End artificial scarcities to increase productivity

http://matt.might.net/articles/artificial-scarcity/

by p4bl0 • 15 years ago

152 84 15 years ago

matt.might.net

scotty79• 15 years ago

Whenever I was missing a pen I was buying 10 or 20 cheapest ones and allowed them to dissipate around in my environment so that whenever I needed a pen, finding one would take me few seconds at most. It required no forethought and no organisation. Inefficiency due to low cost was negligible.

dustingetz3• 15 years ago

+100, i sprinkle shitty sunglasses and $5 phone chargers across all factors of my life ;)

p4bl0• 15 years ago

Reading this recalled me that someone working at a big company once told me that he often had to look for a whiteboard pen for 5 to 15 minutes, and that it was ridiculous because 10 minutes of his salary cost his employer more whiteboard pens than he would ever need… Yet, small budget cuts which target this kind of cheap stuff seems very common.

dugmartin• 15 years ago

I once worked at a very large American company that announced that as part of the effort to hit the quarterly profit goal they would stop buying office supplies. The CEO announced that he he told the same thing to the European branch when he flew over there earlier in the week in the company jet.

orijing• 15 years ago

When I read the heading, I expected this to be a rant about patents and the imposition of artificial scarcities to various industries like music, software and pharmaceuticals, where the marginal cost of production is negligible compared to how much they cost customers.

The article was a pleasant surprise; instead of arguing the trite, it made a point that was rarely made. For me though, I just write off these "wasted" minutes of walking up the stairs to get the scissors as "exercise."

tptacek6• 15 years ago

Bogus scarcities we've addressed at our office:

* Macbook power bricks (we were having arguments over them, because people would borrow them from other desks; now we have a stack of them).

* Macbook video dongles (same; note: it's not enough to just have one attached to every monitor, like the article says, because sometimes people need to take them out of the office)

* Whiteboards (everyone has one on their desk now)

* Hard disks (same deal; they're so cheap, we just buy new ones any time there's any storage issue, rather than have people scavenge for space on their existing drives)

* Books (everyone gets infinite free books, and to head off time-wasting discussions about who bought what book so they can borrow it, the policy is, you order the book & it's yours full stop; we have many copies of several key books in our office)

We're probably missing lots and lots of opportunities to trade small amounts of money for substantial amounts of time. What are other people buying? An obvious next example would be "soda", since people trek down to the convenience store to get bottles --- but I feel like stocking soda is also a bit unhealthy.

matwood4• 15 years ago

It's refreshing to read there are companies out there that 'get it.' Stuff like this has driven me nuts at my current company and it's one of my primary reasons for leaving soon.

As far as soda goes, just do like the government and tax it. Make water, juice, tea, and coffee free and charge a quarter for soda (or whatever combo you like). It's not expensive, but makes people pause before drinking it over one of the slightly healthier options.

tptacek6• 15 years ago

Charging for soda sends the bad message that we want you to pay for soda, rather than "we don't want to make your simplest hydration option very unhealthy".

cperciva4• 15 years ago

You do realize that diet soda is far healthier than fruit juices, right?

anamax• 15 years ago

> Make water, juice, tea, and coffee free

Why is coffee in the "good" list?

Note that all of the "benefits" are achieved by cheap coffee....

Bootvis• 15 years ago

The infinite free books plan is the greatest. Our book buying is by committee and is a bit slow (but comprehensive). You have commented earlier on it and I've been nagging to get it implemented ;)

At our office soda is free and always has been, to address your health concerns you could stock more light products and also more kinds, e.g. offer coke, diet coke and diet Fanta and don't restrict the assortment to soda: offer chilled water, juice and milk. Using this set up the consumption of sugary soda has gone down significantly in our office.

jasonlotito2• 15 years ago

* In our conference tables, we have about a dozen Macbook magnetic plugs so we don't have to change out ours.

* Each TV in the conference room is hooked up to a computer, so you can quickly log in easily (and since pretty much everything is done via the web, we don't have to worry about hooking up our laptops).

* Whites boards are treated as RAM, not Storage. Your phones have cameras now, use them!

* Office supply stations are just filled with stuff. Lots of batteries, mice, keyboards, etc. It's rare we run out of stuff (to the point that I don't really know if it's happened).

