Mind (and trim) your backlogs
Keep lists, mostly new stuff. Not too long.
I have entirely too many items in entirely too many lists. De-facto backlogs. Watch laters, read laters, tasks, notes with “TK marks”, boards holding dozens of ideas that would be nice to flesh out, someday. If there’s a mechanism to defer it until just the right day, I’m ever optimistic that day will come and magic will present me with the right idea in the right moment.
All those “maybe some days” present a non-trivial mental burden. Is today the right day for one of them? Will these lists ever get shorter? When’s the last time I checked off even one of these? Perhaps it’s optimistic to hope for the just-in-time delivery of the right idea in the right moment. Were it only that just the right action, supporting material, and mindset arrived all at the same time!
(This is not about task management or creativity or productivity or process, I promise! Past Adam has already dwelled on that too much.)
1. As time passes, backlogs become needles in haystacks
Backlogs are resistance to reality – we’re humans, with finite energy, time, and willpower. Were it only that we could do all these things, read all these books, visit all these places. How wonderful life would be!
On teams, in particular, it is easier to say “good idea, let’s throw it on the backlog” than “honestly, probably not a thing we’re going to act on.” And then, those backlog items decay. They become less relevant and sometimes outright incorrect. Absent a lightning strike of insight that leads to digging up the perfect, ready-to-execute idea from the backlog, the older a backlog item is, the more likely it’s noise.
Counterproductively, backlog review exercises are likely to consume far more time, emotional, and social energy than simply expiring ideas out periodically or forcing a one-in/one-out policy (with an extremely low number of items allowed to live on the board). So the list grows longer. The backlog becomes the “sad pile of things we’ll likely never do”.
2. Set aside your darlings
It’s a tough move to make, to put something away forever. Setting items aside makes the whole operation easier. When I know I’m putting a task or draft out-of-sight, but not entirely in the waste bin, emotional friction ceases is no longer a problem.
A few weeks ago, I reorganized all the writing I was struggling to make progress on or finish into a “Darlings” folder. Not killing my darlings, just setting them aside. Giving myself a place to store them, lest it turns out I want their essence, that one good sentence, or that they turn out to be the right idea at the right moment!
Maybe this is what makes whiteboards so great. You can push ideas around, throw stickies at them. Every once in a while, you wipe the entire thing clean and start over. Or you come upon something really great, it happens to be the right thing at the right moment, and you go with it. The whiteboard stays that way for days or weeks. It earns the “DO NOT ERASE” emphasis that means something truly wonderful has happened in that creative space.
But, you don’t leave a whiteboard in-state for too long, lest the ink starts to become part of the board. Lists and backlogs are like whiteboards. You have to erase or clear them periodically for them to best serve their function. Keep the “DO NOT ERASE”-level ideas in your backlogs and lists, erase the rest.
3. Editing is an act of creative omission
I suspect pragmatism is important here. Editing the items to watch, write, read, build, visit, or enjoy is essential! These deferred ideas are basically ideas some former version of myself has sent into the future to suggest that I might enjoy. It’s past Adam asking future Adam to please take care of this for me. Maybe it will be easier or faster or more interesting by the time some kind of future rolls around.
I think this is about editing and curation. Acting as the auteur of one’s own days. Reviewing the list of all the things our days and weeks and months could be about and saying “these items are no longer what it’s about” and putting them someplace else.
Creative work, be it art or industry, is more about what was left out than what stayed in. Practicing at editing builds this discipline of the creative muscle. Every element cut, every backlog item removed, makes the remaining elements and tasks stronger.