Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

by Cal Newport

In a push-based process, each stage pushes work onward to the next as soon as it’s done. In a pull-based process, by contrast, each stage pulls in new work only when it’s ready for it. At Broad, this pull methodology was implemented in a simple manner. Each stage maintained a tray to place the completed samples. The next stage would pull in new samples from this same tray. If the outgoing tray at a given stage began to fill, then the technicians filling it would slow down their work. In some cases, they would even offer their assistance to the next stage to help them catch up. Shifting to a pull-based operation made backlogs impossible: the pace of the pipeline would adapt to whatever stage was running slowest. This transparency, in turn, helped the workers identify places where the system was out of balance. “A perpetually full pull box means either the downstream task is moving too slowly or the upstream one is moving too quickly,” write the authors. “An empty pull box at the end of the day means that something is wrong with the operation that feeds it.” The improvements yielded by this approach were quantifiable. The usage rate of the institute’s expensive sequencing machines more than doubled, while the average time to process each sample fell by more than 85 percent.