Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & flow by Dominica Degrandis

“Making Work Visible” is awesome! The book is divided into three parts.

The first introduces the five thieves: too much WIP, unknown dependencies, unplanned work, conflicting priorities and neglected work. The author personifies the thieves nicely and talks about them like they are alive.  I liked the “it was the cloud provider that did it in the data center with the candlestick.”  I don't know about you, but these five thieves have been busy on most projects that I've worked on!

Part two is the meat of the book. It gives ideas and exercises for ways to expose the thieves so you can minimize their impacts on your projects.

The third part of the book is about metrics and how to work in a way with the thieves having minimal impact. I thought it was interesting that the 20% creative time some companies have serves has a way to keep capacity to 80%

Throughout the book, all chapters had great takeways. I like that she has some techniques I use (blocking out your calendar for focused work, using pomodoros for writing a book, office hours; something I've done with interns). This suggests I'll find some of the other techniques useful.  One that jumps out at me is the 10 minute meeting about the item that has been open the longest. “Congratulations your work item is now famous as the oldest WIP”

Finally, the book ends with mug shots of the five thieves and a glossary.

The author works/worked as a build engineer. This resonates for me because it means she did deal with frequent interruptions. The graphics were great. My only complaint was the book gets really hot when you leave it baking in the sun. So don't do that!

I give this book 10 out of 10 horseshoes.