Last Friday, a couple of my colleagues were cleaning up old issues in Github, and I decided to go through the issues I had filed and close out all of the ones that I didn’t think made sense to keep. I started with 178 open issues authored by me; at the end I had only 12.
Of the issues I closed, some were outdated, no longer relevant, or superseded by other planned work. There were a lot though that I simply didn’t think were important anymore. They detailed things like potential improvements or cleanups in our codebase, and even though they were valid I honestly couldn’t justify why we’d want to divert time to work on them.
As an example - one issue suggested refactoring an internal service to make it easier to maintain. That might be a good idea, but we don’t have any plans to change it soon, so if we did it wouldn’t provide any benefits. If things change and I end up working on that service I’d probably make some improvements to the structure on my own anyway, so in the end the issue was just adding noise.
Going forward I want to try operating with a higher standard for filing new issues. If I don’t think something is immediately actionable and has a clear benefit, then I’m not filing an issue for it. My hope is that being more selective about what I file issues for will help the company be more focused. After all, we can’t work on everything, and a huge backlog of potential work makes it harder to find the truly important tasks to prioritize.