A writing backlog is the foundation of a sustainable writing practice
Think about regularly putting ideas into your writing backlog and pulling things to work on
A Product Manager recently said to me, “I want to be blogging, but I have absolutely no systems in place. I have post-it notes everywhere and I have no structures or way to think about moving forward.”
If this sounds familiar, I feel you.
In my mind, the first step toward building a sustainable writing practice is to create a writing backlog. This is basically a list of things you want to write about.
Your backlog could look like this:
How do we make sure more voices are heard at stand-ups?
What I learned from hiring an architect (so others don’t have to make the same mistakes).
Writing performance evaluations that are actually helpful.
All things Corgi
Your writing backlog is the Capture Ideas stage in the Leaders Write Pipeline.
The world is your writing backlog
Start your backlog with the low hanging fruit—the stuff you already know you’re interested in writing about.
But then I want you to start a practice of noticing, observing, and recording items for your backlog. Observe yourself. Observe people. Observe the way stuff happens.
Observation is the beating heart of good writing, especially if you want to develop a regular writing practice.
Here are 3 reliable sources of things to write about:
this is really annoying
wow, this is super delightful
hmm…how could we do this better?
How to capture items for your backlog
Any.damn.way.you.please
Post-its. Notebooks. Napkins. Evernote. Google docs. Voice memos.
You can and should be capturing ideas everywhere you go (or don’t go, as the case may be).
Make sure to compile these into a master list.
How to use your backlog
Let me emphasize that not everything that goes into your writing pipeline will be released as a product. As you move these ideas further into the pipeline you’ll fall out of love with some of them. That’s fine! Think about putting about 3 times as many ideas into the backlog as you’ll actually launch.
The best way to use your backlog is to commit to pulling a set number of items each week and doing a “first pass” session, which I will talk about in another post.
And now that there’s one less item in your backlog, you’ll want to put another one in there! Rinse, write, repeat.
If you’re ready to start putting ideas into action, subscribe to the Leaders Write Executive Community for prompts, exercises, and exclusive opportunities to get your questions answered.