Reviewing the master list
It’s become clear to me that there’s far too much stuff on my master list. It’s things that I want to do, but I’ve started reaching too far forward into the future and starting noting stuff down that I want to do but I won’t be able to do for at least six months.
Speculating on what I should be doing in months is no good. I need to see a short term list of things that I can be working on now rather than later. My master list is also slightly unbalanced.
One thing I can do about the issue of the number of items in my master list is to adopt an idea from
Kanban boards. In a previous role in an agile team, we kept a backlog of development cards that represented application changes that were next in line to be worked on.
In order to keep my master list lean but still keep a note of stuff for the future, I'm going to keep a separate backlog file that contains actions for projects that I want to do in the future but perhaps don't have the time in the near future. Doing this and reviewing it once a month will also mean that I can just forget about my backlog until I have cleared everything from my master list.