If plugins are weighing you down, hide them

Our friend Stan Stewart replied to yesterday’s post about finding one use for each plugin with an important point:

I just finished moving 27 plugins to the “Unused” folder. It felt really good.

And … very much yes! This is a key corollary. If you’ve had a plugin kicking around forever and you realize that you don’t use it any more, or never used it at all, and you’re probably not going to use it in the future, then I would absolutely recommend moving it out of your active plugins folder and into an adjacent “unused plugins” folder.

I wouldn’t recommend totally deleting plugins, only because the moment you delete a plugin someone will ask you to open up an old session and probably that will be the one session that you actually did use that plugin in. It’s happened to me. Sure, you can go download it and install it again, but that’s such a pain.

There are times when I buy plugins aspirationally. If something has good reviews and a cool GUI and is on sale, I might just grab it, figuring that at some point down the road I’ll use it for something or other. I don’t strictly need to do this — I arguably could never buy another plugin again and I’d be fine — but I like making continued investments in my craft. It feels like it helps keep the energy moving in the right direction.

And, similarly, if a plugin’s presence in my menus is weighing me down, then it feels healthy to me to remove it. We don’t have to hoard every single thing we’ve obtained in life; acquisitions have seasons, and recognizing when these seasons end can help clear out stuck energy.

Just sitting over here on a Sunday having existential thoughts about plugins — jamie