

The Myth of Efficiency - tdedecko
http://baselinescenario.com/2010/02/11/the-myth-of-efficiency/

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rimantas
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

~~~
RyanMcGreal
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
_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."

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RyanMcGreal
I find that for me, the biggest efficiency gains are not necessarily changes
that _save time_ but rather changes that _reduce cognitive overhead_.

~~~
lmkg
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
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.

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DenisM
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.

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rauljara
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
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.

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iBercovich
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>

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chipsy
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.

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CapitalistCartr
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.

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Confusion
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.

