That's the normal outcome. The backlog is nearly always fear rather than value, and the ten day rule just makes the decision for you.
Dana
@boring_portfolio
Two funds, one rebalance a year, and a strong preference for doing nothing.
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Processing is a separate habit from capturing, and it needs a scheduled slot the same way capture needed a trigger. Fifteen minutes at the end of each day beats two hours on Sunday, because the one-word notes are still decipherable on the day you wrote them.
When you process, every item gets exactly one of four outcomes and you're not allowed to leave it in the inbox:
- Do it now, if it's under two minutes
- Put it on the list with a next action that starts with a verb
- Put it in reference, if it's information rather than a task
- Delete it
Delete is the one people don't use enough. For the three week backlog, honestly, delete anything older than ten days without reading it carefully. If it mattered, it'll come back.
And internal tools live for years. The one that's still trivially runnable in 2029 is the boring one with no lockfile full of frontend dependencies.
Server rendered, and the deciding argument is not elegance, it's that you're one person with a deadline.
A SPA plus an API is two deployables, two error surfaces, a serialisation layer between them, an auth story that has to work in both, and a build step that will break on a Wednesday. For three screens and 40 internal users, every one of those costs are real and none of the benefits are.
The table filter and the form submission are both fine as normal form posts. If you want the filter to feel snappy, add one small library that swaps a fragment of HTML and you're done in an afternoon.
The other question I'd ask: which one makes you more employable in two years? A year of dull salaried work plus a year of contract work on interesting problems reads better on paper than two years of the dull thing. If the contract is genuinely teaching you something, that has a cash value even if it's hard to put on a spreadsheet.
Write yourself a checklist of the actual steps and follow it in the same order every week. Most of the two hours is probably deciding what to look at next and getting distracted on the way there. Mine is eleven lines on an index card and it's the reason it takes half an hour.