[makeitdouble]

A real world example of the waiting to cook metaphor is PR review and client/QA validation.

Imagine you’re working on an integration project where you use an API provided to you by a third party, there will be a point where you coded a client, you made the calls, and you’ll need their validation before moving that specific task further. And when they green light your implementation, you send that to QA which will review your feature in their next batch.

If you consider your task completion to be “have the service integrated in production”, you have least two stopping points where focusing more on your task won’t help you go faster.

The optimal move is to plan for those and fill the gap. It becomes trickier when it’s unplanned: you were expecting for something to work, but you’ll need to wait for a bugfix that will only comes in X weeks, for instance.