* Also a big push to move everyone to laptops and Mac monitors, so we can easily move around.

At home, I'm less successful. Mostly, with a 1 year old and a 3 year old, anything we put down has the potential to move. That being said, some simple things:

* Having the laundry room be in the second floor.

* Keep the vacuum cleaner parts for the carpet on the 2nd floor.

* Toilet paper distributed to every bathroom. We also have baskets with additional rolls next to each toilet within easy reach. That way, even if the roll runs out, we have 3 or 4 right there.

matwood4• 15 years ago

Having the laundry room be in the second floor.

Hell yes! When I lived in Denver my bedroom was on the second floor and the laundry room was in the basement. I had always lived in coastal areas where basements were rare, so I didn't know what a PITA it would be. After 2 years of dealing with that, never again.

chwahoo• 15 years ago

> Whites boards are treated as RAM, not Storage. Your phones have cameras now, use them!

This sounds like whiteboard space/time is a scarcity you haven't shown to be artificial. (I'm not saying your approach is wrong, just that it doesn't fit with the theme.)

Someone• 15 years ago

"Keep the vacuum cleaner parts for the carpet on the 2nd floor."

In my experience, one vacuum cleaner per floor works way better. It gets rid of most of the "oh, it's on the per floor; I will do that later" cases.

cperciva4• 15 years ago

Having the laundry room be in the second floor.

FYI, the main reason laundry rooms are usually in the basement is risk of flooding. In a basement with a concrete floor with a drain, flooding isn't much of a problem but on a higher floor it could cause very expensive damage to the surrounding space, the floor itself, and anything in the basement underneath.

I'm sure for some reason the tradeoff is in favour of the second-floor laundry room, but the basement laundry room certainly doesn't count as artificial.

da02• 15 years ago

Zevia is one option. Diabetic safe, no sugar, natural sweetener from stevia extract. Amazon sells it.

Or you and your co-workers could invent something. Water, natural sweeteners, natural flavours. Make it a weekly event.

minikomi• 15 years ago

Unlimited books sounds amazing. Especially if the working environment is conductive to having time to read. Is there an internal shared library as well?

wglb2• 15 years ago

Yes, for such things as TAOCP 1-4.

pella• 15 years ago

my favorite: http://safaribooksonline.com

daeken• 15 years ago

We've been making strides with this at the NY office too. We picked up maybe two dozen patch cables of various lengths, a bunch of USB cables, a stack of hubs, some keyboards, and things like that. Maybe a couple hundred bucks all in, to save tons of time. Just got a stack of servers in for a project and need to do some crazy network topology? No problem. This paid for itself in days at the most.

georgieporgie2• 15 years ago

Stupid things I've seen:

* Server space. We had a shared server where, for some reason, /home had been placed on a tiny partition. Someone must have thought this would encourage responsible use of space, but in practice it just prevented real work from getting done. It was a 2000's solution to a 1990's problem.

* Coffee. It's extremely valuable to have one or two varieties of coffee on hand, hot and fresh at all times. Assign someone this task. We had infighting over pots left empty, and angst over cold left-over coffee in the morning. All because the office manager thought it was beneath her to make coffee.

* Books. I have never worked at a company that had a book allowance. When asked, I was told it just wasn't in the budget. Meanwhile, I've been sent, along with coworkers, to awful, multi-day conferences for "training" (it wasn't training, it was a conference).

tptacek6• 15 years ago

Another way around the coffee problem is just to set up an infrastructure for single-cup brewing, either with a bunch of pourovers or with Aeropress's (they're like $20 each).

We (unfortunately) also have a Keurig.

georgieporgie2• 15 years ago

But then you end up with coffee queues before meetings, people who don't clean the machine when they're done, and (in the case of the Keurig) tons of noise.

zdw• 15 years ago

In general this is good, but needs planning - ever walk into a place with multiple 'redundant' printers, and none take the same ink, half are out of color and the others out of black?

For example, there's a cost to having data in more than one place and keeping it coherent. Before version control reduced this friction, I kept having issues where my desktop and laptop would have newer versions of files in one place or the other, so I stopped using both and switched to just a laptop. I know people who keep everything on a USB drive for similar reasons.

