Let’s talk about idea overload: what to build now, what to shelve for later, and what to walk away from.

People assume that if you’re creative, focused, or successful, every idea you have is followed through to completion. But that’s not how it works. Not for me. Not for most founders I know. The truth is, I’ve had dozens—maybe hundreds—of ideas I once loved. Ideas I was excited about. Ideas I even started. But excitement alone doesn’t build something. Timing, energy, money, tools, alignment—all of these things matter too. And not having one of them is often enough to stall or shelf something that once felt like destiny.

What I didn’t expect was the emotional cost. The guilt of not finishing. The internal pressure of having “so many things in progress.” The shame of outgrowing an idea that once felt personal.

Build it.

Not every idea deserves your time. To “build” should be a deliberate decision—not a reaction to boredom, pressure, or inspiration. The right idea meets real criteria. It’s not about how exciting it feels in the moment. It’s about how aligned it is with your current capacity, goals, and systems.

1. You should be reminded of a clear use-case.

2. The idea should align with your current strategy.

3. Can it be launched rapidly? Delays are known to kill momentum. Speed matters.

4. Is the revenue path obvious or overly complicated?

5. Are you prepared to support it—with systems, time, or a team—to deliver and maintain the idea?

Every “yes” costs something. It borrows time and bandwidth from something else. Founders often overestimate their capacity and underestimate the weight of unfinished projects. When you keep old ideas on life support—just in case—they slow everything down. They dilute your core message. They make every decision heavier because you're dragging dead weight behind new goals.

Letting go lightens the load. It sharpens your focus. You move faster, communicate more clearly, and build with precision. When people talk about clarity, this is what they mean: the ability to walk through a day knowing what matters, and having the courage to drop what doesn’t.

Shelve it.

There was an idea I had five years ago. I was obsessed with it. I designed the wireframe and wrote the plan. But I didn’t have the skills to build it. I didn’t know how to explain the concept well enough to collaborate. So I shelved it. It sat in a folder on Miro.com while I worked on other things. And in March 2025, I opened that folder again. Only this time, I had the knowledge to execute—perfect timing, because I was still in deep need of the product. So I built it. By April I had a working prototype, and in May, I had paying users.

That experience taught me something simple but powerful: shelved doesn’t mean dead. Some ideas need time. Time to mature, time for you to grow, time for the right team or tech to show up. Shelving isn’t avoidance—it’s strategy. But only if you have a system for what you’ve shelved and why. Otherwise, your ideas just gather dust and resentment.

Kill it.

A while back, I invested heavily in an idea for a social network. It looked great on paper. It had market potential. People liked it. So I built an MVP very quickly. Why? Because I believe in two things: it’s okay to fail fast, and it’s also okay to fall out of love even faster.

After two months of prototyping, I hated the concept. I kept trying to force myself into momentum, but I realised I didn’t care enough to keep going. I wasn’t interested. It didn’t reflect who I was or where I was going. I had said yes to something I thought I “should” build. The moment I let it go, I felt relief—then guilt.

That guilt was familiar. The guilt of being wasteful with creativity. Of “quitting” something that other people were still praising. But I remembered something I read in Big Magic—that ideas are separate from us. That they visit us, and if we don’t act, they’ll move on to someone else who can. That thought gave me peace. Not every idea is mine to build. Some come through me just to help me get to the next version of myself. And that’s okay.

When I was younger in business, I would attach so much of my identity to an idea. If I had energy for it, I thought it was a sign. I thought I had to follow through no matter what—even when the excitement faded, even when I had no resources, no time, no knowledge. But appetite changes. That doesn’t make you flakey. That makes you honest. Some ideas hit hard in a particular season of life but lose their meaning in the next. Some start with a high and fade out fast. Others grow slowly in the background until one day, you realise you’re finally ready.

One of the first things I had to unlearn was the belief that ideas lose value if you don’t act on them immediately. That urgency isn’t always intuition—it’s sometimes ego, sometimes panic, sometimes a coping mechanism. I had to give myself permission to pause, to delay, to wait for better conditions.

Killing an idea is rarely a clean cut. It’s emotional. It carries echoes of what could have been—ambitions, versions of yourself, projections of success. But if you can separate emotion from strategy, you’ll find that letting go often reveals a more precise path forward. The truth is, every project demands energy. And not all of them deserve it. Some ideas served their purpose just by existing. They helped you get clear, sharper, better. And now they need to be released.

It’s important to honour those ideas, not resent them. Give them a name. Archive the deck. Then move on. It’s important to remember that the choice to relinquish an idea is just a decision—not a failure. You don’t have to chase closure when you create it for yourself.

How I make decisions today: SkyHigh Score

I’ve taken 10+ ventures successfully to market, but I’ve probably loved, shelved, or relinquished a thousand ideas. Most people don’t need more ideas. They need better filters. The problem isn’t capacity—sometimes it’s just mismanagement. I used to decide which ideas to build based on instinct. But instinct gets noisy when you’re tired, ambitious, biased, or under pressure. So I built a scorecard—something fast, honest, and lightweight. I called it SkyHigh Score, and it’s now the tool I use to capture and assess ideas before I give them time or money. It asks a series of viability questions—about clarity, timing, resourcing, and alignment—and then it gives me a score. Five minutes. No overthinking.

Knowing when to take an idea and ‘Build it. Shelve it. Kill it.’ is a process of acknowledgement: of resources, season, and strategic direction. It’s not a reflection of worth, ambition, or potential. It’s simply a system for making better use of energy.

Creativity is infinite. Capacity isn’t. And if you treat every idea like it deserves action, you’ll burn through momentum and miss the ones that truly matter. Learning to triage is learning to lead. It ensures you only build the ideas you have the capacity to manage—at the right time.