DELETE YOUR BACKLOG
If it's important, you'll remember it. If you forgot it, it wasn't important. The case for backlog bankruptcy.
Your backlog is not inventory. It's debt.
Inventory is something you own and will use. Debt is an obligation that compounds whether you touch it or not. Every ticket you file, every "someday" feature, every non-critical bug — you tell yourself you're capturing value. You're not. You're signing a loan against your future attention, and the interest is paid in guilt every time you open the board.
That's backlog bankruptcy: the moment you admit the list will never be paid down, and stop pretending otherwise.
Built to grow
A list assumes completion. You work it, you finish it. A backlog assumes the opposite — it's built to grow faster than you can clear it. New ideas arrive daily. Old ones rot in place. The ratio only moves one direction.
So you triage. You re-rank. You "groom." None of that ships anything. It's an interest payment — the work you do to keep the debt looking manageable, which produces nothing except the sensation of being on top of it. That sensation is the trap: looking organized replacing being effective.
Bankruptcy, not refinancing
Reprioritizing a backlog is refinancing a debt you can't afford. You move it around, you feel productive, you owe exactly as much as before.
Bankruptcy is different. You discharge it. Once a quarter, declare your backlog insolvent and delete it. Every ticket. Every feature request. Every bug that isn't actively on fire. Gone.
Not archived. Not "moved to the icebox." Deleted.
The filter is memory
This is why it works, and why it terrifies people: the filter is your own memory.
→ If a bug is real, it gets reported again. Within days. → If a feature matters, you won't forget it — and neither will your users. → If something vanishes the moment you delete the list and never resurfaces, you have your answer. It was never important. It was just written down.
Your brain is not a storage device for everything you might one day do. The backlog promised to be that storage, and lied. What survives deletion is the real roadmap. Everything else was drag.
Stop hoarding ideas. Execute or delete. There is no middle ground.