Queue Spiral

A hypothesis that backlog is creating expediting, task-switching, or rework that further lowers throughput.

Your household repair list has 22 items and grows weekly. Because everything is behind, you jump to whatever your spouse mentions angrily that day, abandon half-finished jobs mid-task, and redo the towel rack you rushed. The more behind you get, the worse your throughput becomes, which puts you further behind.

Queue Spiral is the hypothesis that the backlog itself is creating the expediting, task-switching, and rework that further lower throughput; the queue is not just a symptom of slowness but a cause of it. Test it with predictions. If the spiral is real, your completions per weekend should be lower now than when the list was short, even with equal hours, the share of time lost to switching and redoing should be climbing, and urgent items should routinely jump the line. The strongest rival: intake simply exceeds your capacity, and with perfect focus you would still fall behind, which calls for a different fix, reducing inflow or hiring help. The distinguishing observation: for two weekends, freeze the list, work strictly one item to completion, and count finishes; a spiral predicts throughput jumps, pure overload predicts it barely moves. If confirmed, the interventions are limiting work in progress and refusing expedites, which feels wrong and works. The trap is buying capacity to fix what is actually a switching problem.