Go look at your backlog right now. Sort by last updated. Count how many items haven't been touched in three months.
It's a lot. For most teams, it's more than half.
Those items aren't waiting. They're decomposing. The context is gone. The person who created them may not even remember why. The problem they described might not exist anymore.
Why 90 days
Ninety days is roughly one quarter. One full planning cycle. If an item survived an entire quarter without anyone touching it, looking at it, or mentioning it in a meeting, that tells you something. Nobody cares enough to act on it.
That's not a judgment. It's information.
The fear of deleting
Teams resist archiving old tickets because it feels wasteful. Someone spent time writing that. A customer asked for it. What if we need it later?
Here's the thing. If it matters, it will come back. Someone will file a new ticket with fresh context and current urgency. That new ticket will be better than the stale one you're hoarding.
If nobody recreates it, you have your answer. It didn't matter.
How to implement it
Set up an automated rule. Any ticket not updated in 90 days gets moved to an archive. Not deleted. Archived. Send a notification to the creator. Give them a week to rescue it if they want.
Most won't. The ones that get rescued are the ones that actually matter. Everything else was clutter pretending to be work.
The result
Teams that run a 90-day rule report the same thing. The backlog shrinks by 40-60% in the first pass. Nobody misses what's gone. Planning meetings get shorter. Decision quality goes up because you're choosing between 50 real options instead of 500 ghosts.
The rule doesn't destroy information. It surfaces truth.
Tom Pinder