10 ms·

End artificial scarcities to increase productivity

152 points by p4bl0 15y ago

scotty79 15y ago
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.
- dustingetz 15y ago
  +100, i sprinkle shitty sunglasses and $5 phone chargers across all factors of my life ;)
p4bl0 15y ago
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.
- dugmartin 15y ago
  I once worked at a very large American company that announced that as part of the effort to hit the quarterly profit goal they would stop buying office supplies. The CEO announced that he he told the same thing to the European branch when he flew over there earlier in the week in the company jet.
orijing 15y ago
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."
tptacek 15y ago
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.
- Bootvis 15y ago
  The infinite free books plan is the greatest. Our book buying is by committee and is a bit slow (but comprehensive). You have commented earlier on it and I've been nagging to get it implemented ;) At our office soda is free and always has been, to address your health concerns you could stock more light products and also more kinds, e.g. offer coke, diet coke and diet Fanta and don't restrict the assortment to soda: offer chilled water, juice and milk. Using this set up the consumption of sugary soda has gone down significantly in our office.
- matwood 15y ago
  It's refreshing to read there are companies out there that 'get it.' Stuff like this has driven me nuts at my current company and it's one of my primary reasons for leaving soon. As far as soda goes, just do like the government and tax it. Make water, juice, tea, and coffee free and charge a quarter for soda (or whatever combo you like). It's not expensive, but makes people pause before drinking it over one of the slightly healthier options.
  - 15y ago
georgieporgie 15y ago
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).
- tptacek 15y ago
  Another way around the coffee problem is just to set up an infrastructure for single-cup brewing, either with a bunch of pourovers or with Aeropress's (they're like $20 each). We (unfortunately) also have a Keurig.
  - georgieporgie 15y ago
    But then you end up with coffee queues before meetings, people who don't clean the machine when they're done, and (in the case of the Keurig) tons of noise.
    - wglb 15y ago
      Meetings?
    - tptacek 15y ago
      It takes like a minute or two to do a pourover cup or an Aeropress cup, and if you're bottlenecking on that, just buy multiple pourovers and Aeropresses; they're cheap.
      - chc 15y ago
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
zdw 15y ago
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.
nostromo 15y ago
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. :)
- justanotheratom 15y ago
  How has your experience with Resveratrol been, and which one did you buy?
  - nostromo 15y ago
    I used to buy a brand called "Bioforte" because ConsumerLab tested it and said it was the best value. However, lately I just pick it up from Costco. It's impossible to tell any difference in day to day life really -- but I certainly haven't noticed any negative effects.
- derwiki 15y ago
  I got rid of all my socks that I had bought over the years and bought 24 pairs of the same socks. Now I just grab any two socks and am guaranteed a match.
  - wpietri 15y ago
    Yes! Socks are definitely best dealt with in batches. I keep two kinds (white athletic and black dress). When one sort is looking raggedy (or the count has fallen below the minimum) I ditch all of that kind and replace them. This has made me especially happy with dress socks. If you buy them at different times, then they are each a subtly different shade of black, which made me insane whenever I tried to match them.
  - JoeAltmaier 15y ago
    My son, a true nerd, used to take pride in mismatched socks. It was proof he had better things to worry about. Then he went one step further - he takes 2 socks from the drawer, and wears them EVEN IF THEY MATCH!
reddit_clone 15y ago
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.
- freehunter 15y ago
  It's about time management. Having to hunt for things is a waste of time, and those little time wasters add up to a lot of work not getting done, or a distraction that takes more time to get your brain back in gear.
  - nandemo 15y ago
    I don't understand reddit_clone's specific example (are there bathrooms with 2 sinks?), but I think the article does mix ideas that are wins with others that are dubious. Pens, chargers and AC adapters, toilet paper are cheap; running out of them is bothersome and there's a fixed overhead to retrieve them, so let's stock them and put them into the right places. But buying and keeping 2 vacuum cleaners at home is arguably not in the same category. It only works if you assign a high enough cost to "getting up and down the stairs" or, equivalently, if the price of the cleaner plus the real estate is cheap enough for you. It's not like it will affect your "productivity", it's just a minor loss of leisure. In other words, it's a first-world-problem. (taking the "first-world-problem" term literally: in the Third World, the problem above is "solved" by not being able to afford 2 vacuum-cleaners, or 2-story houses, if you're poor; or by hiring a maid if you're middle- or upper-class).
    - mooism2 15y ago
      With things like vacuum cleaners, it depends how big your home is. I wouldn't buy a vacuum cleaner for upstairs: there'd be nowhere to put it.
- dustingetz 15y ago
