Michal Piekarczyk

July 18, 2023

Why you should not be afraid of 🔥

So Little’s Law is

X =  λ * W 
that if the arrival rate of some event is λ, and average time to process the event is W, then X is the average number of those events unprocessed at any one time . 

So an example of this is say customers may enter a coffee shop at 2 customers per minute . And say it takes an average of 5 minutes to process a customer ( take their order , make their coffee, maybe remake it depending on the customer 😆) , then we would expect there to be (2 customers /minute)*(5 minutes) = 10 customers queued up at this time . This might be a peak arrival time and the arrival rate will be lower during non peak hours . 

So I was thinking about focus 🧘‍♂️ recently and realized a nice corollary to Little’s Law that should make it easier for someone to turn off their notifications at work for stretches of time . 

So  a corollary of Little's Law that is coming to my mind is that   if the average time you spend on focus-uninterrupted-work-chunk, is not that bad say 30 min to 60 min, then that reduces the chance that you miss something super urgent while you are focusing.

So like
average_number_of__you are unaware
of = arrival_rate_of_🔥 * time_spent_uninterrupted_focus
so if you focus for 60 minutes, and arrival rate of fires is, (1/60) fires per minutes, you are unaware of at most 1 🔥at any time.
But probably arrival _rate_of_🔥 is not that bad ,
So you should go ahead and focus 😆.