While I am spending time reading Peopleware, I am getting pretty interesting things from it. A lot of them fits my current theory and match my practice. And now I'd like to point out one great myths demystified by the book. It's so close to the current project, I'm working with, which is balances between live and backlog, so I couldn't miss this out.
Because of the backlog, you need to double productivity immediately.
It's one of the common myths, which are entirely wrong. Why entirely? Because there is no backlog. You do not trash your house, your car, your life. Why should you trash your work? An every project costs much more, when missed the deadline. When you put it to backlog you're killing it without any chance to recover. And what's the worst thing, is that you don't take a lesson from it. Sometimes it's easier to think that you've got a perspective project in the backlog, you're just waiting for its time to run. You loose. There is no backlog, it's a reject pile (c). Its time will never come again, and you've got to learn how to throw away without sorry. So find an inner power in yourself to make the judgement to either let the project live, here and now, or rip it this single moment. No backlog, no excuses.
Personally, I didn't recover any single project from my backlog.