  a slave would be nice. but pending that, yes, i have multiple tubes of toothpaste in several bathrooms across multiple locations -- nothing worse than not having toothpaste when you need it :(
mechanical_fish 15y ago
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.
- Splines 15y ago
  If I was a teacher that had to have working whiteboard pens all the time, I'd treasure some sort of holster that could hold a good whiteboard pen or two. It's funny how whiteboard pens are these ugly things that we use all the time. I've never seen a really nice whiteboard pen (do they even exist?). All I've ever seen are those expo white-barreled pens that, while certainly functional, are incredibly spartan. What would a "worlds-best" whiteboard pen look like? Does it have to be a round, fat plastic thing?
- wpietri 15y ago
  I'm firmly in the ubiquity camp for this, but with a just-in-time delivery system rather than buying in one giant batch. Every whiteboard should have a large stock of great pens. If I start to write with a balky pen, I throw it out instantly. (Please, HNers: if you ever see somebody put a bad pen back in the tray, smack them.) When we get down to a merely adequate number of markers in some room, I spend 60 seconds on Amazon and order a bunch more. Prime + One Click + purchase history search makes this a breeze.
- 15y ago
dustingetz 15y ago
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.
- anthonyb 15y ago
  In that case surely you should be at home recuperating, rather than spreading germs to your coworkers?
  - Tsagadai 15y ago
    If you have dedicated sick leave pay that's fine. However, sick leave is unheard of in some countries. Why would you force someone to take annual holiday time off to be sick or, worse, unpaid leave. Then they would be even more miserable than just being sick.
    - anthonyb 15y ago
      If your employer doesn't have dedicated sick pay, then why not? Perhaps they should? A few days where >50% of their employees are off sick due to the flu of the month going around ought to convince them otherwise. This is why most countries (by "unheard of in some countries", I think you mean "unheard of in the US") have sick leave in some form -- it's both recuperation time and voluntary quarantine.
      - Tsagadai 15y ago
        Actually, by some countries I meant East Asia. I had a friend get fired after getting hit by a car and needing 2 months leave (because his office had no wheelchair access). Technically not legal but you can't exactly fight a well funded employer when you are broke from medical bills. It is quite common to see very sick people working. People who probably should be in hospital, not just on leave.
    - yason 15y ago
cletus 15y ago
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?"
- buss 15y ago
  Life at Google sounds like a fairy tale. Things I've had to buy myself to work better at Amazon: 1. A better chair (Steelcase Leap). They give us some shitty chair that's barely adjustable. 2. A second monitor. Yup, they give us one monitor. 3. My own whiteboard markers. 4. A better keyboard. (This hardly counts, though, since I have odd keyboard preferences, and the default keyboards are fine). Things I've yet to buy but need to: 1. A new & larger hard drive. I got a 140GB drive in my dev desktop. I regularly work with various data packages over 10GB in size, and I need multiple versions deployed at once. This quickly eats up my available space. Haven't done this yet because I'll lose a day or more to reimaging. 2. More ram. They only give us 4GB. We don't get a free Prime membership. No free kindles. No free AWS accounts for personal projects. Only $100 off per year at Amazon.com. And let's not forget the obscene cost of lunch in South Lake Union (around $10). One of Amazon's core tenets is "frugality" but they're going to have to start spending more on equipment for devs or they won't be able to hire anyone. Hiring is hard enough as it is at Amazon, and we are going to lose good devs to organizations that value them more. (I know, I know, First World Problems. My employer only gives me money instead of free things.) Edit: Formatting
Monkeyget 15y ago
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.
yarone 15y ago
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-plastic-spoon-taped-to-pen/ http://karentl.wordpress.com/2011/06/25/design-artifact-plas...
dangero 15y ago
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.
dmansen 15y ago
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.
kevinburke 15y ago
Whoa, I wrote a post about pretty much the same thing two days ago: http://kev.inburke.com/kevin/stop-worrying-about-shit-that-doesnt-matter-a-short-guide/ http://kev.inburke.com/kevin/stop-worrying-about-shit-that-d...
- derwiki 15y ago
  Re: your laundry item -- does wash 'n fold fit the bill? The place I use is about 100 feet from the front of my apartment building, and it only takes about 1 minute longer to walk to it than it does the laundry room in the building.
ams6110 15y ago
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.
sutterbomb 15y ago
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.
Vivtek 15y ago
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.
- omegaworks 15y ago
  A sharp, pointy broth that you shouldn't run with.
goodweeds 15y ago
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.
mobileman 15y ago
Fingernail clipper: I have 9 of them, yet only two are around at any given point
yason 15y ago
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.

