There was some discussion around how we might find that number of months to complete the project. Treating decision-making speed as a fixed constant oriented the discussion around a complex, low-value workstream of deciding the relative priority of other tasks we were currently working on and then reranking them to free up more calendar time. But we were never constrained on calendar time, what mattered was accelerating the pace of high-quality decision-making.

In my experience, calendar discussions are another way that folks deliberately get stuck, because no company ever has a central list of the true priority of every task. Asking for that non-existent list shifts accountability for forward progress off the asker, but it’s a fundamentally unreasonable thing to ask for. Thinking about things from a CPU scheduling perspective: any scheduler that tried to centrally orchestrate priority within every thread would be extraordinarily slow and stuck all the time; it’s only by locally determining priority–often through extremely crude methods–that things move quickly overall.