zlacker

>>mattjh+(OP)
Something I learned on this site: We're bad at estimating the average duration, but reasonable for the mean duration.

If you get 10 tasks of seemingly equal duration, 9 will go well and 1 will hit a reef of unexpected troubles and take forever.

So the practice of doubling is not that stupid. It leaves time in the first 9 to deal with the unexpected disaster.

>>hyperm+on1
except "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion", and therefore, after each of the 9 tasks is completed, there is no time left for the 10th task. so this only works if the disaster happens very early, or if you do almost all of the tasks in parallel. neither is the expected case.

>>boltzm+Ko1
I tend to have many tasks in parallel, as there are always multiple blocked on input from someone else. E.g.

* 2-3 big programming tasks as focus for this week: I push one forward until I hit a wall, then task switch.

* A backlog of about 5 dumb non-urgent tasks for when the brain is not braining or in meeting filled days.

* 4-5 tasks where I keep asking people questions until the problem is understood. These tend to wake up when receiving information, take priority with 10-30 minutes of writing mails and looking up interesting cases, followed by a few days of waiting for an answer.