
End artificial scarcities to increase productivity - p4bl0
http://matt.might.net/articles/artificial-scarcity/
======
tptacek
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.

~~~
jasonlotito
* 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.

~~~
cperciva
_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_.

~~~
tocomment
I believe the building code says anything on a higher level needs the washing
machine to be in a basin, with the basin connected to a drain. (At least
that's what I've heard)

~~~
cperciva
It's going to depend on which building code you're dealing with, of course,
but that certainly sounds plausible.

I don't think I'd want to place any bets on how often that particular
requirement actually gets satisfied, though.

------
mechanical_fish
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.

~~~
wpietri
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.

------
cletus
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
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

~~~
potatolicious
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.

~~~
derwiki
When I was at IBM, they gave us ~$200 to spend on office things (Buy on
Demand, I think they called it). I ordered a $160 17" LCD to replace the 70 lb
CRT that felt like it was giving me a sun tan. My manager called me into her
office and explained that she was canceling my order, because if _I_ got that
monitor, then everyone else would want one.

There was also the time my officemate decided to order supplies for the three
of us. She was questioned for requisitioning 3 pens. Because she could only
use one at a time.

------
p4bl0
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
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
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."

------
dangero
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.

------
nostromo
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. :)

~~~
derwiki
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.

~~~
wpietri
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.

------
scotty79
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.

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

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

------
yason
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.

------
ams6110
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
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.

------
zdw
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.

------
goodweeds
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.

------
Monkeyget
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.

------
dmansen
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.

------
yarone
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...](http://karentl.wordpress.com/2011/06/25/design-artifact-plastic-
spoon-taped-to-pen/)

------
kevinburke
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...](http://kev.inburke.com/kevin/stop-worrying-about-shit-that-doesnt-
matter-a-short-guide/)

~~~
derwiki
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.

------
dustingetz
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.

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

~~~
Tsagadai
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.

~~~
anthonyb
If your employer doesn't have dedicated sick pay, then why not? Perhaps they
should? A few days where >50% of their employees are off sick due to the flu
of the month going around ought to convince them otherwise.

This is why most countries (by "unheard of in some countries", I think you
mean "unheard of in the US") have sick leave in some form -- it's both
recuperation time _and_ voluntary quarantine.

~~~
Tsagadai
Actually, by some countries I meant East Asia. I had a friend get fired after
getting hit by a car and needing 2 months leave (because his office had no
wheelchair access). Technically not legal but you can't exactly fight a well
funded employer when you are broke from medical bills.

It is quite common to see very sick people working. People who probably should
be in hospital, not just on leave.

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

------
georgieporgie
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).

~~~
tptacek
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.

~~~
georgieporgie
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.

~~~
tptacek
It takes like a minute or two to do a pourover cup or an Aeropress cup, and if
you're bottlenecking on that, just buy multiple pourovers and Aeropresses;
they're cheap.

~~~
chc
Aeropresses are awesome. They actually make better coffee than most coffee
makers, it's always fresh, it's plenty fast and cleanup is a snap. I highly
recommend it for anybody who's put off by the annoyance of normal coffee
makers.

~~~
tptacek
They burn through a _lot_ of coffee, which might be a downside.

~~~
chc
Weird, I hadn't really noticed that. How many scoops do you use for a cup of
coffee? I usually put one scoop (or two if I'm feeling tired), and I don't
find I go through coffee noticeably faster than with a coffee machine.

------
reddit_clone
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
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
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).

~~~
mooism2
With things like vacuum cleaners, it depends how big your home is. I wouldn't
buy a vacuum cleaner for upstairs: there'd be nowhere to put it.

