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Your Backlog Is Not A Museum For Your Good Intentions

Your brain lies to you. It tells you that every idea you have is a precious diamond that must be acted upon immediately. But they aren’t diamonds.

Most of your ideas are just shiny rocks. And if you put every shiny rock on your desk (i.e., your Kanban board), pretty soon you can’t find your computer.

When you come up with something to do, it’s often a real need that you haven’t thought through yet.

We have a term for this: Solutioning. It’s when you decide how to fix something before you even know what is broken. It’s like buying a cast for your leg because you might fall down the stairs next week.

Pawel Brodzinski (see above) pointed out that most of the stuff in our backlogs is just noise. It’s clutter. We stare at 50 items, paralyzed, wondering which one is the “priority,” when in reality, 40 of them are just vague wishes written months ago.

The problem is that we confuse “The Need” with “The Solution.”

And we make our tasks solutions and not need. Ideas are not action, but we need to turn ideas into action.

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What To Do With Ideas

If I put a card on my board right now that says “Make Pizza,” that’s a solution. But the actual need is “Make Dinner.” By the time 6 PM rolls around, nobody might want pizza. If I’ve committed to “Pizza” as a task, I’m stuck. But if I have a pantry full of ingredients, I can look at the hungry people (the market) and say, “What do y’all want?” And they say, “We can Carne Asada Tacos.” I go to the pantry and I make some tacos.

Or worse yet, and to torture the analogy even more, it’s like your ticket is make buttered scampi and then you find out your guests have shellfish allergies.

But anyway you need a pantry. You need something to make sure that when the market wants something from you, you have the ingredients and the recipes.

The Idea Factory

So, let’s get some ideas and then hold them until they are ready with three quick visualizations:

* The Idea Supermarket: This is a nice way of saying “Purgatory for Good Intentions.” Put your ideas here. Let them sit. If they are actually good, they will wait until you and the market are ready. If they are bad, they will quietly decompose without cluttering up your actual workday.

* The 3 AM Notebook: I write things down in the middle of the night. It usually looks like a 6 month old got a sharpie and went nuts. That’s fine. The point here is to leave a trail to that 3 am idea that I’ll forget otherwise. If the evidence is compelling in the morning, I’ll do something with it. If not, it leaves something for the Jim Benson historians to decipher.

* The Quality Filter: This one is deceptive. Only put stuff in your board’s backlog that you are ready to actually do. First, don’t be vague. If a sticky note says “Do Strategy,” that is not a task. That is a cry for help. A task is “Email Dave.” A task is “Write paragraph one.” If you don’t know the physics of the verb, it’s not a task. It’s a solution you haven’t earned yet. Kick it back to the pantry until you learn what you need to cook.

* Second, if it’s something that you could do a million of (for me it’s posts like this one) putting everyone one you could do, into your options column means an insane number of options. Your real option that day is “write something that makes sense for the audience right now”…it’s the dinner. The subjects all go in the super market, they are ingredients.

Closing on Maybe

My friend Jeffrey White asked me recently about the “Maybe” column you see in some Kanban systems. A space for things that might happen. It sounds nice. It sounds like a gentle way to hold space for the unknown.

And this can work for some people, giving them sort of an idea buffer. But, for me, “Maybe” is ambivalent. And ambivalence is justification for clutter that hasn’t found the courage to leave yet. It’s that roommate we all had in college.

The image below shows a pantry, with shelves specifically market for different ingredient types. Don’t make a “parking lot” with stuff just thrown in it. Don’t maybe these things. Make them actionable future yeses.

Today’s metaphor mixer: If you don’t know if an idea is dinner or just a shiny rock, don’t let it sit on your board staring at you like a bad roommate. Put it in the Supermarket. Put it in the Notebook. Get it out of your face.

Your Personal Kanban isn’t a museum of things you thought about once. It’s a kitchen. And you need to cook.

Also H/T to Janis Ozolins for the nifty graphic in the video.

What You Can Do Next:

* Join us for the Personal Kanban workshop. We’ll go deep on your actual limits, help build visuals that work for you personally, and create boundaries that work. Spend some time with us:Deep Dive See Your Work-shop

* Read the full Personal Kanban book to understand the humanity behind the practice.

* Read the Collaboration Equation to learn more about this type of leadership.

* Take the Personal Kanban class on Modus Institute

* Work with Jim and Toni for personalized guidance implementing visibility in your specific situation.

* The board above is on Kanban Zone. Subscribers to this substack can get a bunch of templates from us there.

Like and subscribe and all that stuff. But … really, everyone is running way above capacity and it’s hurting us all. So, please … opt out of that pain.

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