Raspberry Jam
The law of Raspberry Jam is "the more you spread it around, the thinner it gets." A useful principle when dealing with work-in-progress, attention span, goal-setting, etc. I found this gem recited in an email a while back and saved it, without really remembering who wrote it. If you know, please feel free to help attribute it. It quotes Goldratt's /Critical Chain/: There’s a lovely example of the evils of multitasking in Goldratt’s Critical Chain. Suppose you have three things to deliver: A, B and C. Suppose they all take, I don’t know, 2 days each to complete. If you did them one after the other, A will be finished by day 3, B by day 5, and C by day 7. AABBCC. Now suppose you want to satisfy the people who commissioned B and C that you’re paying attention to them, and you decide to multitask. So you decide to split things up, and work on them in one day blocks, ABCABC. The result is that now A is delivered on day 5, two days later than before, and B is delivered on d...