My watchlist has 40 tickers and I've traded maybe 3 of them. How do you actually keep yours manageable?

Anyone else feel like their watchlist has just become a graveyard of setups that never triggered?

I've been swing trading for a few years now and this is a habit I cannot seem to break. I'll spend a Sunday night building out a solid watchlist, maybe 12 to 15 names with clear entry points, stop levels, target zones. Feels productive. Then the week plays out and half the setups either never reach the entry or they break out before I'm watching. So I just add more names next Sunday. Rinse and repeat.

The list is now pushing 40 tickers and I realistically can't track all of them during market hours. My actual job gets in the way, alerts don't always fire at the right moment, and by the time I look up something has already moved 4% and the risk/reward isn't what it was when I added it.

I've tried cutting the list down aggressively, like forcing myself to only keep the top 5 highest conviction plays each week. That helped a little with focus but I kept feeling like I was leaving obvious setups on the table. Then I found myself sneaking names back in by Wednesday.

Part of the problem is I don't have a clean rule for when to remove something. Does it stay on the list if it breaks below support? Does it get removed after two weeks of nothing happening? I've been playing around with a few different tools including dub to see how others are managing their actual positions, and it made me realize how much of my attention is getting spread across setups that never really had conviction behind them in the first place.

Curious how other people here manage this. Do you cap your watchlist at a hard number, or do you just get comfortable sitting on a long list and only acting on the obvious ones?