But for something you just need to grab and use, and doesn't have data persistence, sure.

nostromo2• 15 years ago

Here's something I did recently to make my morning routine go faster and better. I labeled everything I need to do to get ready for work in the bathroom with a number. It helps me remember to do things I kept forgetting to do before: things like apply Rogaine :'( and take Resveratrol -- and it also has shortened the amount of time I take to get ready.

My friends joke that I'm OCD, but I argue that an OCD person wouldn't need the labels to nail down a routine. :)

justanotheratom• 15 years ago

How has your experience with Resveratrol been, and which one did you buy?

nostromo2• 15 years ago

I used to buy a brand called "Bioforte" because ConsumerLab tested it and said it was the best value. However, lately I just pick it up from Costco.

It's impossible to tell any difference in day to day life really -- but I certainly haven't noticed any negative effects.

derwiki3• 15 years ago

I got rid of all my socks that I had bought over the years and bought 24 pairs of the same socks. Now I just grab any two socks and am guaranteed a match.

wpietri3• 15 years ago

Yes! Socks are definitely best dealt with in batches. I keep two kinds (white athletic and black dress). When one sort is looking raggedy (or the count has fallen below the minimum) I ditch all of that kind and replace them.

This has made me especially happy with dress socks. If you buy them at different times, then they are each a subtly different shade of black, which made me insane whenever I tried to match them.

JoeAltmaier• 15 years ago

My son, a true nerd, used to take pride in mismatched socks. It was proof he had better things to worry about.

Then he went one step further - he takes 2 socks from the drawer, and wears them EVEN IF THEY MATCH!

tocomment2• 15 years ago

Any benefit from the Resveratrol? Isn't the the compound from red wine?

reddit_clone• 15 years ago

First world problems. (Is it so important that you may have to reach over to grab your toothpaste or do you keep two of them near both sinks?)

Reduce the clutter and spend some calories reaching for things man.

What you really need is a body slave so that you can be free to be maximally efficient.

freehunter• 15 years ago

It's about time management. Having to hunt for things is a waste of time, and those little time wasters add up to a lot of work not getting done, or a distraction that takes more time to get your brain back in gear.

nandemo• 15 years ago

I don't understand reddit_clone's specific example (are there bathrooms with 2 sinks?), but I think the article does mix ideas that are wins with others that are dubious.

Pens, chargers and AC adapters, toilet paper are cheap; running out of them is bothersome and there's a fixed overhead to retrieve them, so let's stock them and put them into the right places.

But buying and keeping 2 vacuum cleaners at home is arguably not in the same category. It only works if you assign a high enough cost to "getting up and down the stairs" or, equivalently, if the price of the cleaner plus the real estate is cheap enough for you. It's not like it will affect your "productivity", it's just a minor loss of leisure. In other words, it's a first-world-problem.

(taking the "first-world-problem" term literally: in the Third World, the problem above is "solved" by not being able to afford 2 vacuum-cleaners, or 2-story houses, if you're poor; or by hiring a maid if you're middle- or upper-class).

dustingetz3• 15 years ago

a slave would be nice. but pending that, yes, i have multiple tubes of toothpaste in several bathrooms across multiple locations -- nothing worse than not having toothpaste when you need it :(

mechanical_fish• 15 years ago

I think this article would be stronger if it didn't open with its weakest example: The problem with whiteboard pens is that (a) they wear out over time as the ink dries, so you can't solve your problem by buying and distributing them in one large batch; you need to constantly and continuously resupply them over time; and (b) they can be instantly ruined by misusing them, e.g. by not capping one tightly when you put it down.

So I'd argue that whiteboard pens are frustratingly close to the category boundary between "things that are so cheap that you should just buy them in bulk and spread them all over the environment" and "precious personal tools, where the optimal strategy is to buy the best that you can afford, carry them around with you in a special holster, and never let anyone else touch them on pain of death". The latter category includes things like a chef's knife, a mechanic's micrometer, a microsurgeon's favorite tweezers, and your cellphone.

Whiteboard pens are legendarily annoying because they're not clearly in one category or the other, so no matter whether you fanatically carry around a personal set or choose to rely on their ubiquity you're inevitably going to end up kicking yourself at one time or another.

Splines• 15 years ago

If I was a teacher that had to have working whiteboard pens all the time, I'd treasure some sort of holster that could hold a good whiteboard pen or two.

