What is Little law work in progress?

Little law work in progress is a concept in personal epistemology: Identify the slowest step in each workflow — that step determines your throughput.

Example: You run a weekly content pipeline: research on Monday, draft on Tuesday, edit on Wednesday, design graphics on Thursday, publish on Friday. You spend weeks refining your editing process — better checklists, tighter prose, faster turnaround. Editing now takes two hours instead of four. But your total pipeline still takes five days, because the research step on Monday consistently runs until Tuesday morning, pushing the draft to Wednesday, which pushes everything else. You optimized the wrong step. Editing was never the bottleneck. Research was. Every hour you invested in editing speed was wasted effort, because the workflow could never move faster than the research step allowed.

This concept is part of Phase 41 (Workflow Design) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for workflow design.