Focus on your tasks with work in progress limits

Do you ever feel like nothing gets done ? You are probably working on multiple tasks at once and constantly change priorities. We have a solution for this problem - work in progress limits, a new feature we just released.

What's the point of limiting work in progress?

Limiting the amount of work in progress helps your team keep a steady rhythm by making sure no one is ever overwhelmed. It allows you to reduce multitasking and task switching to avoid distractions. The limits highlight team members that are overloaded or starved for work. It will definitely not solve all your problems but it will highlight the places that need attention.

What work limit should you use?

In an ideal world you would set the limit to one. No multitasking, just concentrate on one task at a time. In reality it depends on your team size but it's not recommended to have more than 2 or 3 tasks in a list at the same time.

What you call multitasking is really task-switching.
Guy Winch

Setting up work in progress limits

You can find the new option under the task list settings. Click on the list name to change it.

You'll see the limit next to the list name together with total task count. If you exceed the limit it will not prevent you from adding new tasks to the list but it will show the limit with a red text. This helps you to identify the lists that have to many tasks.

If you are using swimlanes then the limit is calculated as a total for all the lists, not separately for each swimlane.

Try it out and see how it makes you more productive. Remember not to set the limit too high, try to avoid excessive multitasking.