Stop starting start finishing.
Just don’t text and drive.
This principle from the Kanban community is a powerful reminder to limit work in progress. But we often see that individuals, teams, and organizations have too much going on. The perceived benefit is to always have something to do. But idling in traffic still means you get nowhere.
Gerry Weinberg in his book “Quality Software Management” states that –
“Every project you add to your workload,results in 20% drop in productivity”.
These losses are attributed to context switching costs, as we have to perform start and stop resets in between tasks/projects.
Multi-tasking is a silent productivity killer.
Stop starting start finishing.
With many projects in progress, people get used to coordination, status meetings, and getting interrupted multiple times during the day. All of this begins to be considered as ‘work’ when they are all just idling.
What if the organization reduced the work in progress?
Then the meetings and interruptions will disappear because there will be fewer things to coordinate. Therefore creating more space to finish what was already started.
But, but… I know 🙂
No matter how you feel about my rationale.
Just don’t text and drive.
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