While I was at Sony I spent a lot of time thinking about making tasks run concurrently and how they should be scheduled to maximise performance.

Recently this kind of analysis has been spilling over into my everyday life and you start seeing ways you could parallelise all sorts of tasks.  Of course this is just common sense and something we all do naturally do different degrees.

A simple example is making a cup of tea, you don't want to get the tea bags and the cups first, no, that would be a waste of precious milliseconds.  First you switch on the jug and then get to work on the rest of the process in parallel.  I imagine anyone who has worked in a kitchen before would be experts at this kind of scheduling and could probably do my job better than I can.