The Backlog

Prateek Saxena
1 min readApr 14, 2020

All of us have a bunch of different backlogs — emails, todo tasks, articles to read. New backlogs get added all the time too — recipes to make, podcasts to listen to, places to see. While we keep working on our backlogs, the problem is, that we add to them faster than we subtract.

The book you just finished reading references others that are now on your reading list. After releasing your new project you already have a list of things that you need to fix in it. As you constantly move closer to death — the time you have is decreasing, but, your backlog is increasing, often exponentially. This is not sustainable!

Graph showing reducing days and increasing number of items in your backlog
I wish I had better memory of this day

So what are we supposed to do? Prune? Prioritize? Panic? I’ve been practicing an unhealthy balance of these three for a while and am increasingly getting comfortable with its constant hum bothering me. As long as I keep making new spreadsheets and projects on Todoist, I’ll be just fine 😅

Originally published at https://prtksxna.com on April 14, 2020.

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Prateek Saxena
Prateek Saxena

Written by Prateek Saxena

Hey 👋🏽 I am a UX designer at the Wikimedia Foundation during the day, and work on open source & open data projects in the evenings—https://prtksxna.com

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