5 ms·

I dislike this line of reasoning. If you add up the effects over many people then obviously you get a large number of minutes that were wasted, but those people

by Jabbles 13y ago

I dislike this line of reasoning. If you add up the effects over many people then obviously you get a large number of minutes that were wasted, but those people collectively had many minutes to waste. You cannot claim that those minutes could be added together, and therefore you shouldn't invite comparisons to what you could do with 3 extra years. Brooks argued about the mythical man month in the same way. It's an annoying, emotional statistic, used in the same way that my cereal box tells me they've saved 30 lorry-loads of cardboard from being produced. In the context of the millions lorry-loads of rubbish generated, it's not important. I also dislike the 0.05% statistic (which is essentially saying Americans spend 0.05% of their time queueing at the DMV) as it's uselessly emphasized with "a significant amount considering the size of the GDP". If everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little. David MacKay http://www.withouthotair.com/c19/page_114.shtml http://www.withouthotair.com/c19/page_114.shtml

adolph 13y ago
I think the author's purpose is to explore where value can be added to various processes. The first part is to ID areas where value could potentially be added. In some of the examples, the author doesn't seem to address the concept of concentrated benefits outweighing dispersed costs. Another is that one party's muda is often another's profit.
walshemj 13y ago
Yes its like in the 70's when the UK had massive power cuts and the entire country worked a 3 day week - output did not decline by 2/5's And say you take a half day off to visit the DMV your in 95% of the cases not going to get more or less things done that week - unless your a piece worker on a production line which for HN readers is probably zero
lpolovets 13y ago
(I'm the author.) Thanks for the feedback. I agree that the statistics are emotional and not completely translatable to productive time, though I do think the numbers are still significant. Specifically, I think these types of savings compound, so that if you can save one minute of time on each of a 20 daily tasks, then at the end of the day you could have an extra 20-minute continuous block, which is much more valuable than 20 1-minute blocks. Re: .05% -- I personally think mentioning GPD is useful because .05% sounds fairly trivial, but .05% of the GPD is still something like eight billion dollars, which is a very non-trivial amount. Finally, I really like the philosophy of the blog post you linked to, but I think it's talking about a slightly different point. The examples I gave are about a single organization doing something that saves an aggregate of millions of hours or millions of dollars; they are not about trying to convince millions of individuals make a conscious choice to each save one dollar or a few minutes. In the language of the linked post, I would consider the latter to be a million minnows while the former is a single shark.
shalmanese 13y ago
This is why I think the smartphone took off as rapidly as it did. If you look at a modern waiting room, 80% of people are staring at their phones, playing games, surfing the web or checking their email. Previously, people might have a book or a discman on them but many people had nothing and were simply sitting bored. Now, they're at least at 50% productivity if not more. The smartphone alone eliminates half of the losses that the DMV has caused.

by Jabbles 13y ago

adolph 13y ago

I think the author's purpose is to explore where value can be added to various processes. The first part is to ID areas where value could potentially be added. In some of the examples, the author doesn't seem to address the concept of concentrated benefits outweighing dispersed costs. Another is that one party's muda is often another's profit.

walshemj 13y ago

Yes its like in the 70's when the UK had massive power cuts and the entire country worked a 3 day week - output did not decline by 2/5's And say you take a half day off to visit the DMV your in 95% of the cases not going to get more or less things done that week - unless your a piece worker on a production line which for HN readers is probably zero

lpolovets 13y ago

(I'm the author.) Thanks for the feedback. I agree that the statistics are emotional and not completely translatable to productive time, though I do think the numbers are still significant. Specifically, I think these types of savings compound, so that if you can save one minute of time on each of a 20 daily tasks, then at the end of the day you could have an extra 20-minute continuous block, which is much more valuable than 20 1-minute blocks. Re: .05% -- I personally think mentioning GPD is useful because .05% sounds fairly trivial, but .05% of the GPD is still something like eight billion dollars, which is a very non-trivial amount. Finally, I really like the philosophy of the blog post you linked to, but I think it's talking about a slightly different point. The examples I gave are about a single organization doing something that saves an aggregate of millions of hours or millions of dollars; they are not about trying to convince millions of individuals make a conscious choice to each save one dollar or a few minutes. In the language of the linked post, I would consider the latter to be a million minnows while the former is a single shark.

shalmanese 13y ago

This is why I think the smartphone took off as rapidly as it did. If you look at a modern waiting room, 80% of people are staring at their phones, playing games, surfing the web or checking their email. Previously, people might have a book or a discman on them but many people had nothing and were simply sitting bored. Now, they're at least at 50% productivity if not more. The smartphone alone eliminates half of the losses that the DMV has caused.