Get Everything Done

I knew I'd get to this point, but didn't know it would be so soon -- what happens if I declare a backlog, and before it's cleared out, I'm behind again? I know the big-picture answer is to audit the workload, but in the meantime, does the new backlog become backlog #2, a second closed list?

Very helpful; thanks a lot. In starting the audit, one thing that was immediately helpful was to implement a part of the system I had skipped the first time: identify the no-deadline projects and work on only one at a time. It turns out a lot of what I thought was backlog was really too many non-deadline projects competing to be done at once.

Thanks very much for your work in this area.

Ah, thank you for this! I just read this thread and suddenly realised what my problem is: too many non-deadline projects competing to be done at once!!

However, I also know *why* that is, but I don't know the answer to the problem: I'm freelance, so I only ever get a chance to do the non-deadline projects when there isn't much (paid) work around, because usually all my work is extremely deadline-driven, and the deadlines are ofte so tight that everything else has to go out of the window (unfortunately that's the nature of my work, there's not much I can do about it unless I want to change profession!).

It does mean, however, that whenever I get the chance to do all the other things, there is some part of me that desperately wants to do *all* of them while I can. Because I know from experience that, once I get busy again, it may be months until I get another chance! So I tend to get this sense of panic, trying to cram everything in before the next job suddenly lands in my inbox. It really feels like – to use an analogy from DIT – I've got this menu in front of me and I know there's a chance I may not be able to eat again for ages, so I try to eat everything at once.

I know it's silly. But I'm not really sure what to do about this...

Betti