Local efficiency can lower the output of the whole
💎CORE ARGUMENT
A team in which everyone is always busy feels healthy and measures well. It is usually hiding a queue. If every person is fully loaded, nothing can be picked up when it arrives, so everything waits, and the waiting is invisible because no individual is idle. Utilisation is a measure of the parts. Output belongs to the whole. The two can move in opposite directions.
The mechanism is simple once seen. Each step, judged on its own throughput, produces as much as it can. Whatever the next step cannot absorb becomes a pile. The pile needs sorting, chasing and re-explaining, which is work, which makes everyone busier still. Making more than the next step can use is the most expensive waste there is, because it disguises itself as diligence.
My own version was the Friday inbox. For fifteen weeks I ended the week at zero messages and felt efficient. What I had built was a fast reply service: quick answers generated quick follow-ups, other people's small questions got my best hours, and the thinking only I could do sat in a queue of its own. I had optimised one desk and slowed the product. I dropped the habit on 25 April.
I had retired Efficiency as a value the year before for the same reason. It kept telling me to tune a part.
What I look for now is slack in the right place: spare capacity just after the slow step, a morning with nothing in it. Idle time away from the bottleneck costs nothing. A full calendar everywhere costs the week.
🧱BUILT FROM
🌍WHY IT MATTERS
I no longer praise a team for being flat out, and I try not to be proud of it myself. The question in a one-to-one is what is waiting on you, not how much are you doing.
☑️NEXT STEPS
- Drop the Friday inbox-zero habit
- Ask what is waiting on me in the weekly review
- Leave Monday morning unbooked through the autumn
Keeping everyone busy is not the goal of a plant. Overproduction is the worst of the wastes because it hides the others.
💎 A bottleneck sets the pace for everything upstream of it says which part actually matters. 💎 The structure of a system explains more than the people in it says why nobody in the busy team is to blame.
When each part maximises its own throughput, parts that are faster than the constraint overproduce. The surplus becomes queue, the queue creates coordination work, and total flow falls while every local measure improves.
For one person doing deep work, local efficiency is the whole point. A protected half day is a part optimised without apology, and 💎 Makers need half days and managers need hours is right to defend it.
An issue drafted with a cold, the end of inbox zero, and the note that explains why 🧭 Efficiency sits in the archive.