TOCICO

Garett McTernan uses a simple interactive exercise to show why being busy is not the same as getting more work finished. The session begins with the everyday conditions that create multitasking: people start new work while waiting for information or approvals, managers feel pressure to keep everyone busy, departments create competing priorities, customers expect visible progress, and utilization measures reward activity even when flow suffers. Participants then experience the effect directly through the Letters, Numbers, Shapes exercise. In the multitasking round, work is switched repeatedly across three streams, creating approximately 38 seconds of lead time and three items of work in progress. In the focus-and-finish round, the same work is completed one stream at a time, reducing lead time to roughly 6-8 seconds, lowering WIP to one, and revealing capacity without requiring people to work harder. McTernan connects the experience to Goldratt UK's Rules of Flow: control WIP, use release gates, focus and finish, protect capacity, and align measures and priorities with flow. A three-project example then shows how releasing everything at once forces shared resources to multitask and extends total completion to 165 days, while staggering the projects around resource contention reduces the example to 115 days. The central message is practical: focus creates capacity, finishing releases capacity, and staggering protects capacity.