Do much less with less: You'll deliver more value if you do

How doing less with less delivers more value than trying to do more with less

Here's a near-universal diagnostic you can apply in just about every circumstance of your life: Whenever you hear anyone say, "It's really quite simple," figure the odds-on proposition is that the speaker is too entirely ignorant to be worth listening to.

Having said that, the following suggestion really is quite simple, except for what it will take to make it stick: Only take on as many projects at any one time as you can fully staff.

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Everyone who knows what it takes to manage projects successfully -- and I do mean everyone -- agrees on this point: When employees have to divide their time among multiple projects, all the projects suffer. The exceptions are the obvious cases where there isn't enough work to do on one project to keep the employee busy.

Other than that, when employees divide their time among multiple projects, two separate factors cause project delays.

Delay factor 1: Switching gears slows us down
The first is that switching between projects isn't an instantaneous cognitive process. Getting one's head out of one project and into another takes real time.

This wouldn't be a major issue if the "when" of switching was up to the employee. Then it would be simple: Mondays and Wednesday go to Project A, Tuesdays and Thursdays go to Project B, and Friday is reserved for administrivia, non-project-related responsibilities, and project-related miscellany.

That, however, isn't how it works, because by definition projects involve more than one person. With few exceptions they serve multiple stakeholders, and for the most part involve people working as a team, not as a collection of independent individuals.

All of this means that while an employee is working on Project A, the phone sometimes rings, the chat window sometimes opens, or an urgent e-mail pops in regarding Project B. Depending on the exact nature of the various projects an employee is committed to, the result can be serious time lost to gear-shifting.

Sometimes, of course, the employee will decide to ignore all distractions. It seems like a reasonable decision, and for the employee it is. She is on the hook for getting a task done on time, and allowing interruptions can prevent this.