152 points by p4bl0 15y ago

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.

dustingetz 15y ago
+100, i sprinkle shitty sunglasses and $5 phone chargers across all factors of my life ;)

p4bl0 15y ago

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.

dugmartin 15y ago
I once worked at a very large American company that announced that as part of the effort to hit the quarterly profit goal they would stop buying office supplies. The CEO announced that he he told the same thing to the European branch when he flew over there earlier in the week in the company jet.

orijing 15y ago

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."

tptacek 15y ago

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.

Bootvis 15y ago
The infinite free books plan is the greatest. Our book buying is by committee and is a bit slow (but comprehensive). You have commented earlier on it and I've been nagging to get it implemented ;) At our office soda is free and always has been, to address your health concerns you could stock more light products and also more kinds, e.g. offer coke, diet coke and diet Fanta and don't restrict the assortment to soda: offer chilled water, juice and milk. Using this set up the consumption of sugary soda has gone down significantly in our office.
matwood 15y ago
It's refreshing to read there are companies out there that 'get it.' Stuff like this has driven me nuts at my current company and it's one of my primary reasons for leaving soon. As far as soda goes, just do like the government and tax it. Make water, juice, tea, and coffee free and charge a quarter for soda (or whatever combo you like). It's not expensive, but makes people pause before drinking it over one of the slightly healthier options.
- 15y ago

georgieporgie 15y ago

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).

tptacek 15y ago
Another way around the coffee problem is just to set up an infrastructure for single-cup brewing, either with a bunch of pourovers or with Aeropress's (they're like $20 each). We (unfortunately) also have a Keurig.
- georgieporgie 15y ago
  But then you end up with coffee queues before meetings, people who don't clean the machine when they're done, and (in the case of the Keurig) tons of noise.
  - wglb 15y ago
    Meetings?
  - tptacek 15y ago
    It takes like a minute or two to do a pourover cup or an Aeropress cup, and if you're bottlenecking on that, just buy multiple pourovers and Aeropresses; they're cheap.
    - chc 15y ago

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

zdw 15y ago

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.

nostromo 15y ago

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. :)

justanotheratom 15y ago
How has your experience with Resveratrol been, and which one did you buy?
- nostromo 15y ago
  I used to buy a brand called "Bioforte" because ConsumerLab tested it and said it was the best value. However, lately I just pick it up from Costco. It's impossible to tell any difference in day to day life really -- but I certainly haven't noticed any negative effects.
derwiki 15y ago
I got rid of all my socks that I had bought over the years and bought 24 pairs of the same socks. Now I just grab any two socks and am guaranteed a match.
- wpietri 15y ago
  Yes! Socks are definitely best dealt with in batches. I keep two kinds (white athletic and black dress). When one sort is looking raggedy (or the count has fallen below the minimum) I ditch all of that kind and replace them. This has made me especially happy with dress socks. If you buy them at different times, then they are each a subtly different shade of black, which made me insane whenever I tried to match them.
- JoeAltmaier 15y ago
  My son, a true nerd, used to take pride in mismatched socks. It was proof he had better things to worry about. Then he went one step further - he takes 2 socks from the drawer, and wears them EVEN IF THEY MATCH!

reddit_clone 15y ago

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.

freehunter 15y ago
It's about time management. Having to hunt for things is a waste of time, and those little time wasters add up to a lot of work not getting done, or a distraction that takes more time to get your brain back in gear.
- nandemo 15y ago
  I don't understand reddit_clone's specific example (are there bathrooms with 2 sinks?), but I think the article does mix ideas that are wins with others that are dubious. Pens, chargers and AC adapters, toilet paper are cheap; running out of them is bothersome and there's a fixed overhead to retrieve them, so let's stock them and put them into the right places. But buying and keeping 2 vacuum cleaners at home is arguably not in the same category. It only works if you assign a high enough cost to "getting up and down the stairs" or, equivalently, if the price of the cleaner plus the real estate is cheap enough for you. It's not like it will affect your "productivity", it's just a minor loss of leisure. In other words, it's a first-world-problem. (taking the "first-world-problem" term literally: in the Third World, the problem above is "solved" by not being able to afford 2 vacuum-cleaners, or 2-story houses, if you're poor; or by hiring a maid if you're middle- or upper-class).
  - mooism2 15y ago
    With things like vacuum cleaners, it depends how big your home is. I wouldn't buy a vacuum cleaner for upstairs: there'd be nowhere to put it.
dustingetz 15y ago
a slave would be nice. but pending that, yes, i have multiple tubes of toothpaste in several bathrooms across multiple locations -- nothing worse than not having toothpaste when you need it :(

mechanical_fish 15y ago

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.

