I’m running out of room for records. I'm beginning to think my business has the same problem.

As regular readers will know, I’ve recently fallen back in love with vinyl. And it’s been teaching me a lot of unintended lessons. I discovered records were surprisingly good at getting me through work I didn't want to start. Then record shops reminded me of the value of wandering around without knowing what I was looking for.

Now I have a more practical problem: my shelves are filling up. A physical music collection forces a decision that Spotify never does: what belongs on the shelf and what doesn’t.

Just because an album is good, or I’d love to own it, doesn’t mean it gets on the shelf. Each one needs to earn its place in the collection. And it’s not about stuffing the shelf. I need to leave some space for new additions, and enough time to enjoy what’s already there.

It occurs to me that I need to get better at applying the same logic to my work. The requests to collaborate, have conversations, get involved in projects or deliver keynotes keep coming; a nice problem to have. Some I know I don’t want to do. But there are plenty I really do.

Whether I have capacity for something isn’t just a question of finding time in the diary. A lot of what I do requires enough empty space to actually think, connect ideas and come up with something useful.

So perhaps the record shelf offers a useful rule. Once I’m close to capacity, adding something isn't really an addition. It’s a replacement.

Instead of asking whether I can squeeze more in, I need to ask what I’m prepared to take out. And I'm increasingly convinced that sometimes the answer should be: nothing.

[Eagle-eyed readers will have spotted one flaw in the analogy: because I divide my time between two cities, I can spread the records across two sets of shelves. Sadly, work doesn’t offer quite the same storage solution.]