As a junior engineer, I felt the urge to jump on each new project that showed on the horizon. I never checked what I already had on my plate. Inevitably, I ended up with too many projects to work on simultaneously. Whenever my manager or a customer mentioned one of my projects, I immediately switched to it to show I was making progress. It took me years to realize that while this approach pleased the customer or the manager (and saved my junior dev butt) for the moment, it quietly hurt everyone.
The three-line execution graph
Executing multiple projects of the same priority at the same time looks like this:
Initially, there are two projects: Project A and Project B. You start working on Project A, but after a while, you receive a call from the customer inquiring about the progress of Project B. To make this customer happy, you switch to project B. In the meantime, a new interesting project, C, pops up. It is cool and seems small, so you pick it up. Your manager realizes that project A is dragging and asks about it. You somehow manage to finish your toy project C and move to A, which is well past the deadline. Then you pick B again.
If you didn't jump from project to project, the execution could look like this:
If you compare these graphs, three things stand out in the second scenario:
- Overall, the execution took less time. Resuming a paused project requires time to remember where the project was left off and get in the groove, i.e., to switch the context, which , which is time-consuming.
- Projects A and B finished much quicker than in the first case. While you didn't make customer B feel good by saying you were working on their project, ultimately, the project was completed sooner. In fact, both projects, A and B, were finished much sooner than they would have if you bounced between them.
- Project C came in late, so it should wait unless it is a much higher priority than other projects. Otherwise, it disrupts the execution of these projects.
I know that life is not that simple. Completely avoiding context switching is rarely possible. But if you can limit it, your productivity will dramatically increase.
Does it mean you should only work on one thing at a time?
In the past I thought a good solution for junior engineers to combat context switching was to ask them to work on just one project at a time. But this idea has a serious drawback - projects often get stuck due to factors outside our control. If this happens and there is no backup, idling until the issue gets resolved is a waste of time.
Having two projects with different priorities works best. You execute on the higher-priority project whenever you can. If you can't, you turn to the other project until the main project gets unblocked.
What I like about this approach is that it is always clear what to work on: the higher priority project wins unless working on it is impossible.
Falling back to the lower priority project means there might be some context switching. While it is not ideal, it is better than idly waiting until the issues blocking the main project are resolved.
But my TL (Tech Lead) always works on five projects!
Indeed, experienced senior and staff engineers often work on a few projects at the same time. In my experience, however, it is a different kind of work. It might be preparing a high-level design, working on an alignment with a partner team, breaking projects into smaller tasks, and tracking the progress.
The secret is that most of these activities don't require as much focus as coding. Handling a few of them at the same time is much more manageable because the cost of switching contexts is much lower.
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