Follow up to [1], expanding, on the overwhelm of intake you end up with if there are too many voices competing for your time.

I want to sharpen what appears to be happening. Yes, your colleagues are asking for help and you dont want to deny them. Yes some production system is breaking, someone else is addressing it, but you have an inkling as to why and you want to save them time on triage. Yes, your colleagues are asking for their pull requests to be reviewed and yes there are also all the other things you said yes to presumably at the start of the sprint. And yes you just attended a meeting reminding you that the next PI planning is just a few weeks away and you should spend some time on refining proposals.

What did we just do here? We wrote down several known commitments , soft commitments and several potential competing commitments (call them opportunities).

If presumably they are all laid out on the table, we see you may finally have a chance to do something rare: make choices (a sequence of choices).

And theoretically after making those choices, you have sort of a piece of mind. This is a hard prerequisite for getting into any kind of flow. There was an ad for software I saw that takes these commitments ( boundaries?) And lays them out time-block style. Sounds like a good idea.

But what we also see is that the commitment tracking promised by your scrum software is incomplete. I try to record this kind of information on my whiteboard and I dont have this auto-time-block software but I sense an opportunity to write something like this for myself.

The twist is that the choices referred to above are the hard part. So some kind of round Robbin would be nice or if we sprinkled some arbitrariness, that would help too. Could also use a Monte Carlo simulation to help lay out some scenarios given the choices? Maybe much of the decision paralysis here is about trying to optimize for outcomes that are highly out of our control and we just try to make choices thinking we have more control than we do? Thats why letting the universe roll the die is also quite satisfying.

But what would the best outcome look like? Maybe visualization of this can help the choices align. Then silence. Then flow.

References

[1] https://michal.piekarczyk.xyz/note/2026-02-13-what-ends-up/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN8lxhAkIuA, Newel of Knowledge on boundaries