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Maximizing productivity comes from maximizing efficiency. Efficiency is about sitting down and analyzing your tasks holistically and doing min-maxing to ensure

Maximizing productivity comes from maximizing efficiency. Efficiency is about sitting down and analyzing your tasks holistically and doing min-maxing to ensure every process achieves its greatest result. Now ask yourself this: how often do people do this at all? Pretty much never. Most of us only do it when you have to, because you aren’t making enough money, because your application is slow, because you can barely meet budget, or because you are trying to land on the moon and failing costs too much.

boothby 1y ago
> Efficiency is about sitting down and analyzing your tasks holistically and doing min-maxing... Accurate analysis depends on accurate data. Which is why some people I know are required to account for their work activities in 7-minute increments, have frequent and detailed meetings to account for progress, project planning, etc. Actually, doing that analysis has a cost that must be discounted from any perceived gains of efficiency, to be truly efficient. One learns to tolerate some waste to avoid the ultimate time-suck. To say nothing of maintence and sustainability -- if you're always sprinting, you're doomed to fall.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Sevii 1y ago
  For factory optimization they didn't ask people to track their hours at 7 minute intervals. They put a camera on them and analyzed what they did over an entire shift. Then they redesign the factory line to optimize things. Having people manually track time has far more overhead and is less accurate in general. In practice I've never seen a software org take estimates or time tracking seriously beyond "Track your hours in 15 min increments against tickets".
  - 7952 1y ago
    7.5 would be nicer as it fits into sixty minutes!
  - hinkley 1y ago
    I will have this written on my gravestone if Edward Tufte doesn’t beat me to it: Charts are for asking questions, not answering them. That analysis phase can be done brilliantly, or disastrously. It’s down to whose hand is on the rudder.
- hinkley 1y ago
  Boeing does 6 minutes, which means that it’s impossible to have a 45 minute meeting. My coworkers decided that if the meeting went over its .8 hours and if we cleared out on time or earlier that it’s .7 hours. I don’t know why you would do 7. That doesn’t divide into 60 at all. Nor 480.
jgeada 1y ago
The other hard lesson learned during the Covid shutdowns (actually, it is learned and promptly forgotten at every major crisis): maximizing efficiency also maximizes the number of single points of failure in your system. Anything that goes wrong breaks an optimized for efficiency system. You need to have resilience and redundancy to deal with variability, but those cost money. Much better from the management perspective to ignore those risks, cash in on the cheap profits and blame "unexpected events" and get a bailout when things go wrong. They cash in on the easy money and have no downside consequences.
- danaris 1y ago
  > You need to have resilience and redundancy to deal with variability, but those cost money. Reiterating for truth, and also to expand upon the point: These are things that cost money all the time, but only pay off visibly in a crisis. And it has to be a crisis of the right kind (if your headquarters burns down in a wildfire, it won't help you to have 225% coverage on every role). So this makes it very difficult to justify to people who think only numbers—and only specific kinds of numbers—matter. But redundancy and resiliency, at least in most cases, also make the lives of everyone working there better. They mean, among other things, that if one person needs to get surgery, or take their child to the doctor, or just go on vacation, there's still enough people there to keep the work flowing smoothly. The people still there won't be hopelessly overloaded, the work will get done, and the one person who's out won't have a mountain of catch-up work to go when they get back. The only drawback is that it means you're paying people to work at a rate that means they regularly have downtime and aren't "fully utilized" constantly. (By definition.)
  - toast0 1y ago
    > The only drawback You also spend a lot more time on communication. If you have one person who is the resource for X, they can spend their time doing X and don't have to spend time on coordination. When the procedures for doing X change, only one person needs to figure it out, etc. That doesn't mean having a single person is the right decision, the benefits of having multiple people are important; just want to be clear about the drawbacks of multiple people doing the work.
MaKey 1y ago
> Now ask yourself this: how often do people do this at all? Pretty much never. Most of us only do it when you have to, because you aren’t making enough money, because your application is slow, because you can barely meet budget, or because you are trying to land on the moon and failing costs too much. I do it most of the time at work because I find joy in finding the best possible solution.
saulpw 1y ago
I disagree with the toplevel statement. In high-school science terms, productivity is like accuracy whereas efficiency is like precision. You can be very "productive" at a high-level without being efficient. Similarly you can be quite efficient at your tasks while not managing to achieve the toplevel goal. You may argue that "analyzing your tasks holistically" will make you more efficient at achieving your goals. But min-maxing is for tactics, and is antithetical to strategy. Very often, taking a nap or a bath or walk will yield an insight that changes the entire game, obviating weeks or months of efficient and diligent work. We've all experienced this, so why do we insist on "maximizing efficiency"?
- hinkley 1y ago
  The word “effectiveness” has a lot of utility in this sort of conversation. It’s no good driving as fast as possible straight at a brick wall L.
hinkley 1y ago
Maximizing efficiency is how smaller companies eat your lunch. They maximize effectiveness instead. But that’s hard to measure except in customer satisfaction and market share. So it takes a lot of storytelling to get that far, and it can be broken quickly by the wrong execs being hired or the right ones leaving. There’s a reason “bean counter” is an epithet.
marcosdumay 1y ago
The article is about several very widely known effects that don't require holistically analyzing anything nor come close to maximizing anything.

