I’ve explained in a previous post that I was going to work on doing less. This weekend I made good on that, but the adjustments I’ve made might go by largely unnoticed. To me, these adjustments were the cull I needed to do, but in the broad spectrum of things it won’t seem like a cull at all.

The word “cull” is generally reserved for use when referring to wildlife. For example, in a part of my community there have been votes to begin a deer cull. This cull might be deemed necessary as deer are wandering into the urban areas and are actually getting hurt by vehicles and indirectly causing harms to humans. There’s great opposition to this culling by an outspoken group within the community, but most of the community says nothing because they agree with the idea, have no interest in the matter, or perhaps don’t even know about the matter.

That’s how I feel about the cull I’m doing.

I feel as if it is needed because some of my work isn’t as good as it could be, so by eliminating some of it the rest will increase in quality. I feel as if those who read my work are getting saturated with it instead of satiated by it. My culling is not too far from its meaning either, which is to “remove rejected members or parts from.” I’m taking out the excess so that rest has a better chance to thrive — or even survive.

But I didn’t just stop the cull at my writing.

I reviewed my projects and rid myself of some of them too. I put some on the back burner (or the ever popular “Someday/Maybe” list) and some were deleted from my task manager altogether. I took a good long look at my online presence and decided what was worth fostering, where it was worth fostering, and then I made changes to put myself in a far better position to make my online presence…better.

And now I’m ready to thrive.

There’s a difference between curation and culling. In my mind, curation is done initially once you get really good at identifying what’s worth your attention and what isn’t. Culling is done eventually, usually once you’ve gathered so much on your plate that you realize that you’d better identify what’s worth your time and what isn’t. What I’ve culled was either new components that grew from something I’d crafted or were components that were already withered on the vine and needed to be cut down.

In short, you’ll do a lot more culling at first because it’s by spending the time in that activity that you get much better at curation.

The cull is over for now. It’s time to return to crafting and creating again — only this time even better than before.