[teampractices] [Discussion] Term for always prepping for the next thing

[Rob Lanphier]

On Mon, Sep 7, 2015 at 1:27 PM, Max Binder <mbinder at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Everything is set at an equally high priority, with each upcoming task
> usurping the priority of the current task. There are no low priority
moments
> because stress of the upcoming tasks is the motivator to do the work. I
also
> do believe that context-switching is not limited to the traditional phrase
> "multitasking," in that you can still do one thing at a time, but if you
> don't carve out capacity for preparing to do work then you can't execute
> when it is time to.

Ah, I call that "being stuck in swap" (see the "Thrashing" article on
Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrashing_(computer_science)>).
In software and in life, it's tempting to try to do too much, where "too
much" may well be "too much planning".  The software side of this problem
is very well studied, and there are capacity management solutions.  I'm not
familiar with an equivalent term to "stuck in swap" that applies to
planning, so I've used that metaphor liberally in the past.

Perhaps that's still the "multitasking" metaphor that you're trying to
avoid, but I think that trying to plan the upcoming task at the same time
as executing the current task *is* a form of multitasking.

Rob
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