The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up Your Backlog

Prioritize what really matters and discard the rest

I recently read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. As a naturally neat and highly organized individual, I was surprised at just how much stuff I was inspired to discard via the KonMari method. My tiny Manhattan apartment is so much happier, as am I.

I’m still on a bit of a Tidying Up craze, and my Pivotal Tracker project is my next target.

Reduce Cognitive Overload

When your backlog and icebox are cluttered with unimportant stories, you won’t be able to find the stuff that actually matters. Let’s say you’re about to deploy a new version of your software. Are you sure you fixed all of the critical, show-stopping bugs? Were there any important chores you missed, such as upgrading a dependency that’s about to be deprecated? You’ll never be able to tell what still needs to be done if it’s buried under the rest of the icebox. Do yourself a favor and reduce the number of stories you need to wade through. Prioritize the stories that matter by pulling them into your backlog, then delete the rest.

Defrost Your Icebox

Icebox Theory 101: At any point, you should be able to delete every story in your icebox and be totally fine. These may be the clever feature ideas that aren’t all that valuable to your customers, the obscure bugs that can’t be reproduced, or the chores that won’t reduce technical debt in a significant way. If they truly matter, don’t worry. They’ll come up again.

The goal is to keep your icebox as a short-term staging area when you’re actively writing out the stories for a future epic. The icebox holds your soon-to-be-prioritized stories. The icebox is not for your maybe-one-day-after-we-finish-everything-else stories. You will never finish everything else. Even if you do, the stories in your icebox probably won’t be relevant anymore. You shouldn’t assume those old stories will still provide value without user research, and that research will result in new stories to prioritize anyway.

Declutter and Organize

Open up each story in your icebox. Ask yourself, “does this story create value?” If it does, it deserves to be in your backlog, so prioritize it accordingly. If it doesn’t, discard it.

May your tidy backlog spark joy!