Reviewing the Backlog

This month I’ve been cast back into an Agile business environment where the concept of Backlog is once again a central feature of my shared professional life. Seeing how this company and the squad I currently work with describe and use their backlog drove me to reflect again on my own theory of backlog and the place it can hold in our lives.

This is a foundation concept which I feel many gloss over too quickly. What is a backlog? What does it buy us? As usual, I want to start with a definition so that we are all talking about the same thing.

"an accumulation of uncompleted work or matters needing to be dealt with” ~ Oxford

“a prioritized list of deliverables (such as new features) that should be implemented as part of a project or product development. It's a decision-making artifact that helps you estimate, refine, and prioritize everything you might sometime in the future want to complete.” ~ Agile

I think we can agree that generally, it’s a list of future work. However, I reserve niggling doubts for the marketing of backlog. The traditional, linguistic definition is shaded with a hint of the pejorative, riddled with words to make you feel guilty about this incomplete pile of things you’ve avoided to this point. Agile is as usual trying to figure itself out. ‘Am I a business process or a lifestyle?’ says the Agile metabeing and out pops a description that focuses first on delivery and project milestones before the riffing on the idea that a backlog item is a tool to encourage conversation, prioritisation, estimation, and collaboration. Honestly, make up your mind Agile. You and Hot Desk haven’t really convinced me yet.

I’ve always appreciated the lens that Getting Things Done puts over this topic. GTD has a form of backlog called Someday/Maybe which is “not just for ‘blue sky’ or ‘dream’ projects; it's for *any* goal, project or next action that you are not committed to achieving or doing right now.” Here we lump anything that we aren’t working on immediately into a bucket where we openly confess we might get to it at some point… perhaps. It’s possible. I mean… we aren’t working on it right now but that doesn’t mean we’ll never do it.

Irrespective of your definitional preference, I think we can all agree on two central tenets of backlog:

1)      It is the place you put everything you cannot, will not, must not think about or work on today.

2)      For every backlog, there must be a regular routine to review, process, purge or activate the items.

Whether you use sticky notes or a journal, Agile or GTD, Outlook folders or a Kanban, a backlog serves the crucial psychological purpose of letting you set and forget. Why? One of the biggest problems in our lives – personal and professional – is that there is always too much. There is too much work, too many things to do, too many ideas to implement, too many bugs to fix, too many chores to complete, too many projects to start. If you allow everything that might be done to live at the front of your consciousness, you will spend every waking moment busy, tired, helpless, and overwhelmed. It actually can’t be done so you feel guilty or sad or bad about yourself. You create a space where you are doomed to fail no matter how much you accomplish.

A backlog addresses this in a tangible, practical fashion. Imagine shoving literally EVERTHING off your desk… absolutely every. single. thing. Dump it ALL into someday/maybe. Huh. Look at that. Instead of being overwhelmed with what you can’t get done, you have nothing whatsoever to do. Now review your backlog and select only what you are going to get done today. Pick the most important, identify the most critical. Select tasks that aren’t blocked by lack of resource or availability to someone else. Put those up front and centre.

Do the work. Celebrate completing your tasks. Get a beer. Do it again tomorrow.

Your time between dipping into the backlog can extend. You can make it daily, weekly, fortnightly. Your call, your family, team, or company. It doesn’t really matter. As long as you make it regular and make it literally the most important task of the day when the review is due, you’re okay. The psychological safety net of knowing that those deferred items will get some periodic love strengthens your ability to ignore them the rest of the time and focus on the thing in front of you.

Every once in a while (I do this annually), roll through the backlog and let go. Say goodbye. Bin that shit. The backlog gets crufty over time, full of ideas, requirements, obligations that time after time do not float to the top and get done. No matter how inspirational, necessary, seemingly valuable, you aren’t doing them. You have repeatedly said you aren’t going to. Let go. I’m not going to learn how to play the flute. I’m never going to clean out the tool shed. We aren’t going to implement that feature. Honestly, if I get inspired to learn the flute again, I’ll just throw it back into the backlog a few years from now. Maybe then there will be room in my life.

So my definition of a backlog? A backlog is a process that lets me focus on the possible without letting go entirely of the aspirational.

“The goal of this life isn’t to be perfect, it’s to be progressively less stupid.” ~ Marshall Rosenberg