When we're asked why something took so long to do, we have a tendency to look at only those things that were under our control. We think about the actual steps we took and how long each took and we often forget about all those times that the work was idle.
Sometimes it was idle because we were blocked and waiting for something else to happen. Sometimes it was idle because we were busy with other tasks and just didn't have time to work on this one.
It's very common for that idle time to be significantly larger than the time spent actually working on the item. If we want to speed up completion of that work, we need to look at reducing that idle time.
#FlowEfficiency