I borrowed the term "backlog" from the IT industry. It means a list of tasks arranged in order of importance. Think of it simply as a to-do list. The key word here is "list", not "importance". We'll talk about importance in other chapters below. For now the value of this chapter is that all your notes, dreams, financial goals and other wishes that you want to realise in the future should be in one place.
This chapter overlaps quite a lot with the previous one. If in the previous one I urged you to gather all your materials (that you already have) in one place, in this chapter the emphasis is on gathering all your "wants" (that you don't have yet). Ideally, if you had paused reading the book after the last chapter and got down to organising your affairs and thoughts, you would most likely have come to gathering all your wishes in one place. If not, I'll remind you that it's important to do so.
What exactly to add to the backlog, everyone will decide for themselves. I'll just try to help you structure it. To start with I recommend having not one backlog but two or even three straight away. First, remember that your "wants" can be both financial and time-based. For example, buying a car is clearly a financial goal, since you need to save money for it. Learning a foreign language can be done without financial investment but with a big investment of personal time. These two goals could be combined in one place, but since one requires money and the other — time, I would split them into different backlogs: financial and time-based. Second, your "wants" can be structured by another criterion. Some help you reach your global goal. What a global goal is we'll discuss in the chapter "Pyramid of goals". Others simply bring you pleasure or satisfaction but don't bring you closer to achieving the global goal. The first and second types of goals should be kept in separate backlogs. I have several backlogs, but if you find it hard and inconvenient to keep everything in several lists, keep it in one.
