“It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.”
—John Steinbeck

In Personal Kanban (Modus Cooperandi Press, 2011), Jim Benson and I discuss how workflow should be optimized for throughput, not capacity. Work shouldn’t “fit” into your day but rather, it should flow. Much like how a freeway grinds to a halt when its capacity is exceeded, so too do people who are overloaded experience physical and mental gridlock. As with any system—animate, mechanistic, social, or ecological—the importance of incorporating slack to absorb or respond to variation, create efficient processing, and maximize performance is not simply good practice, it’s indispensable.

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