Cal Newport talks about overhead tax in “Slow Productivity”:
Further, imagine it takes seven hours of core effort to complete a single report, and each report that you’ve committed to write generates one hour per day of overhead tax (emails, meetings, occupied mental space, and so on) until it’s completed.[*] In this thought experiment, if you commit to just one report at a time, giving it your full mental attention until it’s done before you agree to start working on another, you’ll complete reports at the rate of one per day (assuming you work eight hours per day). If, on the other hand, you agree to take on four different reports simultaneously, the combined overhead tax of maintaining all four on your task list will eat up half your day in logistical wrangling, effectively doubling the time required to complete a single report. In this example, doing fewer things ends up producing more results.
When you have too much work in progress, there’s too much overhead tax. It’s not just filling in the existing gaps in your day to day. It starts to create the default framing for your day, then you’re trying slice your actual projects into the gaps remaining.
In the old rocks in a jar analogy, overhead tax is the sand that fills the jar in the first place. You don’t even have to put the big rock in first to get its overhead tax sand.
You can fill an entire day with overhead tax. It’s one type of fuel for procrastination.
You can prevent it from stacking so much by parking projects in a backlog. Though, just stretching the parking lot analogy, there are different ways to park.
If you really can’t put it on hold, it’s like double parking someone with your hazards on to run into a building. It’s still going to generate some overhead tax and take some mental energy on the backburner.
To truly remove the overhead tax, you’ve got to find the equivalent of an unmetered unreserved un-everything’d parking spot. At a team level, this could be a team backlog where a project actually might not be assigned to you at all. So you can focus strictly on what you’re assigned to and others trust and follow the team’s system. They can see what’s on your plate and you’re allowed to focus on it.
I’m now thinking of eating at a buffet while double parking someone so I know there are too many metaphors here.
Time to run.