I deleted 91 tasks and shipped more that week
Ninety-one open items, none of them scheduled. The delete rule that replaced my backlog.
PlaceholderMy task list had ninety-one things on it. I counted. Not one of them had a date, and eleven were older than the app I was tracking them in.
So I wrote a rule instead of a system. Anything untouched for twenty-eight days is deleted at six on Monday morning. No archive, no review queue, no are-you-sure. If it matters it comes back, because whatever made you write it down will happen again.
First Monday it deleted ninety-one tasks. Four came back. That is the real number — four. The other eighty-seven were me being unwilling to admit I was never going to do them.