There will always be more to do than a life can hold
💎CORE ARGUMENT
I had been running my life as a backlog: a stock of things to do, to be drained by working faster than it fills. It will not drain, and I have spent years reading that as my own inefficiency. It is arithmetic.
The inflow is not fixed. Every book I finish names three more. Every problem solved at work uncovers the one behind it. Every person I love is a standing claim on time that I would not want reduced. Being capable makes it worse: the more I clear, the more I am given, and the more I can see that is worth doing. The list is produced by being alive and interested, and it grows faster the better things go.
So getting on top of things is not a state I can reach by going faster. What I can do is choose, on purpose, which things will not happen. I find that hard to write down. I tend to treat every undone thing as a failure of throughput, when I ought to see it as the unavoidable price of the done ones.
I wrote the first version of this in the third week of July. It was thirty-three degrees, I was working all day and finishing nothing, and I had just decided to skip an issue for the second time in the newsletter's life. I expected the decision to feel like a defeat. It felt like nothing much. The issue did not go out, the subscribers stayed, and a fortnight later I wrote a short one saying so.
That is the only evidence I have, and it is small. One thing was deliberately not done, and the world did not send a bill.
It leans on 💎 Time is the only thing I own that cannot be earned back and answers to 💎 Enough is a number I have to choose: if there will always be more, I have to decide what is sufficient, because the list will never tell me.
Where I might be wrong. I wrote this in the flattest weeks of the year, and it may be a mood with footnotes. You cannot do everything is true, and it is also exactly what a tired person wants to hear. In September, rested, I took on a discovery project and a promotion case in the same month and did both.
It could also become an excuse. Some things I leave undone are neglected because I was avoiding them, and no choice was involved. This note gives me no way to tell those apart from the ones I chose.
🧱BUILT FROM
🌍WHY IT MATTERS
At the quarterly review I write a short list headed Not this year. It has things on it I would like to do. Writing them there is the decision. I no longer keep a someday list, which was only the same backlog with better manners.
☑️NEXT STEPS
- Write the Not this year list at the Q3 review
- Delete the someday list
- In January, check which items on the list I regret
📖 Burkeman on finitude: the decks will not be cleared, so the question is what to neglect on purpose.
💎 Time is the only thing I own that cannot be earned back: the hours are the fixed side of the sum. 💎 Enough is a number I have to choose: where a number is possible I should choose it. Here it is not, and I still have to choose.
The supply of worthwhile things is effectively unlimited and grows with capability, while the hours are fixed. Working faster cannot close a gap of that size. Since most things will go undone whatever I do, the only real choice is which.
💎 A backlog is a stock and only the outflow shrinks it, my own note, and I stand by it at work. A product backlog is a stock, and finishing or deleting is the only thing that lowers it. The contradiction is one of scale. For a team's backlog, raising the outflow is the job. For a life, the inflow has no limit, and treating it like a sprint is a category error.
Said plainly to readers in 📝 Issue 44 - The fortnight I did not write. Written from the inside, with no conclusion, in 🕯️ The flat weeks.