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I used to engage in a lot of yak shaving (needless refactors, redesigns, etc), but I never actually shipped anything. I was tired of having a big pile of unfini

I used to engage in a lot of yak shaving (needless refactors, redesigns, etc), but I never actually shipped anything. I was tired of having a big pile of unfinished projects, so I forced myself to take a more waterfall-y approach to some smaller projects: define the requirements and build only what is needed to meet those requirements. Once it's shipped, I allow myself to look at biting off another chunk of work, but until that chunk of work is done, I'm not doing anything else.

Jtsummers 8y ago
The important thing here is: until that chunk of work is done, I'm not doing anything else. Multitasking means you'll take longer to ship anything, though the total time spent to ship everything may be the same. By selecting smaller units of work and focusing on them to completion you can reduce the overall latency of the system. This doesn't even mean Waterfall (big design up front). Agile workflows operate on this same principle. If you elected a Scrum-styled approach you'd select the work for the current Sprint and run it to completion. If you elected for a Kanban-styled approach, you'd look at how many things are in each stage of completion and stop inducting new work when you realize you have 20 projects that are all at the "refactor for publishing" stage.