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Comment by II2II | Hacker News Reader

> A well run company will always have more work for each employee than is possible for them to complete.

That depends.

It may do wonders for efficiency, yet there are a number of ways it can breakdown: failing to complete regulatory or contractual requirements is a big one, since they rarely allow for flexibility. Clients may not receive the service they expect, so the organisation's reputation will be damaged. In cases like that, prioritisation only really works to diminish the possibility that too much time is spent on small tasks or that efficiency is reduced by doing things out of order.

It also turn small problems into a crisis. With staff already working at capacity, there are very few options for handling the problem.

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No, there should ALWAYS be more work. If there is not more work, then as soon as work runs out the team is idle.

So you have to plan ahead.

This seems like an assertion that may need to be challenged. I'm not convinced a team with no downtime is working at maximum output, let alone maximum efficiency. My experience is that teams that are constantly busy are rarely working on the most important thing, either for the short term or for the long term.

Isn't that poor planning? I never want a team "busy", I want everyone to see where we are going and why.

I think that there should always be more work, but there should not always be more critical work. This minimizes idleness while allowing non-critical tasks to be pushed aside when handling emergencies.

For example, my team has a backlog of work to be done. There are certain things that cannot slip. There are plenty of things that could be pushed out to handle a production outage, or a shiny object, etc.

Indeed, critical dead after critical deadline is a good way to burn out. One a year is critical in a well planning system if that.

The solution there is to have a gradient of criticality to each individual workload. If you have 100% capacity of an individual assigned to contractually obligated work then you are under-resourced and have a problem. In my experience, there are always nice-to-haves, and a resource allocation plan should include a good amount of those goals at all levels of granularity to give overall flexibility. I realize that's hard to achieve, and maybe even impossible for some types of organizations, but to me it's the only way to operate without either causing massive burnout or paying people to sit around.

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