As a consultant, I have a habit of keeping track of just about everything my customers ask for. At least I used to.
The work I did in the past often entailed hourly work so the more there was to do, the better. And for a long time I assumed that this was beneficial for my customer too.
So I diligently kept todo lists, per project. To the point where many projects were never ending. That what we worked on was simply a matter of what was the top priority.
Over years of this, projects tended to accumulate hundreds of items that never happened. But I kept track of all of them.
Many project management systems encourage this. They have drag and drop todo lists euphemistically named back logs. They make it easy to re-prioritize and be agile! But what they fail to help with, is getting rid of things that are never going to be done. And things that should never be done.
Pair this the hoarding mentality that’s typical among project managers and you have lots of wasted time shuffling the deck chairs.
Some one way to waste time, is to delete the things that shouldn’t be done. The things that aren’t going to be done. I would go so far as to say that you should have your software do this for you automatically. Have it delete anything that’s over a year old, or how about six months or maybe three?
If you do this, you’ll have peace of mind from less things to keep track. And you’ll waste a lot less time worrying about things that shouldn’t be done.