"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." Check out part 2 of our discussion of Slow Productivity by @ProfCalNewport! youtu.be/1_v6ye-3l7I