The Mythical Man-Month is a book describing the "mythical", or hypothetical, idea of a man-month. This fictitious unit can be used to describe the amount of work that one person can do in one month, and the book focuses on the idea that more people added to a project does not necessarily mean that the outcome will occur more quickly.
Brooks claims that, with more men on the job, there are more communication connections that must be maintained between each person. So, using his formula presented in the book, one can determine how fast something can get done, considering the time taken for communication. When the formula generates a negative number, then the project will be done in an even longer time than anticipated.
According to Brooks, overthinking things is also dangerous to the development of new technologies. Especially dangerous is when someone comes out with a second revision of their work. In this revision, there will be things never included the first time, therefore increasing the likelihood of extraneous systems that they had the time to think out. Despite their thinking, Brooks claims these systems are often useless.
Overall, Brooks incorporates a lot about communication into his book. If people were to interact more as one mind, more could be done. However, with so many different opinions (which, he adds, most of which are wrong), then "project time" drastically increases.
