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.
Category
Product
Also known as
- work queue
- wish list
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 example
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.
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.