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.
This is an excerpt. Read the rest at brainbrutalism.com.
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