This Focused Performance Weblog is a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective. TOC is noted for its applications in Project Management and Multi-Project Management (Critical Chain) and Operations Management (Drum-Buffer-Rope), as well as in Marketing, Strategic Planning and Change Management (TOC Thinking Processes). If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
"...when someone is working on four tasks, he is spending 10% of his productive time on each task. That adds up to 40% of his time. Where does the other 60% go?
That missing 60% goes to:
--breaking concentration on the task A
--picking up task B
--organizing materials related to task B
--remembering where you were last time you worked on task B
--establishing concentration on task B
--overcoming emotional inertia
--recreating the train of thought that got you to the current point on task B....
and so forth and so on."
That fourth item -- remembering where you were -- brings to mind a story from a Critical Chain Multi-Project workshop I did a few years ago in a software-centric product development organization. I used the usual example of the "Where was I?" question as one of the reasons for lost productivity. From the back of the room, one developer pointed out that if she's in the middle of coding something, and gets pulled away for something else, the question that comes to here is in "Where was I?," but rather, "Who the hell wrote this crap?"
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