How much impact does Steve Huynh say you lose by working on several projects at once?

Steve Huynh estimates from experience that splitting time between two projects yields roughly 20% of each one's impact rather than 50%, and three projects about 8% each. Parallel projects also land later: two two-week projects done in sequence finish at two and four weeks, but done together both land in about a month. He blames context switches, noting it takes about 15 minutes to settle into real work.

• Huynh says the average knowledge worker checks email every six minutes, so ten open items make the whole day context switches.
• Huynh's filter is to ask of every task whether it will show up on the performance review.

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on A Life Engineered (2026-11-02). Read the whole episode summary →

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