2014-08-20 at

What's Your Number?

Old topic, new article.

In highly repetitive scenarios, like doing barista or call-centre work, my service life-cycles have been as short as 45 seconds per transaction. The article's model works fine, and even so into types of work such as project management, quantitative modelling, which are inherently reductive... the job mostly involves analytical work to improve SNR within a domain. But as we move along the gradient into work that is less analytical, and more synthetic, like the early stages of design... in media of any sort, from food, to machinery (even software), to culture, to scientific experiments, to big messy social efforts, it definitely seems that (a) is very low, so the 52:17 ratio ends up being more like a 180:60 or something.

There are a couple of factors limiting the domain of work, within which this article's rule works. Roughly modelling, productivity (p) = time (t) x quality of work. Let's denominate quality in units of displacement (d), rate of change in quality as its velocity (v), and rate of change of its velocity as acceleration (a).

What is / are your numbers?

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