My podcast this week is from the Continual Planning book. Enjoy!
I did make a mistake this week. Since I was trying to stay within my minute timebox, I missed adding the most important line. Here it is: Aging is the leading indicator and root cause of all that overplanning. (Sigh.)
(I use a frame to embed the podcast into this post. Some RSS readers and some email clients do not show that. If you see nothing after “The Podcast,” please click through to this post. Or, look for “Writing in Public with Johanna Rothman” in your favorite podcast app.)
The Podcast:
The Transcript:
This is 60 Seconds of Writing in Public with Johanna Rothman for September 11, 2026, where I read an excerpt of just a minute of some writing in progress.
This is from the Continual Planning book.
I’m using some terms that might be unfamiliar to you. These are the four flow metrics.
- WIP is Work in Progress. That could be a team’s work. Or, it could be a manager’s or a management team’s work. As an example, deciding on the project portfolio often requires a management team, because the portfolio reflects the organization’s strategy.
- Cycle time is how long the work takes. For a team, it’s the time it takes to deliver something useful to customers. For a manager or management team, it’s the time it takes to make a decision.
- Throughput is how much the team (or the managers) can release when they want to.
- The lower the throughput, the older everything gets. That’s the increase in aging.
(The missing line would go here: Aging is the leading indicator and root cause of all that overplanning.)