The reasons behind my four-project limit
Hello, I’m Kristof, a human being like you, and an easy to work with, friendly guy.
I've been a programmer, a consultant, CIO in startups, head of software development in government, and built two software companies.
Some days I’m coding Golang in the guts of a system and other days I'm wearing a suit to help clients with their DevOps practices.
By now, we all know that multitasking (in humans, not in computers) hurts performance. Still, most of us can’t afford to let our work be about only one thing. The best we can strive for is serial monotasking.
Allowing one half day and one hour every day for a project, an ideal week would look like this:
But we all know that this isn’t happening. Instead, we end up with something more like this:
Looks familiar? I knew it would. :)
So, while five projects is theoretically possible, in practice we all have to admit that even if we don’t calculate in things like running errands, random disasters, sales work for bringing in new jobs, etc., even four projects at the same time will sometimes overrun our work time.