Assume that you have a fixed budget of time, and a bunch of projects that each take the same amount of time to do, and provide ongoing value once completed.
Some reasons why it’s generally best to work in serial rather than in parallel
- Generally you deliver value once a project is completed. If you work in serial (one project at a time), then you deliver value sooner because you complete your first project more quickly. If you work fully in parallel, then value is only delivered at the end. You complete the set at the same time, but you lose out on the intermediate value, where you would have completed many of the individual projects sooner. This can add up.
- In addition: There are extra costs to tracking/managing multiple projects at once, which also pushes towards serialization. Costs like:
- Keeping track of things in paper/todo apps/Slack/etc
- Keeping track of things in your head/body, being stressed about things
- Having problemsfrom one project flow through to how another project goes, and managing expectations, etc. E.g. something goes wrong in one project, so you don’t have time to complete another project on the timeline you said.
- In addition, sometimes you can learn something in one project that apply somewhat to another project. If you’ve completed the first project, you’re more likely to have lessons that you can apply to the next one.
However, if you literally only have one project, you’ll often be bottlenecked by waiting to hear back from other people (feedback etc.)
Conclusion:
- 2 projects at once.
- Once you’ve started a project, work it through to completion:
- Basically never drop a project because something more tempting comes up.
- But be a bit more open to dropping a project if it begins to not work out for some reason.
- Whenever you complete a project you’ve opened up a slot, and you can start one new project.
- This is a nice incentive for completing those annoying mid-stage projects: you get to start the juicy new project you’ve been wanting to work on!
If this goes well, you should cycle through projects quickly - maybe every 1-4 weeks.
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