Get Everything Done

Aaron - thanks for posting that very insightful article.

I think Newport is right when he says Drucker's emphasis on the autonomy of knowledge workers tends to ignore the fact that they operate in an interconnected system.

I see this manifest in the common management practice of loading up knowledge workers "until they start to push back".

This practice is exactly analogous to operating a factory in such a way as to maximize the utilization of every resource. As Goldratt illustrated so well in The Goal, this only results in reduced throughput and increasing inventories (WIP) -- individual resources may be operating efficiently, but the factory as a whole is operating very inefficiently.

The solution for the factory is to introduce work into the factory only as fast as the most constrained resource (the bottleneck) can process it.

The same methods can work for IT, office operations, product development, engineering, etc.

The biggest problem with these methods is not the idea of the bottleneck and how to manage it. This is easy to understand, and many people already know it intuitively.

The problem is that you have to tell your non-bottleneck people to STOP WORKING (or at least STOP TAKING ON NEW WORK) if bringing the new work into the system will overload the bottleneck. They themselves might have capacity to accept the new work -- but they don't see that when they finish their part and hand it off to the next person -- or send emails or set up meetings or whatever -- they are ultimately overloading the bottleneck -- and this overwhelms the whole operation.

It is extremely difficult to get people to stop accepting new work when they feel they have available capacity, and extremely counter-intuitive for managers to resist loading them up.

For example, I've seen projects that were starting up, but there was a vendor problem or something the delayed the project start for a week or two. So some people have nothing to do while they are waiting for the project to start. This makes people really nervous -- is the project being cancelled? Am I going to be laid off? Is my work so unimportant that nobody notices I am idle? They start looking for something to do, to make sure they are not caught idle. It is a real threat to one's sense of job security and the perceived value that a person brings to the company.

I think this applies to personal time management, too. First it applies because most of us are embedded in these complex systems and deal with the overwhelm all the time. But even if we are more independent, it is easy to bring it on ourselves. We don't see the interconnected nature of our own endeavors, and don't realize where the bottlenecks are. So we accept new ideas and new tasks but don't realize how they conflict with existing commitments -- forcing us to prune something later -- which means all the work that eventually got pruned was wasted. Or we don't see how the bottleneck controls the throughput of the whole system -- so we chase the new shiny thing that seems like it might solve some important problem, but if the new shiny thing doesn't improve the performance of our bottleneck, it will not have any material impact on our goals and objectives.