boothby 1y ago

> Efficiency is about sitting down and analyzing your tasks holistically and doing min-maxing... Accurate analysis depends on accurate data. Which is why some people I know are required to account for their work activities in 7-minute increments, have frequent and detailed meetings to account for progress, project planning, etc. Actually, doing that analysis has a cost that must be discounted from any perceived gains of efficiency, to be truly efficient. One learns to tolerate some waste to avoid the ultimate time-suck. To say nothing of maintence and sustainability -- if you're always sprinting, you're doomed to fall.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Sevii 1y ago
For factory optimization they didn't ask people to track their hours at 7 minute intervals. They put a camera on them and analyzed what they did over an entire shift. Then they redesign the factory line to optimize things. Having people manually track time has far more overhead and is less accurate in general. In practice I've never seen a software org take estimates or time tracking seriously beyond "Track your hours in 15 min increments against tickets".
- 7952 1y ago
  7.5 would be nicer as it fits into sixty minutes!
- hinkley 1y ago
  I will have this written on my gravestone if Edward Tufte doesn’t beat me to it: Charts are for asking questions, not answering them. That analysis phase can be done brilliantly, or disastrously. It’s down to whose hand is on the rudder.
hinkley 1y ago
Boeing does 6 minutes, which means that it’s impossible to have a 45 minute meeting. My coworkers decided that if the meeting went over its .8 hours and if we cleared out on time or earlier that it’s .7 hours. I don’t know why you would do 7. That doesn’t divide into 60 at all. Nor 480.

jgeada 1y ago

The other hard lesson learned during the Covid shutdowns (actually, it is learned and promptly forgotten at every major crisis): maximizing efficiency also maximizes the number of single points of failure in your system. Anything that goes wrong breaks an optimized for efficiency system. You need to have resilience and redundancy to deal with variability, but those cost money. Much better from the management perspective to ignore those risks, cash in on the cheap profits and blame "unexpected events" and get a bailout when things go wrong. They cash in on the easy money and have no downside consequences.

danaris 1y ago
> You need to have resilience and redundancy to deal with variability, but those cost money. Reiterating for truth, and also to expand upon the point: These are things that cost money all the time, but only pay off visibly in a crisis. And it has to be a crisis of the right kind (if your headquarters burns down in a wildfire, it won't help you to have 225% coverage on every role). So this makes it very difficult to justify to people who think only numbers—and only specific kinds of numbers—matter. But redundancy and resiliency, at least in most cases, also make the lives of everyone working there better. They mean, among other things, that if one person needs to get surgery, or take their child to the doctor, or just go on vacation, there's still enough people there to keep the work flowing smoothly. The people still there won't be hopelessly overloaded, the work will get done, and the one person who's out won't have a mountain of catch-up work to go when they get back. The only drawback is that it means you're paying people to work at a rate that means they regularly have downtime and aren't "fully utilized" constantly. (By definition.)
- toast0 1y ago
  > The only drawback You also spend a lot more time on communication. If you have one person who is the resource for X, they can spend their time doing X and don't have to spend time on coordination. When the procedures for doing X change, only one person needs to figure it out, etc. That doesn't mean having a single person is the right decision, the benefits of having multiple people are important; just want to be clear about the drawbacks of multiple people doing the work.

MaKey 1y ago

> Now ask yourself this: how often do people do this at all? Pretty much never. Most of us only do it when you have to, because you aren’t making enough money, because your application is slow, because you can barely meet budget, or because you are trying to land on the moon and failing costs too much. I do it most of the time at work because I find joy in finding the best possible solution.

saulpw 1y ago

I disagree with the toplevel statement. In high-school science terms, productivity is like accuracy whereas efficiency is like precision. You can be very "productive" at a high-level without being efficient. Similarly you can be quite efficient at your tasks while not managing to achieve the toplevel goal. You may argue that "analyzing your tasks holistically" will make you more efficient at achieving your goals. But min-maxing is for tactics, and is antithetical to strategy. Very often, taking a nap or a bath or walk will yield an insight that changes the entire game, obviating weeks or months of efficient and diligent work. We've all experienced this, so why do we insist on "maximizing efficiency"?

hinkley 1y ago
The word “effectiveness” has a lot of utility in this sort of conversation. It’s no good driving as fast as possible straight at a brick wall L.

hinkley 1y ago

Maximizing efficiency is how smaller companies eat your lunch. They maximize effectiveness instead. But that’s hard to measure except in customer satisfaction and market share. So it takes a lot of storytelling to get that far, and it can be broken quickly by the wrong execs being hired or the right ones leaving. There’s a reason “bean counter” is an epithet.

marcosdumay 1y ago

The article is about several very widely known effects that don't require holistically analyzing anything nor come close to maximizing anything.