I am sure you have noticed this. When there are few cars on the highway, we all move pretty quickly. Add a few more cars, and it still moves pretty well. A few more, still no problem. “Throughput,” the number of miles traveled during a given hour, is still increasing. Yay. At a certain point, if we add a few more cars, things start to slow down seriously. Add even more, and we get crawling bumper to bumper traffic. While the number of cars on the highway has gone way up, throughput has gone way done.
We’ve all been there at work, right?
Up to a certain point, adding to-dos increases our productivity, but then it starts to slow down and get clogged, much like the highway at rush hour. Sadly, at this point, because we are falling behind, our to-do lists tend to back up, making a bad problem even worse. Yikes. Sometimes we even force more “cars” onto the “highway,” since we are so far behind. Ugh, gridlock. The way out of this isn’t to panic and force more and more onto the system. The solution is to recognize that like the highway, our brains have a natural limit to the number of tasks we can handle before productivity starts to fall. It would be nice if we could put more and more cars on the highway and have things get better, but that’s not how it works in reality, that only makes things worse. Once we have accepted that, we can start prioritizing, so that we only put the most important tasks on the list. Now things start moving again.
