no matter how many tasks you finish, you’re never done—more to-dos are always waiting to take their place.

clearly identifiable, discrete chunks of work. This project-centric approach is increasingly finding its way into all knowledge work, a trend named the “Hollywood model” after the way films are made.

The most common mental model of work is that it’s like a 100-meter race (not even a 100-meter relay race, just a race)—as if a team is a single runner and can just pick up the pace, improve their conditioning, or improve their technique. Comparing work to a race and your teams to independent athletes obscures the complexity of work and leads to pro

work execution, describes the act of actually executing the underlying value-producing activities of knowledge work—the programmer coding, the publicist writing the press release.