Backlog
The list of work agreed but not started — useful when it is ranked and honest, and a source of guilt when it is neither.
A backlog is the queue of work that has been accepted but not yet begun. In its healthy form it is short, ordered, and every item has a plausible route to being done. In its usual form it is a landfill: four hundred items, no ranking, and a quiet assumption that everything on it will happen one day.
The cost of the landfill version is not storage, it is judgement. A list too long to read cannot be prioritised, so decisions get made from memory instead, and the backlog becomes a museum of intentions that produces guilt without producing throughput. It also lies to whoever put an item on it two years ago and is still waiting.
The fix is a policy, not a cleanup. Cap the list. Anything older than a fixed age is closed rather than carried, with a note that says so. If an item genuinely matters, someone will raise it again, and that second request is better information than the first.
Worked: 260 open items. Closing everything untouched for a year leaves 34. The 34 are readable in one sitting, can be ranked in an hour, and the eleven items that were re-raised within a month were the real list all along.
Also known as
- work queue
- wish list
Relevant for
- Founders
- A backlog nobody can read in one sitting is not a plan; cap it, close what has aged out, and let the genuinely important requests come back on their own.
- Business owners
- Every unstarted item you carry is a promise someone is still counting on — close it explicitly, because silent queues are how a practice loses trust it never noticed spending.