I like this a lot! Is the free pass important? Could you just say that you have to spend that hour working on whatever’s the oldest thing in the list, even if that happens to only be a day old? (I’d expect that to be moot in practice, it just seems cleaner without the special case, not to mention the danger to the QS First principle.)
Also, I have a personal update on this (repeating from the last weekly beemail):
Neglect-minding non-nerdtastically
I’ve been talking the daily beemail folks’ ears off about strategies for solving the problem of not letting queues and backlogs be places where todos go to die. The last thing I said about it was that I would not be at all surprised if I’m overcomplicating things and there’s a much simpler way to force myself not to let backlogs be black holes.
Well, drum roll…
Here’s what I’ve come up with as the Simplest Possible Thing That Might Work: a manual do-more goal to make an epsilon improvement to whatever the oldest issue in our bug tracker is. I can change the labels, copyedit the description, even start a discussion about whether we still care about it (but maybe also getting someone to reply because just “do we still care about this?” is arguably a negative contribution, like replying “bump” to a stale email thread). And here’s my graph: bmndr.co/d/freshgish – we’ll see how it goes!
I think the equivalent for an email backlog would be to give a status-update reply to your oldest email. For a todo list, just doing something that you could describe to a partner or colleague with a straight face as having made progress on it.
I think this is especially applicable for things like our bug/issue database where new issues arise faster than we can ever hope to dispatch them. (That’s normal, right?)