It's funny how whiteboard pens are these ugly things that we use all the time. I've never seen a really nice whiteboard pen (do they even exist?). All I've ever seen are those expo white-barreled pens that, while certainly functional, are incredibly spartan.

What would a "worlds-best" whiteboard pen look like? Does it have to be a round, fat plastic thing?

wpietri3• 15 years ago

I'm firmly in the ubiquity camp for this, but with a just-in-time delivery system rather than buying in one giant batch.

Every whiteboard should have a large stock of great pens. If I start to write with a balky pen, I throw it out instantly. (Please, HNers: if you ever see somebody put a bad pen back in the tray, smack them.) When we get down to a merely adequate number of markers in some room, I spend 60 seconds on Amazon and order a bunch more. Prime + One Click + purchase history search makes this a breeze.

cperciva4• 15 years ago

a microsurgeon's favorite tweezers

Given the risk of cross-infection, I really hope microsurgeons acquire these in multiplicity rather than just buying one pair and carrying them around with him. :-)

dustingetz3• 15 years ago

hahah. i buy my own stuff at work if its scarce. most notably kleenex; being sick is miserable, who wants to use cheap-ass sandpaper on their nose when they already feel like shit? thank you, i'll spend $4 for super-extra-soft tissues.

anthonyb2• 15 years ago

In that case surely you should be at home recuperating, rather than spreading germs to your coworkers?

Tsagadai2• 15 years ago

If you have dedicated sick leave pay that's fine. However, sick leave is unheard of in some countries. Why would you force someone to take annual holiday time off to be sick or, worse, unpaid leave. Then they would be even more miserable than just being sick.

cletus• 15 years ago

It's interesting to view how Google works in this light:

- the micro-kitchens are restocked once or twice a day and have all manner of drinks and snacks;

- micro-kitchens are only so far from every desk (they're in every building in MTV and on every floor in NYC);

- stationery cabinets are also in close proximity. Take whatever pens, whiteboard markers, etc ou need;

- tech stops are a little further away generally but have self-service for many things (power bricks, cables, mice, keyboards) although I wish the self-service was open out-of-hours;

- you can file tickets for things and it just turns up at your desk;

- you have a credit card you can expense things with (nobody likes keeping and submitting receipts for small items);

- if you need a book just expense it;

- all of the conference rooms have display adapters and power bricks (although there could be more of these);

- whenever there is a mass desk move (it happens a lot) your labelled boxes and equipment gets moved on the weekend and at your new location there'll often be a triage station with cables, power bricks and the like; and

- whiteboards are plentiful.

I'd always viewed this as not penny-pinching, which I guess it is (apart from the micro-kitchens, which I'm sure are a significant cost) but its interesting to view this in terms of reset and transit costs.

Another important part of this (IMHO) is not making people make decisions about stuff they don't care about, which has a cognitive cost.

Imagine if a company gave you a book budget of $X per year. Even if it's more than you would likely spend the very fact that you have a limit makes you think about what else ou might need later rather than just "do I need this now?"

buss• 15 years ago

Life at Google sounds like a fairy tale.

Things I've had to buy myself to work better at Amazon:

1. A better chair (Steelcase Leap). They give us some shitty chair that's barely adjustable.

2. A second monitor. Yup, they give us one monitor.

3. My own whiteboard markers.

4. A better keyboard. (This hardly counts, though, since I have odd keyboard preferences, and the default keyboards are fine).

Things I've yet to buy but need to:

1. A new & larger hard drive. I got a 140GB drive in my dev desktop. I regularly work with various data packages over 10GB in size, and I need multiple versions deployed at once. This quickly eats up my available space. Haven't done this yet because I'll lose a day or more to reimaging.

2. More ram. They only give us 4GB.

We don't get a free Prime membership. No free kindles. No free AWS accounts for personal projects. Only $100 off per year at Amazon.com. And let's not forget the obscene cost of lunch in South Lake Union (around $10).

One of Amazon's core tenets is "frugality" but they're going to have to start spending more on equipment for devs or they won't be able to hire anyone. Hiring is hard enough as it is at Amazon, and we are going to lose good devs to organizations that value them more.

(I know, I know, First World Problems. My employer only gives me money instead of free things.)

Edit: Formatting

falcolas• 15 years ago

Sounds like the pendulum has officially swung too far the other way. Lunches, Aeron chairs, top of the line computers, free employee shipping... all used to be provided for free.

That went away with the dot-com bust, and despite their current success, they didn't bring the useful components back (I never minded not having my own door-desk).

potatolicious• 15 years ago

I used to be at Amazon, I hear you on all the frustration, and it's amazing how much more productive I am now when many of these pain points are removed.

I seriously have no idea where Amazon finds their office chairs. Nobody's asking for Aerons, but the chairs Amazon puts in their offices are worse than my chair at home I got at IKEA. It's like someone went out there and spent effort finding the worst, least comfortable, least adjustable chairs they could manage.

Where I'm working now there's a firm belief that if you need gear to do your job, just buy it and expense it. I've never been challenged on any tech expenditure, including a 30" Cinema display, something that would be the height of luxury (and entirely unheard of) at Amazon.

For those not familiar with Amazon, they do provide whiteboard markers - you can fetch them from the copy room at any time, along with all manners of office supplies. For some reason though, nobody ever orders enough whiteboard markers, and pretty much whenever someone restocks the copy room the markers are gone in a matter of hours. It's a frustrating part of Amazon life to raid nearby conference rooms so you can actually have your meeting, or when someone else wants to jump in on the whiteboard you have to hunt around to find another color. This really is a pain point that shouldn't exist. It's a fucking whiteboard marker for crying out loud. Facilities also insists on stocking those rainbow-palette packs of whiteboard markers, which means every pack of markers you run across will be full of the colors nobody uses (yellow?!) and the black/blue/red will always be gone.

It's not really that frustrating while you're there, but in hindsight I'm not sure how I put up with that. It's such an unnecessary waste of engineering time.

> "Things I've yet to buy but need to:"

They just need to give devs new desktops. Before I left my dev desktop had a 140GB drive, with 4GB RAM, and a Celeron CPU. A full build of my code base took 15 minutes when on any modern $700 desktop it'd be a small fraction of it. I'm pretty sure Amazon has lost enough money on my engineer-twiddling-thumbs-while-code-compiles lost time to buy a room full of top-end desktops. It's the most puzzling, absurd frugality strategy ever.

I've worked at a number of code shops before, and Amazon is the only place (and the largest company, puzzlingly) where the hardware was actively, and massively holding back my productivity as an engineer.

wpietri3• 15 years ago

Wow. That is idiotic. At my company, we give all the developers credit cards and tell them to buy what they need. But I try to beat them to it, as I'd rather they focus on coding.

E.g., last week I noticed a couple of developers trying to get a wireless mouse working; they couldn't find charged batteries. Time lost, 5-10m each. So I ordered a dozen sets and two chargers. Cost, maybe $40. (Thanks, Prime!) The opportunity cost of developer time is large (our rule of thumb is $250/hr), so most purchases (including all those you mention) are obvious wins.

Monkeyget• 15 years ago

I am reminded of Snow Crash where the government has turned into an hyper bureaucratic system. It describes in several tedious pages an addendum to the office rules for toilet paper an TP pooling. But fear not, productivity was not lost since employees were expected to read the new rule within a specified quick time.

yarone• 15 years ago

Also, sometimes it's important that there's a forcing function / mechanism of some kind that gets things to stay put.

Ex: Pens used at cash registers that are intentionally giant / ugly / unwieldy so you don't walk off with them. See here: http://karentl.wordpress.com/2011/06/25/design-artifact-plas...

dangero• 15 years ago

Another big productivity helper is to be less hesitant to discard a piece of hardware that is not working well. Repairs often take more time than you expect. It takes discipline to do this because as a tech person you tend to like to troubleshoot things. Examples are things like a router that needs to be restarted a lot or a keyboard with a sticky key. Sometimes it's just acknowledging that you spent money on something that never really worked well enough and you should just throw it out and buy something better. I find that often times I hold onto something because I know I paid a lot for it, not because it's working well.

dmansen• 15 years ago

I do this at home, but my items are geared towards musicmaking. Every guitarist knows picks always go missing - buy hundreds and leave them around the house. Same goes for instrument cables: why should you EVER have to deal with running out? I try to facilitate creativity by making it as easy as possible for me to create. This also applies to your work area, the kitchen, etc.

Also, after getting a couple flat tires on my bike, I stocked up on tubes so that I wouldn't ever have to worry about that again.

kevinburke• 15 years ago

Whoa, I wrote a post about pretty much the same thing two days ago: http://kev.inburke.com/kevin/stop-worrying-about-shit-that-d...

derwiki3• 15 years ago

Re: your laundry item -- does wash 'n fold fit the bill? The place I use is about 100 feet from the front of my apartment building, and it only takes about 1 minute longer to walk to it than it does the laundry room in the building.

ams6110• 15 years ago

The central office printer example is one that I'm not sure about. Where I work, personal printers are banned on the basis of a "sustainability" policy that views them as energy- and resource-wasting. There is one shared printer that I admit is fantastic. Beautiful color, also scans to email or fax, it's fast, and it never seems to jam or break down (though it is nearly new). I don't print much, and I suspect many devs are the same. About the only time I print anything is when it's something needing a signature. In the past I would often print web articles that I wanted to read in depth but Readability has really helped me do that a lot less often.

So I really don't see a central printer per se as an example of an artificial scarcity. There would need to be some other shortcoming: it's old, slow, prints are full of artifacts, it jams a lot, wasting time, etc.

If I had a need to print dozens of documents a day and had to walk across the floor to get them, maybe I would see this differently.

sutterbomb• 15 years ago

This post seems a little too narrow in focus. Sure, there are some hands down winners like white board markers and video dongles.

But your own printer? Coffee and soda at your doorstep? It's healthy to get up, stretch out and walk around a bit. Healthy to socialize in the copy room too.

Are the productivity gains really that great at the margin? I suspect the extra minute you save by not walking to a printer is just shifted to an extra minute on Twitter or Hacker News.

The general concept is a useful one to keep in mind, but as with all productivity pron, there are limits.

Vivtek2• 15 years ago

I call this saturation - if I spend five minutes looking for the scissors, I've already spent more time than another pair of scissors is worth. So I increase the concentration of the scissors solution by buying another pair of scissors. Eventually I reach an equilibrium between known pairs of scissors and whatever process is removing them from the knowable - at that point, my scissors solution is saturated.

Repeat for all other items in the solution until you have a broth you can work in.

omegaworks• 15 years ago

A sharp, pointy broth that you shouldn't run with.

goodweeds• 15 years ago

Bicycles! I ride my mountain bike pretty hard any time I go out for fun, and sometimes come back with an out of true wheel, a screwed drive train, bent derailleurs/disc brakes/frame/etc. This got in the way of my daily commuting/exercising so I decided I needed to have a good road bike, and a spare cheap mountain bike to make sure I can still go out to have fun, even if my primary mtb is in the middle of surgery. Having three bikes also means that when friends are in town visiting, I can show them around the city without having to resort to expensive taxis/zipcars or public transit.

mobileman• 15 years ago

Fingernail clipper: I have 9 of them, yet only two are around at any given point

yason2• 15 years ago

Reading the list, however, I get the feeling he likes to optimize for the sake of optimization. If you factor in the rate of use, few items on his list are actually worth duplicating. Flashlights scattered around for power outages? Come on! Unless the outages come weekly, it's probably just a premature optimization. Or unless you're particularly accident-prone, you might get by with fewer first-aid kits and fewer towels and wipes.

However, laptop adapters I understand. They're a pain here, too, and laptops travel many times a day. And this thinking of his is good, in general. But mostly, he certainly goes off my scale in my world where the mere cost of keeping is pretty high. I generally don't want anything unless I really, really need it and much less I want two or more copies of it! I'm quite sure that as soon as you have two or three copies of nearly anything you need more often than once a year, you'll will the same.

Instead of duplication, I often opt for keeping things in their places. For example, I don't need wrenches and screwdrivers every week but I certainly do few times a month. Thus, I don't mind walking to another room to pick one from my toolbox as long as I know they're in my toolbox and I don't have to search for what I want. Searching cost is often greater than the cost of fetching.

And accumulating the copies costs too, really. They cost in terms of taking space and in needing both physical and mental upkeep: mind them while cleaning, mind if one of your numerous stashes is running out of consumables. And the burden of ownership, and the burden of eventually requiring more space because you have copies of too many things. These cut down productivity, at least they would cut mine.

YMWV, of course.

End artificial scarcities to increase productivity

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