

Inefficiency Yields Opportunity - lpolovets
http://codingvc.com/inefficiency-yields-opportunity

======
Jabbles
I dislike this line of reasoning. If you add up the effects over many people
then obviously you get a large number of minutes that were wasted, but those
people collectively had many minutes to waste. You cannot claim that those
minutes could be added together, and therefore you shouldn't invite
comparisons to what you could do with 3 extra years. Brooks argued about the
mythical man month in the same way.

It's an annoying, emotional statistic, used in the same way that my cereal box
tells me they've saved 30 lorry-loads of cardboard from being produced. In the
context of the millions lorry-loads of rubbish generated, it's not important.

I also dislike the 0.05% statistic (which is essentially saying Americans
spend 0.05% of their time queueing at the DMV) as it's uselessly emphasized
with "a significant amount considering the size of the GDP".

 _If everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little._ David MacKay
[http://www.withouthotair.com/c19/page_114.shtml](http://www.withouthotair.com/c19/page_114.shtml)

~~~
lpolovets
(I'm the author.) Thanks for the feedback. I agree that the statistics are
emotional and not completely translatable to productive time, though I do
think the numbers are still significant. Specifically, I think these types of
savings compound, so that if you can save one minute of time on each of a 20
daily tasks, then at the end of the day you could have an extra 20-minute
continuous block, which is much more valuable than 20 1-minute blocks.

Re: .05% -- I personally think mentioning GPD is useful because .05% sounds
fairly trivial, but .05% of the GPD is still something like eight billion
dollars, which is a very non-trivial amount.

Finally, I really like the philosophy of the blog post you linked to, but I
think it's talking about a slightly different point. The examples I gave are
about a single organization doing something that saves an aggregate of
millions of hours or millions of dollars; they are not about trying to
convince millions of individuals make a conscious choice to each save one
dollar or a few minutes. In the language of the linked post, I would consider
the latter to be a million minnows while the former is a single shark.

------
sriyansa
This quest for eliminating inefficiencies often creates a cycle in terms of
products designed to eliminate them.

In the first stage, every individual efficiency (or a related group) will lend
itself to a new application that significantly changes the equation.

However, as the number of these applications increase substantial efficiency
benefits can be reaped by aggregating /replicating these functionalities in
one place - sometimes even at the cost of a little inefficiency. But once
these inefficiencies start paining a user segment, we start with step #1 all
over again

------
PaulHoule
In a lot of examples he gives it's not just a matter of time, but it's a
matter of people's limited cognitive capacity.

In the example of the Target data breach you just learn to click on the UAC
dialog every time, click on the EULA and not read it, delete emails that have
URGENT in the subject line, not look at anything on a web page that is
designed to catch your eye, etc.

------
swalsh
I don't really accept the idea that 3 years of time was wasted because of a 30
second recording. I just activated a new card, I wasn't working, I was waiting
for the costco lady to make a new batch of samples. Those 30 seconds were sunk
no matter what.

I think its kind of a fallacy to suggest that human time can be summed in much
the same way computer resources can be.

~~~
sophacles
I was thinking the same thing about google search results. The .1s difference
can aggregate to a lot of hours, but in reality, I cannot effectively utilize
my .1s - It literally is too small of a unit of time to be useful.

When looking to optimize human time - the low hanging fruit is always the most
impactful. Shaving 2 minutes off a 10 minute task means nothing to me if the
task is a rare one - I will still schedule 20 minutes for it in my planning.
On the other hand, if someone turns what used to be a day-long task into
something that takes an hour, my planning will be significantly altered and
I'll be able to add more productivity into my time.

