Your backlog is hope. Your backlog is pain. Your backlog holds all the projects, tasks, demands, desires, and expectations that you and the world have for you. The problem is, today’s apparent emergencies are tomorrow’s waste of time.

If we are focused on completion, we don’t want to complete tasks: We want to complete products. If you find you are completing tasks but not products, try making your backlog explicitly show what you need to do to complete the products those tasks make up (figure 1).

Figure 1: Typical kanban backlog—the cluttered ready column has become a backlog. Click here for larger image.

 …