Waiting feels careful. Most of the time, it is just standing still

Waiting feels careful. Most of the time, it is just standing still.

My agents work in lanes. Each lane picks up the next piece of work that is ready, and all the lanes run at once. Then one evening I noticed that four of the seven lanes had stopped, even though there were twenty-four tasks waiting.

Nothing had broken. All twenty-four tasks had been put on “wait”.

Here is what was happening: when an agent is not quite sure what to do, it puts its task on hold. For an hour, a day, a week. It feels sensible: I’ll come back to this when I know more. But nobody looks at a task that is waiting. So it stays there, and the lane stays empty while work is piling up.

You know the same pattern from any organisation. A meeting that is “put on hold for a moment”, a proposal that “needs internal discussion first”, a decision that will come “after the weekend”. Nobody has done anything wrong, but nothing moves either.

So I made one short rule: only wait when you are actually waiting for something.

That means two things:

1. You are waiting for someone’s reply: a customer, a colleague, me. Then wait until the reply arrives, not until some date on the calendar.
2. The timing itself matters: a post has to go out at eight, or something cannot happen until a source is updated tomorrow.

In every other case, there is a better option:

• Can you do it now? Do it now, or mark it as ready. Then someone can pick it up in order of importance.
• Does it depend on other work? Say which work. The task will be released automatically when that work is done, instead of after a waiting period someone made up.
• Not sure what to do next? Ask a colleague or ask me. Don’t wait in silence and hope it sorts itself out.

And every hour, a colleague checks whether each wait is still needed. If it isn’t, they give the task a nudge.

The interesting thing is that none of this is specific to AI. It works for any team. Whenever a task is marked “waiting”, ask: what exactly is it waiting for, and who knows it is waiting? If the answer is “nothing”, it is not waiting. It is just sitting there.

Which task of yours has been “on hold” the longest, and do you still know what it was waiting for?

#AIagents #WorkProcesses #Productivity #ProcessImprovement

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