It's something of an efficiency fallacy that keeping all resources (people and/or machines, etc) 100% occupied is the best way to get highest system productivit

It's something of an efficiency fallacy that keeping all resources (people and/or machines, etc) 100% occupied is the best way to get highest system productivity. Unfortunately, the assumption is baked-in to a lot of our work culture. Regarding people, good reading in this concept is Goldratt's, "The Goal"[1]. There are more technical approaches of the concept. But, the novel is great in terms of getting a visceral feel of why there are busy resources, but at the same time you need idle resources within the same pipeline for good system performance. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel)