The Myth of Efficiency

http://baselinescenario.com/2010/02/11/the-myth-of-efficiency/

by tdedecko • 16 years ago

34 17 16 years ago

DenisM• 16 years ago

I used to work in a place where exact same reason was given for not upgrading developer PCs - "devs will goof around anyway, they might as well do it while build is in progress". No joke.

rauljara• 16 years ago

I love the example of moving the printers. For me, every time I get up from my desk for a couple of minutes, I get a little refreshed, and I come back more productive than before. Having to walk a little ways to get a print out is a great recharge to my mental batteries. A shorter walk would translate into less of a recharge.

Of course, I could also easily see how if you were focused on something, walking a long ways to the printer might be just enough of a distraction to make you lose your focus. I imagine short "breaks" like walking to the printer would effect everyone a little differently.

WingForward• 16 years ago

Sure, but should you be recharging your mental batteries (reducing cognitive overload) based on what documents your printing?

Short breaks and walks are wonderful and productive, but not necessarily at the times your printing.

RyanMcGreal3• 16 years ago

I find that for me, the biggest efficiency gains are not necessarily changes that save time but rather changes that reduce cognitive overhead.

xtho2• 16 years ago

Quit your day job today! There a plenty of jobs out there you'll really love more. For starters, I'd recommend working on the assembly line in a cozy factory somewhere in South America or Eastern Asia.

RyanMcGreal3• 16 years ago

You seem to have assumed that I want to reduce cognitive overhead so I don't have to think.

Rather, I want to reduce cognitive overhead so I have more mental energy for thinking about the problems I'm trying to solve. That way, I can spend a bigger share of my time on productive tasks.

Periodic• 16 years ago

I agree. I find that I have a fairly fixed amount of energy. There are various lifestyle changes that affect this energy, but at the beginning of a day I'm pretty much set in how much work I'll get done that day, whatever it's on.

The biggest efficiency gain for me is eliminating things that have a large cognitive drain but little efficiency, such as face-to-face meetings, phone calls, and generally things that can be automated.

Having the printer closer won't help much.

lmkg• 16 years ago

Operational efficiency analysis originally came from optimizing military operations in WWII, and it cut its teeth in industrial production in the following decades. The history shows. As a discipline, it's still focused on lowering the amount of time, labor, and money to achieve well-defined objectives (and to be fair, it's very good at it).

The field is still somewhat lost in optimizing creative work, like coding. I definitely agree that cognitive load is the operative bottleneck in a large swathe of non-industrial work. I think that operational efficiency research probably could be used to good effect there if it were applied correctly, but the problems are still poorly understood by the experts, so it's a while off.

zb• 16 years ago

Well, the time and motion stuff he's talking about actually go back further, to Frederick W. Taylor in the late 19th Century. Robert Kanigel's biography of Taylor The One Best Way gives a very good history and a much more in-depth analysis than can be compressed into a blog post.

rimantas• 16 years ago

A quote from my favorite book:

  "Good morning," said the little prince.
  "Good morning," said the merchant.

  This was a merchant who sold pills that had been invented
  to quench thirst. You need only swallow one pill a week,
  and you would feel no need of anything to drink.

  "Why are you selling those?" asked the little prince.

  "Because they save a tremendous amount of time," said the
  merchant. "Computations have been made by experts. With
  these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every week."

  "And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?"

  "Anything you like..."

  "As for me," said the little prince to himself, "if I had
  fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at
  my leisure toward a spring of fresh water."

"The Little Prince" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Chapter XIII

RyanMcGreal3• 16 years ago

Possibly related:

> Homer's Uncle Ulysses and Aunt Agnes have a very up and coming lunch room over in Centerburg, just across from the court house on the town square. Uncle Ulysses is a man with advanced ideas and a weakness for labor saving devices. He equipped the lunch room with automatic toasters, automatic coffee maker,' automatic dish washer, and an automatic doughnut maker. All just the latest thing in labor saving devices. Aunt Agnes would throw up her hands and sigh every time Uncle Ulysses bought a new labor saving device. Sometimes she became unkindly disposed toward him for days and days. She was of the opinion that Uncle Ulysses just frittered away his spare time over at the barber shop with the sheriff and thee boys, so, what was the good of a labor saving device that gave you more time to fritter?

Robert McClosky, The Donuts of Homer Price

JacobAldridge• 16 years ago

This is a little longer than I'd normally post, but it's relevant and I use it to make the point often.

An American tourist was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked.

Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The tourist complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The Mexican replied, "Only a little while."

The tourist then asked, "Why didn't you stay out longer and catch more fish?"

The Mexican said, "With this I have more than enough to support my family's needs."

The tourist then asked, "But what do you do with the rest of your time?"

The Mexican fisherman said, "I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos, I have a full and busy life."

The tourist scoffed, " I can help you. You should spend more time fishing; and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat: With the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats. Eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor; eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution. You could leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then Los Angeles and eventually New York where you could run your ever-expanding enterprise."

The Mexican fisherman asked, "But, how long will this all take?"

The tourist replied, "15 to 20 years."

"But what then?" asked the Mexican.

The tourist laughed and said, "That's the best part. When the time is right you would sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions."

"Millions?...Then what?"

The American said, "Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos."

iBercovich• 16 years ago

I completely agree that increasing time at a desk doesn't mean much in terms of productivity, specially when the activity in question involves a lot of mental effort. I like how this article talks about time spent working: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html

Confusion• 16 years ago

An important jump in general happiness in my life occurred when I stopped worrying about efficiency when standing in line in the supermarket, when stuck in the slow lane or when doing some maintenance around the house.

CapitalistCartr• 16 years ago

The article seems more to illustrate the pitfalls of incorrectly identifying the bottleneck in a process, thereby fixing the something that isn't broken. He points out, rightly, that time isn't always the bottleneck. But any efficiency analysis that blindly made that assumption without any checking should be thrown out.

chipsy• 16 years ago

Echoing the mentions of cognitive load, I get the impression that only about an hour or two of "forceful mental effort" - the period when you're hovering outside of a flow state and have to reassemble the problem you're working on - actually takes place during work hours.

This would account for why it becomes incredibly difficult to polish up creative work after a certain point(fit+finish of software, detailing artwork, tone and timbre in music); once you've solved all the big problems. You're spending all your time on figurative hands-and-knees, straining to find the little things - even though you may know how to attack a problem once you're aware of it, collecting the necessary data to turn the process into a fast feedback loop is hard. Hence why polish work is absolutely exhausting, because you're constantly knocked out of flow.

The Myth of Efficiency

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