Human Task Switches Considered Harmful

When you’re managing a team of programmers, one of the first things you have to learn to get right is task allocation. That’s just a five-dollar word for giving people things to do. It’s known colloquially as “file dumping” in Hebrew (because you dump files in people’s laps). And how you decide which files to dump in which laps is one of the areas where you can get incredible productivity benefits if you do it right. Do it wrong, and you can create one of those gnarly situations where nobody gets anything accomplished and everybody complains that “nothing ever gets done around here.”