End artificial scarcities to increase productivity

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.

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.

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?"

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.

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."

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.

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. :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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...

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.

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

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).

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.