It feels responsible to keep everyone fully booked. Nobody’s idle, every hour is “utilized,” the spreadsheet is green. So we split a specialist across five projects at 20% each and call it efficient. It is the opposite of efficient. It’s the most expensive way an organization can get less done, and it hides in plain sight because the utilization number looks perfect.
The tax you don’t see on the invoice
Work isn’t a liquid you can pour into any gap. Every time someone switches projects they pay a reload cost: where was I, what’s changed, whose question do I answer first. Split across five contexts, that reload happens all day, every day. The person is busy from dawn to dusk and moves every project forward at a crawl — and then gets asked why everything’s slow.
Fewer things, finished sooner
Counterintuitively, the way to deliver five projects faster is often to not work on all five at once. Concentrate a person on one or two, finish them, then move on. Less switching means more of each hour goes to the work instead of the reload — and finished projects stop consuming attention entirely. Limiting work-in-progress isn’t a productivity fad; it’s just refusing to pay the switch tax over and over.
Measure the thing that actually hurts
Per-person utilization tells you if someone’s busy. It won’t tell you if they’re fragmented. The number worth watching is how many distinct projects each person is spread across at once. Someone at 90% on two projects is fine. Someone at 90% across six is a slow-motion bottleneck, no matter how green their utilization bar looks.
Busy is not the same as productive, and fully-booked is not the same as effective. Protect focus like the scarce resource it is, and you’ll be amazed how much faster “busy” people move when they’re allowed to finish one thing before starting the next.
See it in ProjexHQ
ProjexHQ shows how many projects each person is spread across, so you can spot the context-switching tax before it quietly eats a quarter.
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