

16 Things I Wish They Had Taught Me in School - edw519
http://www.positivityblog.com/index.php/2008/04/02/16-things-i-wish-they-had-taught-me-in-school/

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xirium
From the article: Batching

An acquiantance planned to start a business making kites. He planned to use an
idustrial glue and designs which required gluing on both sides. He devised a
technique where he could batch 10 kites in the time it would take to make two
kites sequentially.

Likewise, on a train, I overheard two jewellers discussing one of their mutual
acquaintances. Apparently, the fellow discovered a lucrative sector of the
market (US$900 white gold bracelets). He was making them in batches of 50. He
would warm his soldering iron and repeat the same step 50 times. Then he'd
repeat the next step 50 times. He didn't care the first few bracelets were bad
or if he'd make a mistake because he'd still have 45 or so perfect examples
when he finished. Its boring but its very productive.

~~~
dood
I once worked a job moving and scanning data from an old paper archive to some
custom built software. I developed a batch system which allowed me to spend
around half the day browsing the web. When I left, I recommended a fairly
smart friend as my replacement, but it turned out he didn't get batching and
was fired two weeks later for being overwhelmed with the work.

~~~
Tichy
Couldn't you have told him how to do it?

~~~
mleonhard
When you develop a good process, WRITE IT DOWN! Processes are valuable!

~~~
dood
Indeed, I learnt that lesson from that episode!

------
wallflower
At a small company, I once had to put together an big order of 150 PCs for a
local college. A one-man assembly line - I had three cordless power
screwdrivers. We had an 8-way hard-drive duplicator (I think it was called the
Octopus) that we used to make the master HD image. I made a mistake on one of
the network card drivers and had to boot up all 150 PCs and update the
driver.manually. That taught me a lesson.

~~~
ovi256
>That taught me a lesson.

To test stuff ? Yup.

------
vikas5678
I think the guy's borrowed a lot of info from Tim Ferris(the author of Four
Hour Work Week) ideas, but good stuff nonetheless.

