![]() ![]() Stacking more tasks on our high performers risks burning a huge portion of their time on context switching overhead, making them less productive. Gerald Weinberg estimates that we lose 20% of our time to context switching for each additional task we try to perform in parallel. Context-switching costs are a likely culprit in those situations. ![]() We've all had days where we felt terribly busy all day but didn't actually get anything done. Too much work leads to crushing context-switching costs It's tempting to go after short-term productivity gains by routing all important projects to our most outstanding team members, but the long-term risks far outweigh the benefits: 1. What we risk when we overburden our best employees Here I’m going to outline the risks of punishing our top performers, before sharing some practical steps we can follow to make sure we’re not accidentally punishing folks with more pie. ![]() And because of the power dynamics at play in manager-employee relationships, it's on us as leaders to avoid pushing our best employees too hard. The phrase ‘everything in moderation’ holds painfully true. Without moderation, even the best things go wrong: overwater a plant and it dies eat only your favorite food and you'll get sick of it even drinking too much water can be harmful. In work as in life, we have to maintain a healthy balance between ‘too much’ and ‘too little’. It feels reasonable to do the successful thing again, so we'll pull the lever that got us a win for as long as it continues to win.Īs managers and leaders, we have the same tendency: if we have an outstanding performer, our instinct is to give them more work because they did a great job on previous tasks. Humans are maximizers by default: when we see something that works, we tend to go all-in on that strategy to get as much value as possible out of it. ![]()
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