Architecture & practice·Delivery, flow and technical debt
you were told to finish one of the four things you had started before picking up a fifth.
Work-in-progress limit
Also calledWIP limit
A cap on how many items may be in flight at once, per person or per team. It feels like a restriction and functions as a throughput improvement, because unfinished work delivers nothing while consuming attention, context and review capacity. It also makes bottlenecks visible immediately: when the limit is hit and nothing can start, the reason is the thing everyone was quietly working around.