5 Tips & Tricks To Help Tackle Your Content Backlog!

With how much stuff that’s out there, it is next to impossible to get every piece of content, and for media savvy people like us, that can be frustrating. Enter the nebulous void of the backlog: the inevitable result of having things you want to watch, play, read, what have you, but then either other things come up, you don’t have time, or you simply just forget about it. Backlogs are just a routine fact of consuming art and media nowadays, and oftentimes it can be hard to get to anything in your backlog.

Lucky for you, we’ve got you covered with some tips and tricks to help you conquer your backlog, whether it be movies, video games, podcasts, or literally anything you have piled up but haven’t gotten to experiencing any of it. So, with this helpful guide, you should be making some progress in no time. This list isn’t in any particular order, and some of these tips might not work for you, and that’s ok! As long as one of them does, then you’re one step closer to saying you’ve cleared out your backlog. Let’s get to it!

1. Have a Way of Remembering Your Backlog.

This one might seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how easy it can be to forget that show your friend Suzie told you to watch two years ago, and now you’re thinking about it with the free time to watch it. For any physical media, you at least have the easy reminder of being able to pick up your book or movie and see it on your shelf, giving you a very real and tangible reminder of "Oh yeah, I need to get to this." The problem there can be when you simply get used to the sight of Hell or High Water on your shelf and you don’t even actively think about it anymore.

With digital media, it can be even worse with how easy it is to just scroll through things. Don’t even get us started with realizing you have the time to binge that show that everyone was talking about and then, oh crap, it’s not on that streaming service anymore. Frustrating, right? Now you can’t watch the thing you’ve been wanting to watch, and if you can’t remember what it was, then it just gets lost to the ether.

So, the easiest solution for all of these predicaments is to simply have a list or some dedicated way of remembering what’s in your backlog. Streaming services give you a watchlist, but again, those can go away in due time, so they aren’t always reliable. Whereas if you have a list to keep track of what movies you need to see or the podcasts that you’ve been wanting to listen to, it just gives you an easy place to go and check to see what you need to catch up on. The problem then comes with choosing which thing to get to and for that, and so we have our next tip...

2. Try and Tie Items In Your Backlog To Something.

Here is another one that might seem obvious. Oh jeez, I haven’t seen the original Beetlejuice. Well, there’s a sequel that just came out, so now you have an easy excuse to watch it then. Been meaning to read that book? Well, that just got adapted into a new movie or TV series, thereby you can read it in the lead-up or read it after the fact to see how the two versions compare. There are plenty of easy ways to help give you reasons to cross off another thing on your backlog, and when you can, you should always try and take advantage of them.

However, what if I told you we can go deeper down the rabbit hole? Finding connections to something that you wouldn’t even think possible but, once you do, you get yourself another excuse to get through something in your backlog? So there’s this new horror movie with James McAvoy that came out called Speak No Evil. Well, I still haven’t seen Split — that has horror and James McAvoy so voilà, now I have a good reason to watch it. That’s just one example of how to find a link to something that helped you watch a new movie you’ve been meaning to get to. There’s plenty more so get creative with it.

3. Give Yourself a Schedule and/or Timeline.

Remember in the last tip when we proposed the idea of watching the original Beetlejuice before the sequel? That also falls into this category of giving yourself some form of schedule and/or timeline to help crack the code to your backlog. In that case, we set ourselves up to watch the original before the sequel released, but there’s plenty more ways to do it than that. Take the idea of a book club giving yourself a week’s amount of time to read X amount of pages before you meet up to talk about it. Well, whether you have people to meet up with or not, you can set yourself up to a “read/watch X amount by this pace”, and before you know it, you just watched through an entire season of television.

If that doesn’t work for you, then maybe just go, “Okay, I have next Tuesday off, I’ll use that to binge through a whole season or play through a whole game." Not a fan of binge-ing things all at once? Well, then take a note from Disney+ with "The Mandalorian" and watch the episodes week-by-week on a certain day of the week. Time management can be an incredibly hard thing to pull, though if you’re able to, then it may be just what you need to help your backlog lose a few pounds.

4. Play It By Feel.

With this tip, I do what I often do and think back to The Incredibles. Remember that scene at the dinner table where Violet says she isn’t hungry for meatloaf and her mom goes, "Well, it’s leftover night. We’ve got steak, pasta, what are you hungry for?" Basically, if you know what you’re in the mood for with movie night or a round of gaming time, then it helps decide which part of the backlog to tackle. I think back to the times where I’ve put a couple movies on one of those wheel websites and let it spin to see what I watch (that’s another good trick, btw) and when it landed on something and I went, “Huh, that just, doesn’t feel right." Well, because I knew that, I ended up going with another one of my options that just felt more fitting for the type of mood I was in.

That can be incredibly helpful to just know what the vibe is so that way when you’re ready to go through something, you don’t turn it off or move on to something else just from the timing not being right. If you’re not in the mood for a horror movie, then don’t watch a horror movie. Feeling like more of a light read? Lord of the Rings probably isn’t best. You need to get your heart racing? A good racing game might be the right medicine. Choosing what’s next on your backlog is half the battle sometimes, so if you know yourself well enough, then go off of your gut instincts, and that way, you’ll feel more rewarded for it.

5. Don’t Be So Hard on Yourself About It.

Yes, this one can be MUCH easier said than done when FOMO comes to play. Still, the pressure of having to watch something everyone else is watching or feeling bad about yourself that you haven’t played as many games this year isn’t going to help you or your backlog. Is it natural to feel this way? Absolutely! It can be normal to have that anxiety, and you know what, that’s okay. Feeling that extra level of stress just means that you’re human (we hope so anyways) and that, more than likely, you want to be a perfectionist about having seen every movie or having listened all of your favorite podcast’s episodes. It makes sense, though feeling that stress can not only slow you down in getting through your backlog, it can just be exhausting.

Who ever said we had to rush through it all in the first place? Unless you’re Sonic and you’ve gotta go fast, nobody. Sometimes, the slow and steady path actually does win the race. And if you’re worried you might forget about something you don’t get to it immediately, that’s what we have our lists for! All of this is to say that getting to things in your backlog takes time and it isn’t easy, and that is okay. Knowing that can be the first step for many to actually enjoying something.