The Scenario
Quarterly backlog grooming is done. The product team spent two hours going through 60 stale issues and marked 28 of them "archive" in column B of a Google Sheet. The issues haven't been touched in months — they're not bugs, they're not features, they're just dead weight in the backlog making sprint planning harder to read. Someone needs to archive them in Linear before next week's planning session.
The bad version:
- Open Linear, search for the first identifier, open the ticket, click the three-dot menu, find "Archive," confirm the modal.
- Twenty-eight times.
- Linear's search is fast, but navigating to the archive option still requires three clicks per ticket. That's 84 clicks for a task that a human should not be doing at all.
The person who got assigned this cleanup already has three other things on fire today. Twenty-eight tickets is not "a few minutes of cleanup" — it's a half hour of repetitive clicking that could have been avoided entirely.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the issue identifiers from your sheet and archives all of them in Linear at once — no three-dot menus, no confirmation modals.
Archive every Linear issue identifier listed in column A of this sheet where column B says "archive"
What You Get
- All 28 issues archived in Linear in one operation.
- Issues where column B doesn't say "archive" are left untouched.
- Identifiers that don't exist or are already archived surface as notes rather than hard errors.
- A completion summary with the count of archived issues.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You want to preview the list before archiving
Before committing, you want to confirm exactly which issues will be affected.
For each row in this sheet where column B says "archive": look up the Linear issue in column A and write its current title and state into columns C and D — do not archive anything yet
Some issues marked "archive" are still assigned to someone
You want to remove the assignee before archiving, so it doesn't show up in anyone's active work view.
For each row in this sheet where column B says "archive": remove the assignee from the Linear issue in column A, then archive it
The grooming sheet has multiple disposition values
Column B has "archive," "keep," and "defer." You only want to act on "archive" rows, but you also want to update the "defer" ones to a different state.
For each row in this sheet: if column B says "archive", archive the Linear issue in column A; if column B says "defer", update the issue state to "Backlog"; if column B says "keep", do nothing — write the action taken into column C
Full cleanup with writeback
Archive the flagged issues, confirm each one, and log any that failed.
For each row in this sheet where column B says "archive": archive the Linear issue in column A — write "archived" into column C if it succeeded, or the error message if it failed
The sheet becomes the audit trail for the grooming session.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the Google Sheet from your last backlog grooming session — mark which issues to archive and ask SheetXAI to handle the cleanup. If you also need to pull a fresh snapshot of what's left after the cleanup, the export-issues guide walks through that next step.