Splines 15y ago
If I was a teacher that had to have working whiteboard pens all the time, I'd treasure some sort of holster that could hold a good whiteboard pen or two. It's funny how whiteboard pens are these ugly things that we use all the time. I've never seen a really nice whiteboard pen (do they even exist?). All I've ever seen are those expo white-barreled pens that, while certainly functional, are incredibly spartan. What would a "worlds-best" whiteboard pen look like? Does it have to be a round, fat plastic thing?
wpietri 15y ago
I'm firmly in the ubiquity camp for this, but with a just-in-time delivery system rather than buying in one giant batch. Every whiteboard should have a large stock of great pens. If I start to write with a balky pen, I throw it out instantly. (Please, HNers: if you ever see somebody put a bad pen back in the tray, smack them.) When we get down to a merely adequate number of markers in some room, I spend 60 seconds on Amazon and order a bunch more. Prime + One Click + purchase history search makes this a breeze.
15y ago

dustingetz 15y ago

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.

anthonyb 15y ago
In that case surely you should be at home recuperating, rather than spreading germs to your coworkers?
- Tsagadai 15y ago
  If you have dedicated sick leave pay that's fine. However, sick leave is unheard of in some countries. Why would you force someone to take annual holiday time off to be sick or, worse, unpaid leave. Then they would be even more miserable than just being sick.
  - anthonyb 15y ago
    If your employer doesn't have dedicated sick pay, then why not? Perhaps they should? A few days where >50% of their employees are off sick due to the flu of the month going around ought to convince them otherwise. This is why most countries (by "unheard of in some countries", I think you mean "unheard of in the US") have sick leave in some form -- it's both recuperation time and voluntary quarantine.
    - Tsagadai 15y ago
      Actually, by some countries I meant East Asia. I had a friend get fired after getting hit by a car and needing 2 months leave (because his office had no wheelchair access). Technically not legal but you can't exactly fight a well funded employer when you are broke from medical bills. It is quite common to see very sick people working. People who probably should be in hospital, not just on leave.
  - yason 15y ago

cletus 15y ago

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?"

buss 15y ago
Life at Google sounds like a fairy tale. Things I've had to buy myself to work better at Amazon: 1. A better chair (Steelcase Leap). They give us some shitty chair that's barely adjustable. 2. A second monitor. Yup, they give us one monitor. 3. My own whiteboard markers. 4. A better keyboard. (This hardly counts, though, since I have odd keyboard preferences, and the default keyboards are fine). Things I've yet to buy but need to: 1. A new & larger hard drive. I got a 140GB drive in my dev desktop. I regularly work with various data packages over 10GB in size, and I need multiple versions deployed at once. This quickly eats up my available space. Haven't done this yet because I'll lose a day or more to reimaging. 2. More ram. They only give us 4GB. We don't get a free Prime membership. No free kindles. No free AWS accounts for personal projects. Only $100 off per year at Amazon.com. And let's not forget the obscene cost of lunch in South Lake Union (around $10). One of Amazon's core tenets is "frugality" but they're going to have to start spending more on equipment for devs or they won't be able to hire anyone. Hiring is hard enough as it is at Amazon, and we are going to lose good devs to organizations that value them more. (I know, I know, First World Problems. My employer only gives me money instead of free things.) Edit: Formatting

Monkeyget 15y ago

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.

yarone 15y ago

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-plastic-spoon-taped-to-pen/ http://karentl.wordpress.com/2011/06/25/design-artifact-plas...

dangero 15y ago

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.

dmansen 15y ago

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.

kevinburke 15y ago

Whoa, I wrote a post about pretty much the same thing two days ago: http://kev.inburke.com/kevin/stop-worrying-about-shit-that-doesnt-matter-a-short-guide/ http://kev.inburke.com/kevin/stop-worrying-about-shit-that-d...

derwiki 15y ago
Re: your laundry item -- does wash 'n fold fit the bill? The place I use is about 100 feet from the front of my apartment building, and it only takes about 1 minute longer to walk to it than it does the laundry room in the building.

ams6110 15y ago

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.

sutterbomb 15y ago

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.

Vivtek 15y ago

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.

omegaworks 15y ago
A sharp, pointy broth that you shouldn't run with.

goodweeds 15y ago

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.

mobileman 15y ago

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

yason 15y ago

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.