, image citations, and links to references but that’s about it. So the outline of a post is there. I just need to check out those references and finish it off. I have 20 with this indicator.
Finish This
This is the one that floored me the most. I had no idea. 16 posts that are 99% finished. 16. I’m still in shock. I’m not sure what happened with these. Maybe I got interrupted. Maybe I had to run out for an appointment and by the time I got back, I just didn’t feel like dealing with it. God knows there have been months on end where my health was less than. These are the posts that I plan on working on from now until Monday. So they will be the ones you will be seeing at 9 am M-F for the next two weeks at least.
That means I’m looking at 36 pieces to be published. At 5 a week that’s over 7 weeks’ worth of posts without having to start anything from scratch. That’s a lot of work just sitting there done and not going anywhere!
That leaves about a dozen or less that I’m at a loss for and will have to look over them a little more deeply. They, on the surface, appear to be worth the write but have had very little work done to them. They will be the last ones that I concern myself with.
There is a smattering of posts that would be published in my publication, You’re Related To Who?! I think with those I will log into the pub and copy and paste all of the loose info into one document and park it there. Then I can delete all of those draft posts as well.
So there you have it. Another Medium housekeeping task marked off my to-do list. On to the next one!
