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Comment by rglover | Hacker News Reader

That working on multiple things at the same time one is spot on. That has been the #1 reason I've screwed stuff up.

Something I constantly remind myself: it's not that you're not capable of doing that thing, it's that you don't have the capacity. You may be perfectly capable of doing something, but if you don't have the capacity to do it, there's a good chance you'll blow it. Disconnecting your ego from reality on this one will save you a ton of heartache and stress.

And for those who say "not me," I, too, was an egomaniac and thought everyone else wasn't as good. Pump your brakes and thank me later.

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I have "one rabbit" at the top of my TODO list to remind me of this, from the saying:

    "He who chases two rabbits catches neither." - Confucius

Oh, that's good. I'm stealing this.

Slightly off-topic, but I have been raising this point (after learning the lesson hard way) within my larger engineering org and seem to be getting nowhere towards convincing people that the #1 reason for degraded quality of delivery is too many big ticket changes going on at same time.

What's the playbook for this? Any recommended reading etc would be a huge favor.

PS: Not necessarily a question to OP but anyone passing by.

The best advice I've seen on this is, whenever someone new comes up, ask "what should be deprioritised to accomodate this new thing?".

And the complimentary - which feature do you want delivered first?

It should be a single backlog for the whole company (obv divided up by product or component of whatever for ease of managing) but a single list of features in order.

This will of course mean that the decision makers will need to sort out their politics and divisions to agree an order. This is usually hidden by giving vague and conflicting directions to the rest of the business and hoping it will all sort out.

By solving the politics at the top the organisation will benefit greatly from clarity and resource allocation.

Chances are high that even asking for this will reveal enough problems that you can decide if staying is worth it.

Worth looking into SRE concepts such as Error budget and SLO/SLIs if you want to consider one way of tackling this at the org level. It does however need senior buy-in (like most things) to be effective.

I've seen this problem constantly with new entrepreneurs. They don't know when to switch off. They have dozens of ideas and they want to do them all.

I did the same thing and failed at everything.

So I decided to simplify: just one thing at a time. And that's the only time I've tasted any success.

Yeah Dell bought our startup. I said at the time "We have 5 orthogonal IP components to our product. We can ship something with one or two of those, which are already complete. We should do that." I got a patronizing "Maybe the next time, lets not switch horses now" kind of response.

Being incapable and having no capacity sounds very similar to me. Could you explain the difference a bit more?

Example: I am physically/mentally/financially capable of taking a bike tour across US, to do that I need X amount of time.

Owing to other responsibilities I can not allocate X amount of time right now. (Ignoring whole COVID-19 saga of course)

I could easily count to 1 billion, but I don't have the time to undertake that task.

Sibling comments are missing the point.

I am capable of make video game A. I am also capable of making video game B.

I do not have the capacity to make both video games in parallel, even if I give myself twice the time. A core level of attention and care is required by each, of which I only have capacity to focus on one at a time.

As the other comments illustrate capability pertains to something within the person, and capacity pertains to factors outside the persons control.

Hence the person has the capability to count to 1 billion, but not the capacity to do it because other obligations will prevent them taking the required time.

Of course 1 billion seconds is a little over 30 years, so probably the external capacity limit on that task is mortality, dependent on starting point.

You've got 100 Terabytes of storage in the cloud (capability) but only a 100 Mbps connection (capacity).

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