It’s difficult to plan for what you don’t understand.

The only way out is “through.” Often, you can’t delegate, procrastinate, or ignore personal work.

The Zeigarnik Effect fosters a psychic tension which has a toxic interaction with fears or worries lying around in our psyche. What results is an anxiety feedback loop that can preclude sleep, impact health and for some, become psychologically or physically debilitating.

increasing work linearly increases the likelihood of failure exponentially.

It is challenging to understand what we can’t see.

Visualizing work gives us power over it. When we see work in its various contexts, real trade-offs become explicit.

When time becomes a function of income rather than personal or professional value, we become psychologically and emotionally detached from our actions.

Each time we move a sticky note, we receive kinesthetic feedback: the tactile action is both a data point and a reward. A regular succession of these movements creates a cadence, a rhythm of work.

All that stuff we need to do? That’s our backlog. Amorphous and undefined, our backlog is powerful and pernicious.