The Reckoning: Triage, Focus, and Ending Work in the Age of Infinite Backlogs

The scarce skill is deciding what gets to count as work.

90-minute workshop, worked in small groups

Next: Saturday, October 10, 2026 · 10:20 – 11:50 AM
Pigott 203, Seattle University, 901 12th Ave, Seattle
PMI Puget Sound — Professional Development Days 2026, “Be the Transformation” · PM & CAPM Foundations track

When you can spin up an entire project — plan, epics, a tree of subtasks — from a single prompt, you may end up (as I did) with 179 tasks created in less than three minutes, of which, five months later, only 36 had ever been touched.

Work stops being scarce, and what grows in its place is a forest of untended and overgrown projects. You cannot decide your way out.

When creating work is free, the scarce skill is deciding what gets to count as work at all. An infinite list of ideas is an asset; an infinite list of obligations is a crushing burden. And generated at scale, they all look alike.

The reckoning is where you decide what survives on the project plan.

This is a working session, not a talk. We'll work through a shared example, and together we'll generate far more work than any room could do, then cut it back down in small groups against a real deadline. Expect to spend most of the ninety minutes building rather than listening.

Along the way we run a five-move playbook — (1) triage versus focus; (2) clear, assign, or kill; (3) make deferral cost something; (4) the reckoning (this is a ritual!); and (5) prune whole speculative trees in one gesture. At the end, we'll have every item either done, shrunk, parked, or killed, never left half-alive.

Then we go upstream. Instead of sorting things out afterwards, we'll see how setting an explicit strategy helps us decide what becomes work in the first place.

You don't need a smaller backlog. You need better ideas in it — and the judgment to pick what to do next.

Bringing this to your event?

Tell me the date and who is in the room, and I will tell you whether it fits. I adapt it to the audience — see below.

[email protected]

Useful in a first email: the date, the city, roughly how many people, and what they do all day.

What happens in the room

The ideaA reckoning is a scheduled pass that resolves every lingering item to a terminal state — done, shrunk, parked, or killed — by deciding in advance what qualifies, rather than weighing items one at a time. Apply the same filter upstream, and most of what a reckoning would otherwise have to end never exists.
The live momentEvery item leaves the room done, shrunk, parked, or killed — never left half-alive. Parked is the one that matters: it is how an obligation becomes an idea again.

You leave able to

Diagnose why per-item triage fails when work is generated faster than anyone can read it.
Run a reckoning — a scheduled pass that resolves every lingering item to a terminal state: done, shrunk, parked, or killed, never left half-alive — by deciding in advance what qualifies, rather than weighing items one at a time.
Apply the same filter upstream — let an explicit strategy decide what gets created, so most of what a reckoning would otherwise have to end never exists.

PMI Puget Sound — Professional Development Days 2026
The event page, with the full programme and registration.

Field notes

Monthly notes on AI-assisted development — what I'm shipping, what I'm learning, and which tools actually earn their place. It's also where the next talk and the next office hours get announced.

Talks · Reports · Survey of Software · ivantohelpyou.com
Model Citizen Developer · Ivan Schneider · [email protected]

The Reckoning: Triage, Focus, and Ending Work in the Age of Infinite Backlogs

Bringing this to your event?

What happens in the room

You leave able to

Related

Field notes