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Comment by theoj | Hacker News Reader

>> The fastest way to complete two projects using the same people is to do it one at a time, sequentially. Trying to run two projects in parallel using the same resources introduces a large amount of waste

Is that always the case? I have seen freelancers handle multiple projects at once using a weekly breakdown of 3 days for one project and 2 days for another.

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Having done freelance work in varying amounts for a couple of years now, I'd say that task switching between two projects from one day to the next is not really a big deal. You have an overnight sleeping period for your brain to process and reset. Switching within the day, or trying to switch among three or more projects starts to break down, efficiency-wise.

No, it isn't always the case. It is only the case when all employees are fully 100% utilized at all stages of the product, which rarely happens. There are often bottlenecks where one group is blocked by deliverables from another group, and in a perfect world one could make the process more efficient by scheduling so that when those developers would be blocked they are working on the other project. Even accounting for the context switches, having the two projects worked on in parallel would be preferable here if the deadlocking blocks are sufficiently long enough.

Having said all of that, doing such scheduling well is damn near impossible in the real-world, as far as I've seen.

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