Every stochastic inbox/outbox patterned software (todo lists, email, issue tracker, rss reader) follows this same pattern where there are only two stable outcom

Every stochastic inbox/outbox patterned software (todo lists, email, issue tracker, rss reader) follows this same pattern where there are only two stable outcomes: Inbox Zero or Bankrupt. Because the stream of incoming is random and uncontrolled by you, unless the time you devote to clearing your inbox vastly exceeds the incoming stream, all queues converge upon bankruptcy inevitably. Given this, it's worthwhile thinking about bankrupt only software. Twitter is a great example of bankrupt only thinking. One of the crucial things Twitter did that differentiated itself from RSS is it never put an unread counter anywhere. You expect to go into Twitter, reading only some small percentage of your stream. You assume that if a link is important enough, enough people will post it that you'll eventually see it. But also, if you don't, it's no big deal. It's interesting thinking about what a bankrupt only issue tracker would look like. Perhaps a version could be that when an engineer logs in, he only sees one issue at a time and has the choice of "I want to work on this issue", "I know someone who should work on this issue" and "I don't want to work on this issue". You can click around a couple of times until you find an issue to work on and then get straight to work. Crucially, there's no way to see the global list of issues and duplicates are encouraged, not discouraged. If an issue is duplicated many times, it means more of a chance that someone will hit upon it stochastically. I have no idea if this will work, probably not. But I think people need to start thinking outside of the todo list paradigm for issue tracking to make any meaningful progress forward.