In this animated TED‑Ed talk, Brian Christian draws insightful parallels between human time management and how computers schedule tasks. He begins with a fascinating example: NASA’s Pathfinder spacecraft, which due to a bug in its scheduler, became overwhelmed “procrastinating” by doing less important tasks instead of prioritizing key functions.
Christian then discusses how traditional methods of ranking all tasks by importance can become inefficient, especially as workload grows. He cites how Linux developers addressed a similar problem by grouping tasks into a few “priority buckets,” reducing overhead and improving progress.