It’s okay for your backlog to be disorganized. After all, you pile every new requirement, user story, and request into it when you say, “I’ll add it to my backlog.”
If you fully organize your backlog and assign every item into a future sprint, you are approaching it with the traditional project management mindset i.e. plan everything out in detail. Mostly likely, you will need to re-plan over and over again.
The agile approach is to only pull out the highest priority items from the backlog and plan the next one or two sprints. That’s it.
Compare this to investing. Let’s say you have $10,000 to invest for the next two weeks. The agile mindset is akin to getting the highest return on investment in the next sprint. After that, you pivot to the next best investment. Whereas the traditional approach is to plan out your investment strategy for the duration of the project, say over the next 12 months.
Another approach is to use apply the 80-20 method to backlog grooming. Organize 20% of the highest priority items into future sprints and leave the rest of the 80% for future planning. That strikes a balance between sufficient planning without doing too much planning resulting in rework.
What is your approach to backlog grooming?