How DevOps Taught Me to Stop Overthinking and Actually Get Things Done

Malek Mostafa — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 09:25:59 +0000

I used to have a problem that doesn't look like a problem: I think about too many things.

At any moment my head holds client work, a business idea, a freelance gig, something I want to learn, and three "cool ideas" I had in the shower. Every one of them felt important, so I tried to hold all of them at once.

The result was predictable. I felt busy all day, but at the end of it I couldn't point to anything I had actually finished. I was overwhelmed, not unproductive by choice.

The idea that came from DevOps

The fix came from my own field. DevOps teams deal with this exact problem: too much work arriving, limited capacity, and a need for steady flow instead of chaos.

A few of its principles apply directly to a personal day:

Make work visible. Work you can't see, you can't manage.
Break work into small batches. Small changes ship faster and fail more safely than big ones.
Limit work in progress. Starting more things doesn't finish more things.

So I stopped treating my day as a mental to-do list and started treating it like a delivery pipeline.

The system: a four-column Kanban board in Notion

The board has four columns:

Backlog → Today → In Progress → Done

That's all. No complicated setup.

My board. Task names are blurred.

How I use it, step by step

1. Everything goes into the Backlog

Any task, idea, or "I should look into this" goes into the Backlog the moment it appears. I don't judge it and I don't schedule it. I just capture it.

This one habit solved half my problem. Once an idea is written down, my brain stops rehearsing it, and I stop losing the good ones.

2. Big tasks become small tasks

"Build a CRM feature" is not a task. It's a project wearing a task's clothes.

Before anything leaves the Backlog, I break it into pieces I can finish in a single sitting. A task I can finish feels doable, so I actually start it. A vague giant one feels heavy, so I avoid it.

3. Every task gets a label

I use five labels:

Work
Own business
Freelance
Self-development
Searching & learning

A task card with its properties. Title and label are blurred.

Labels show me where my time actually goes. If a week is all Work and Freelance with nothing for my own business or my growth, I can see the imbalance and decide whether that's what I want.

4. Every task gets an estimate

I add a rough time estimate to each task. It doesn't need to be accurate. The point is to make the size visible.

Estimates also stop me from planning a day that has 14 hours of work in it. When I pull tasks into Today, I can see whether the plan is realistic before the day even starts.

5. Maximum 3 tasks In Progress

This is the rule that changed the most. In DevOps it's called a WIP (work in progress) limit, and the reasoning is simple: the more things you have open, the more time you lose switching between them, and the longer each one takes to finish.

If I already have three tasks In Progress, I can't start a fourth. I have to finish something first. It feels restrictive for the first few days, then it feels like relief.

6. Details live in the task description

Each task has a description holding everything I need: links, notes, the context, what "done" looks like. When I come back to a task after a day or a week, I don't have to remember where I was. I read the card and continue.

What changed

I'm not going to pretend there's a magic number here. I haven't measured it with a stopwatch. What I can say is how it feels:

I know what I'm working on and why.
I rarely lose an idea, because it has a place to go.
Finishing a small task gives me a clear, regular sense of progress, instead of the vague feeling of "busy".
The overwhelm dropped, because my head is no longer the storage system.

A few lessons

The Backlog will grow, and that's fine. Its job is to hold ideas, not to be emptied. Only a few of them need to become real work.
Keep the board simple. Every extra column or property is more maintenance, and a system you don't maintain stops working.
The WIP limit is the hardest and most valuable rule. If you only adopt one thing from this article, make it that one.

Try it yourself

You can build this in ten minutes:

Create a Notion board with four columns: Backlog, Today, In Progress, Done.
Add two properties: a Label (select) and an Estimation (number).
Dump everything in your head into the Backlog.
Break the big items into small ones.
Move a few tasks to Today, and never have more than 3 in the In Progress column.

DevOps was built to move work through a system without burning out the people in it. It turns out that works on a single person's day too.

What does your own system look like? I'd like to hear what works for you.

DEV Community: Malek Mostafa