The philosophy behind Chekhov's gun makes sense on the surface, where you don't put something in a story unless it comes up later, but I think there's an interesting technique that I've seen in the Sherlock Holmes short stories where stuff doesn't come up later, but still kind of serves a purpose.
Often Watson will reference other cases at the beginning of a story, some of which actually appear as short stories themselves and some of which never make it to print. You may ask, "What's the point of even mentioning the case if it will never come up again?" And my answer to that would be that it makes the world appear much larger than what we actually see.
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