Backlogs often become a dumping ground for ideas. Some of those ideas are good, others might need some exploration before we understand if they’re worth it or not, but many of them are often not worth pursuing. After some time, it can be cumbersome to start to trawl through an ever increasing backlog to find the right value item that you should start to explore.
If you’re using a backlog and not thinking of them as options, please refer to an earlier blog post that talks about using options instead of a backlog (from here on, I’ll refer to them as options):
https://evogility.com.au/use-options-instead-of-backlogs/
Options have a value at a point in time. Generally they have a cost of delay. There’s also a cost of retaining options for too long – think about a options list that has a thousand items in it, how long is it going to take for you to find the top 10? You need to regularly trim your options list to make sure it’s lean and gives you insight into what are real options you need to spend your time on.
Put it another way, if you’ve had an option in your list for a year and haven’t taken it up, how likely is it that you’re going to take it up in the next year? For that matter, if you’ve had an option in your list for six months and not proceeded, how likely is it that you’ll take it up in the next six months? Or three months? If you’re thinking to one / all of these that it’s not very likely, then you’ve really just hit on your option expiry date. After a certain amount of time those ideas have expired.
Think about your answers to those questions. The one that’s the shortest to which you answered “unlikely” is your option expiry timeframe. Record the date that an option enters your pool of options. After the amount of time you discovered above (say it’s six months), that becomes your option expiry date.
Periodically remove those options that have exceeded that timeframe. Just throw them away. Even better, if you have an electronic system, set a rule to do it for you. Don’t worry, if it’s really important it will come back and you can create another ticket.
Doing this will save you time and help keep you focused on things that are important right now.