The Epic of Gilgamesh Had a Backlog Too

I did not read the Epic of Gilgamesh because I wanted to think about work tracking.

Trying to turn a four-thousand-year-old Mesopotamian epic into a lesson about modern working life is, after all, a fairly reliable way to start saying ridiculous things.

I am not going to claim that Gilgamesh managed a backlog or held weekly status meetings with Enkidu.

But when I thought about the story again, I noticed some things that felt strangely familiar.

An extremely powerful leader.

A companion just as formidable as he is.

Big ambitions.

Decisions made without fully considering their consequences.

Work that affects other work.

Waiting.

And eventually, a much bigger question:

When all that work is finished, what remains?

You might hope working life would have progressed a little further in four thousand years.

Yet on Monday morning, someone still asks:

“Who owns this?”

Gilgamesh and what happens when everything depends on one person

At the beginning of the story, Gilgamesh is extraordinarily powerful.

He is also not particularly good at recognising the limits of that power.

Translated into modern working life, that feels surprisingly familiar.

Someone is good at their job, so they gradually take on more responsibility. They become involved in every critical decision. When a problem appears, they solve it. When people do not know something, they ask them.

Eventually, without really intending to, that person becomes the centre of the entire system.

A structure like this can work for a surprisingly long time.

Because if the person at the centre is genuinely good, the work genuinely gets done.

But there is an important distinction:

The system isn't working. The person is.

What happens when that person is not in the meeting?

When they are on leave?

When they are busy with something else?

Suddenly, simple questions become difficult.

Who owns this?

What are we waiting for?

What was the final decision?

What happens next?

That is why I do not see work tracking as a way to exercise more control over people.

Quite the opposite.

Good work tracking stops work from living inside one person's head.

If understanding what a team is doing requires everyone to keep going back to the same person, there is no visible system.

There is a person.

Then Enkidu arrives

When Enkidu enters the story, Gilgamesh meets someone who can genuinely match him for the first time.

First they fight.

Then they begin acting together.

And Gilgamesh starts to change.

I like Enkidu's place in the story because it reminds me of something important about good teams:

A strong team is not a strong manager surrounded by people who do what they are told.

It is made up of people who increase one another's capacity.

Enkidu does not replace Gilgamesh.

Gilgamesh does not become less Gilgamesh because Enkidu is strong.

Together, they attempt things neither would have attempted in quite the same way alone.

There is a small but important distinction in work tracking that feels similar:

Giving a piece of work an owner does not mean that person has to do it alone.

Ownership matters.

It should be clear who ultimately owns a piece of work.

But ownership and isolation are not the same thing.

One person can own the work. Someone else can support it. They may need another person's expertise. They may be waiting for action from another team.

Clear responsibility and collaboration are not opposites.

Should everything we can do actually be done?

Then Gilgamesh and Enkidu travel to the Cedar Forest.

They face Humbaba.

And, as tends to happen in epics, things escalate quickly.

What interests me here is not whether they are capable of defeating Humbaba.

It is another question:

Why are we doing this?

I am not sure we ask that often enough in modern working life either.

Backlogs have a very natural tendency to grow.

A new idea.

A new report.

A new feature.

A new analysis.

A new meeting.

A new project.

Each one sounds reasonable on its own.

Eventually, instead of managing a list of things that need to be done, we find ourselves managing a list of everything we could possibly do.

Then we start measuring success by how many of those things we complete.

I no longer think good work management is simply about completing things faster.

Sometimes the more valuable question is:

Should we actually do this at all?

Giving something an owner, a deadline and a “high” priority does not make it valuable.

Sometimes the most valuable outcome of good work management is not a completed task.

It is a task we consciously decide never to start.

Ishtar and what happens after a decision

At one point in the story, Ishtar proposes marriage to Gilgamesh.

Gilgamesh refuses.

So far, that is one decision.

What follows is considerably more than one thing.

Ishtar's anger.

The Bull of Heaven.

Gilgamesh and Enkidu killing it.

The judgement of the gods.

And eventually, Enkidu's death.

The management lesson I am taking from this is obviously not “never say no to a stakeholder.”

There is something more interesting here:

Decisions have dependencies too.

At work, we often look at a piece of work as though it exists on its own.

It rarely does.

One decision starts another team's work.

One approval is delayed and three tasks wait.

One deadline moves and another plan stops making sense.

A project is marked “complete”, while the new work it created disappears from everyone's radar.

So when I track a piece of work, asking:

“What is its status?”

does not feel like enough.

I also want to know:

“What is it waiting for?”

and

“What does it affect?”

Waiting work is particularly interesting.

It is not complete.

Nobody may be actively working on it.

But it has not disappeared either.

It is simply sitting there, quietly consuming time.

And invisible waiting can become one of the quietest ways a team loses time.

Then Enkidu dies

At this point, the epic changes completely.

Gilgamesh's enormous strength can no longer solve the problem in front of him.

Enkidu dies.

And for the first time, Gilgamesh truly confronts his own mortality.

He is no longer chasing another victory.

He is chasing immortality.

Eventually he reaches Utnapishtim, the survivor of the flood.

He wants an answer.

But the story does not give him the answer he wants.

Gilgamesh does not become immortal.

Eventually, he returns to Uruk.

And we look again at something that has been there since the beginning:

The walls of Uruk.

I like this part.

Because Gilgamesh will die.

Enkidu is already dead.

The struggle with Humbaba is over.

The Bull of Heaven is dead.

All the great adventures have become part of the past.

But some of the things that were built are still there.

So where does our work go?

This makes me think about one of the least discussed parts of work tracking.

We spend months on a project.

We solve a problem.

We make decisions.

People take on extra responsibility.

We try things that do not work.

We learn something.

Eventually, the work is finished.

We tick the box.

Done.

Then, a few months later, someone asks:

“Why did we do it this way?”

Emails are searched.

Old messages are opened.

Meeting notes are dug out.

Everyone hopes somebody remembers.

I think we lose something here.

Because good work tracking should not only answer:

“What is everyone working on right now?”

It should also help answer:

What did we do?

Why did we do it?

Who contributed?

What came out of it?

What did we learn?

Finishing a piece of work and erasing it from memory are not the same thing.

What are our walls?

Probably none of the work most of us do will still be discussed four thousand years from now.

I am perfectly comfortable with that.

But teams need their own small memories.

Of the decisions they made.

The work they finished.

The things that failed.

The things they waited for.

The things they chose not to do.

And the things they created together.

That is why looking at a backlog simply as “a list of things to do” now feels incomplete to me.

Kept well, it becomes something else.

A trace of what a team leaves behind.

Gilgamesh had the walls of Uruk.

Ours can be a little more modest.

But perhaps we can at least make sure the work we do survives until the next meeting.

So that when someone asks on Monday morning:

“Who owns this?”

we have somewhere useful to start.