Does this look familiar?

This is a problem, because an disorderly and frightening READY column is, in and of itself, a form of work-in-progress. Even if you are limiting your WIP, looking at that huge string of demanding post-its weighs us down just looking at it.

When we limit our personal Work-in-progress, our ultimate goal is to provide a calm, stable, and flowing state of work. We want a system that allows us to focus on the task and hand and complete quality work.

Having a huge, daunting backlog undermines our quality and destroys our focus.

What we need to do is focus this work. We can start by gathering some of those tasks together into groups and taking a look at what they really are.

We can do this by doing a quick exercise called Affinity Mapping.

We take the bulk of the stickies that we have in our read column and we sort them into groups that feel right. These might be easy, medium, and hard. These might be project 1, project 2, project 3. There might be two categories or there might be ten.

In the end, however, you’ll have your pile of pain sorted into easy-to-digest groups.

Then, you can name your groups. In this case they are “Household Projects”, “Office Work”, and “End-of-Year Taxes”.

Now we have a little more clarity over what is in our backlog. The previously undifferentiated jumble is a bit more orderly. We can now pull work knowing a few new things:

What projects we are really working on
What we are completing (and what we are procrastinating on).
What work we need to schedule for and what work can simply flow
Which tickets are still scary

Perhaps the most important thing is that the cognitive load of the original backlog was enormous. That added to our work-in-progress. The cognitive load of this new organized backlog (no matter how you feel about doing your taxes or cleaning) is much less. Your brain is spending less time and energy trying to make sense of what’s coming up.