The case for quitting
What you stop doing might matter more than what you start
I’m quitting Duolingo.
Even though I’ve got an unbroken six-year streak.
For a long time, it did exactly what I wanted – it kept my French fresh, added vocabulary, and gave me an easy way to practise every day.
But at some point that changed, although the shift was so imperceptible I didn’t notice at the time.
I’ve essentially finished the course and I’m just on revision. And the app has become so gamified, and so AI-ified (see also, a bit shit), that it has become more about maintaining my nearly 2200 day streak than actually maintaining, let alone improving, my French. That objective remains, but the mechanism is no longer any good.
So I’m quitting Duolingo, and I’m going to find something else that actually serves the goal.
Now I realise this isn’t the most earth-shattering news to share, however it got me thinking. Last Friday was “Quitter’s Day” – the day most people are predicted to give up on their New Year’s resolutions. We usually talk about it with a bit of judgement and an accompanying eye-roll: “Look at all the people who couldn’t even stick at stuff for two weeks.”
But what if quitting isn’t automatically a bad thing? What if quitting is sometimes not only a good thing, but actually essential?
Let’s explore.
The stories we tell ourselves about quitting
Many of us will have heard – and probably internalised – some version of:
“Winners never quit and quitters never win.”
Vince Lombardi
It sounds like it makes sense, and even sounds rather noble. It also suggests that:
stopping = failing
persisting = morally superior, regardless of the cost
When you translate that into work and leadership you get a powerful pressure to see things through long after the usefulness has expired. Projects continue on because “we’ve already invested too much” or “we’re committed now”. Initiatives limp on because no one is willing to ask “what’s the point of this?”.
We rarely say: “Is this still the right thing?”
We more often say: “We’ve come this far; we can’t stop now.”
There’s a difference between perseverance and stubbornness. One is about staying committed to the purpose. The other is about refusing to change course, even when the purpose has evaporated.
A few years ago, I decided that if I really wasn’t enjoying a book, I didn’t have to finish it. This took me an embarrassingly long time to get my head around. I had a whole internal script about it being “good for me”, about having started so I should finish. And yet, it doesn’t mean anything about me if I don’t finish a book. It just means that book is not for me.
The same is true for more than books. Choosing to stop is not automatically weakness; it can be a very necessary and valuable act of course correction.
When habit takes over
Sometimes we carry on doing things even though we can’t remember why.
Or we vaguely remember why we started – it made sense at the time – but that reason is no longer relevant. The habit stayed; the usefulness left. Think of:
The recurring meeting in your calendar that no one really prepares for, but no one cancels.
The monthly report that takes hours, where you have a nagging suspicion no one actually reads it.
The process that provokes eye-rolling, but the explanation for it begins and ends with “we’ve always done it this way”.
And yes, the apps we keep tapping on just to avoid breaking a streak.
Habits can be incredibly helpful to build consistency and embed good practices. But they can just as easily become something that drains our time and energy without any meaningful purpose.
You can’t endlessly do more
There’s also a more basic problem: we can’t endlessly do more.
Our time, energy, focus and attention are finite. That’s not a moral failing; it’s just how humans work. Yet within organisations, we’re remarkably good at layering new things on top of the old:
New strategic priorities (without formally ending the old ones).
New responsibilities (without removing or redistributing anything).
New habits and goals in our personal lives (without questioning what they’re displacing).
Over time this becomes overwhelming and exhausting, leaving us feeling as if we’re constantly trying to catch up, to get on top of things, while falling even further behind.
The willingness to quit is essential. It is how we create the space to do fewer things better, instead of more things badly.
As leaders, what we stop doing is as instructive to others as what we start. Cancelling an unproductive meeting, ending a pointless process, or formally closing a project sends a clear signal: time and attention matter here.
Knowing what to quit (and how to test it safely)
Knowing what to quit starts with a deceptively simple question:
Do we know why we’re doing this?
Not why we did it once upon a time. Why we’re doing it now.
What’s the purpose of this meeting, this report, this process, this app, this commitment? Does it still serve us? If it vanished for a month, would anything truly important break?
If we don’t know how and why we’re spending our time, it’s very difficult to spend it intentionally.
Once you start asking “why this?” you’ll usually find a few good candidates for quitting or redesign. From there, you can experiment rather than make grand, dramatic exits.
A few practical ways to do that:
Do a simple time and energy audit
For a week or two, notice where your time goes and how you feel afterwards. What genuinely moves the dial? What just exists? Pay attention to the things you dread or that regularly overrun. They’re often prime candidates for pruning.Run quitting experiments
Rather than declaring permanent change, try quitting something for 30 days and look at the impact. Pause a meeting, skip a report, simplify a process. At the end, ask: what, if anything, actually got worse?Talk before you chop
That report might feel completely pointless to you, but have you had a conversation with the person who receives it? What’s their real need? Is there a different way they could receive the data that’s more efficient – a shorter summary, different frequency, a dashboard instead?Start with low-risk quits
That might be the book you’re not enjoying, the app you’re only opening to keep a streak alive, or the internal update no one can properly explain. These are low-stakes ways to retrain your brain that quitting is allowed.
None of this is about becoming flaky. It’s about aligning your time and energy with things that actually deliver value (to you and the organisation) and make sense.
Rethinking Quitter’s Day
Sometimes you just have to quit.
It might feel a bit Machiavellian or rebellious to just stop doing something. It can trigger all sorts of discomfort – Am I letting people down? Does this say something bad about me?
And yet, with the things that genuinely no longer serve us, it’s not uncommon that a week later we’ve almost forgotten we were even doing them. There’s no real loss of benefit, but what we notice instead is the extra headspace, the slightly less frantic calendar, the marginally better mood.
So rather than treating Quitter’s Day as a collective failure, we could treat it as a prompt:
Which resolutions, habits or commitments honestly don’t deserve your time anymore?
Where have you outgrown the mechanism, even though the objective still matters?
I’m quitting Duolingo not because the goal no longer matters, but precisely because it does. The objective stays: to maintain and improve my French. The mechanism is (long) overdue for a change.
Quitting can be:
a strategic leadership act;
a kindness to yourself and your team; and
a way to protect your finite time, energy and attention.
So, over to you. Hit reply or leave a comment to let me know what you’re willing to quit to shake up your time and energy.
Restack
Some more nice practical tips in this Substack on strategic quitting, and some of the traps we fall into doing it. If you’ve recently done some planning for 2026, this might help you pass a critical eye over those plans to check you’re not trying to do too much…
Meme of the week
On the theme of quitting, this one made me smile 🙂
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