40 Cats in Your Office

Think of every project as another cat in your house. Can you imagine the overhead - extra unplanned time to clean, feed, shop for cat litter? Or even how much longer it will take you to walk to the living room given what interruptions you might encounter, or other things you notice pulling at your attention and then store in your head as unresolved tasks.

Remember, just like having 20 to 40 cats in your house, there is an overhead cost to each project. And if you are the business owner, you are probably the one that will pay for half (or all) of it.

When deciding on the number of ongoing projects, one has to consider the amount of communications overhead to factor in, along with attention budget. If there’s not a good process in place, project can just stall till the next person responds.

For a project to move forward, you need respond to the next email (or email thread) about it. It is like a game of ping-pong. If I am not there to lob the ball back over the net, the project is stalled. It is somewhat OK if you just have just one project, but at scale (5 to 40 projects), the overhead cost is huge because of switching costs.

Think about task-switching costs

Have you ever been focused on something, and something else (like taking care of your child) constantly needed your attention? Your brain is just not built for that. Both things suffer, all those context-shifts fry our brain, reduce our cognitive capacity, fatigue us, and by 2pm we are exhausted.