Stopping something you already do and are committed to, is hard, even when it is no longer viable.

To help, you can borrow a method from financial planning: zero-based budgeting.

In zero-based budgeting, instead of carrying over the last period’s budget and adjusting it, you disregard the past budget and start from zero. It means you need to justify everything again from scratch.

You may want to use this method when implementing your idea, and not just for budgeting.

Periodically, reexamine your decision to commit to a particular course of action, a sub-project you initiated as part of making your idea real. Justify its viability as if you were only starting. If you can’t, you know you need to stop doing it.

By forcing yourself to “start from scratch,” you’ll lose many of the biases that plague making the right decision, like status-quo bias, sunk-cost bias, and more.

You’ll see things clearer, and that will make it easier for you to make the right decisions regarding past commitments.