No Backlogs Allowed
A thought about backlogs popped into my head after finishing my previous two posts.
Having some experience working on big-ish teams and also having worked on a lot of personal projects over the years, I’ve realized how important but also challenging it is to stay organized. Because of this, people and organizations (no pun intended) have to create systems to track the status of projects, provide time estimates for their completion, communicate blockers and updates, etc. The real world is a messy place and having a framework for bringing order to that chaos can allow you to move quickly, efficiently, and intentionally towards your goals.
But a caveat to this is that implementing the organizational system itself is a sort of project in a way. It takes time for people to learn it, test it out, and see if it’s helpful. And the times I’ve seen this done poorly, whether it was just a spreadsheet or to-do list I set up for myself or something more complex at work, the system starts to get in the way of the work getting done and sort takes on a weird life of its own. It starts to exist only to justify its existence, and I imagine this is how bloated bureaucracies form over time.
The key insight I’ve had in the last year or so is that the system needs to exist to support the work, and not the other way around, and if you’re ever confronted with a situation where you need to sacrifice one for the other you should always sacrifice the system.
I’ll give a concrete example of backlogs.
I keep a spreadsheet of video/blog post ideas with a placeholder title, maybe a small (or large) description/summary, and some other metadata around completion status, tags, due date, etc. It’s a big spreadsheet that is fairly comprehensive, containing years of my thoughts, interests, and insights. This can make it a bit daunting to pick projects out of the list, prioritize them, and eventually execute them.
I also have a tendency to store ideas in my Notes app and in an Evernote I keep so in the back of my mind I’m always worried I might be missing something crucial. Like a nugget of gold that I stashed somewhere and now I can’t find it.
Now I think having this spreadsheet can be useful at times as a way to keep track of things and look back at all my accomplishments and creations. Turns out I’ve been more prolific than I thought. But it also took some time to set up and it takes time to maintain which can get in the way of actually doing the work itself.
This is something I’ve been trying to reconcile with a seemingly opposite philosophy around something like daily vlogging. One of my favorite YouTubers is Casey Neistat, and he achieved massive success through his daily vlog a few years back. Now granted he had years of experience beforehand, and there was an element of timing since that’s where the platform was at during that point in time.
But what seemed so amazing about it is that he could go out every day of the week and find some cinematic story to tell just by going around and living his life and in doing so his whole life became a story. It wasn’t planned, it wasn’t scripted. Granted he had a life and work that he did so I’m not saying he didn’t make plans whatsoever. But the creativity seemed to emerge organically and continuously and his talent was being able to capture that magic and share it with all of us.
Now, there is only one Casey Neistat and he’s on YouTube’s metaphorical Mount Rushmore for a reason, but, interestingly, he seems to struggle with this very issue himself. He recently made a video about procrastination and even talked about how he was procrastinating on making that video about procrastination.
The conclusion that I came to from this is that he found what worked well for him and that was posting daily because it set parameters on his creative canvas, so to speak, which I think is incredibly powerful and key to being successful. There have to be boundaries around a project otherwise you run the risk of “scope creep”, a term created by project managers to describe the tendency for more and more features to be added over time causing delays and extra complexity that slows everything down.
There are some challenges I’ve run into with daily content though, like many other creators. Eventually, there seems to be a kind of drift and loss of momentum in the content, and I think even Casey Neistat experienced some of this eventually (albeit after 800+ days of daily vlogging). You start to get so caught up in sticking to the schedule that you lose sight of why you started doing it in the first place, but sometimes this comes after burning out because you didn’t have time during that intense schedule to properly reflect on a change of course. The system becomes stifling and it starts to make the creative process less challenging and almost stale. Casey even talks about this in his video about ending the daily vlog, and I could tell this was a painful decision for him because I bet a part of him felt like it was a kind of failure or defeat.
This brings us full circle to the initial idea that prompted this post. Is there a way to combine the best of both worlds? Daily consistency with an overarching plan and vision? Can you have a direction and progression built into the core loop that keeps things feeling fresh and new while also staying grounded in putting stuff out regularly?
I can’t say for sure since this is my first time articulating this fully but the solution I think I’ve come up with is the idea of “No Backlogs”.
Essentially this boils down to having a plan, but always looking forward and not accumulating a backlog of todos that prevent you from progressing. Maybe it’s my psychology or some kind of OCD but there’s something about feeling like I need to catch up on stuff that feels toxic and it derails me when I’m starting to make progress towards my goals.
For example, if I missed a day on my workout routine, I would stress about having to make up for that day at some point down the line. Maybe I would shift my Wednesday workout to Thursday, but this would then shift everything else around too. This made the system I created for myself very brittle and prone to failure since work, travel, illness, and life would always find ways of throwing my best-laid plans out the window.
Or similarly, if I missed a day of journaling, posting a video, meditation, or reading my Daily Laws I would start to think about how to make up for a lost day. And then paying down this debt, this backlog, made the next day even more stressful, and the effect only got worse the more days I accumulated.
This is where the conclusion of No Backlogs Allowed comes from.
Treat the project list, the spreadsheet, the system, the vision as a guide, but always be looking forward. Just like in Casey’s vlogs, some days will be better and go more smoothly and be more productive, and others may not be productive at all. That’s okay. The system needs to be set up in a way not so that it’s fragile, and breaks anytime something comes up. It should be something that you can gravitate back to to keep headed in the direction you want to go in, not a way of cataloging a growing list of to-dos that you mentally need to keep track of and which you may never get around to.
Every day should be a new canvas, and every canvas should be another tile in a vast mosaic of work.
