The Myth of Efficiency
baselinescenario.com
baselinescenario.com
"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."
> 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
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."
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.
The biggest efficiency gain for me is eliminating things that have a large cognitive drain but little efficiency, such as face-to-face meetings, phone calls, and generally things that can be automated.
Having the printer closer won't help much.
Rather, I want to reduce cognitive overhead so I have more mental energy for thinking about the problems I'm trying to solve. That way, I can spend a bigger share of my time on productive tasks.
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.
Short breaks and walks are wonderful and productive, but not necessarily at the times your printing.
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.