Search: "time management"

A third Industrial Revolution?

by on October 4, 2012 at 2:37 pm in Economics, History, Web/Tech | Permalink

James Tien has a new paper:

The outputs or products of an economy can be divided into services products and goods products (due to manufacturing, construction, agriculture and mining). To date, the services and goods products have, for the most part, been separately mass produced. However, in contrast to the first and second industrial revolutions which respectively focused on the development and the mass production of goods, the next – or third – industrial revolution is focused on the integration of services and/or goods; it is beginning in this second decade of the 21st Century. The Third Industrial Revolution (TIR) is based on the confluence of three major technological enablers (i.e., big data analytics, adaptive services and digital manufacturing); they underpin the integration or mass customization of services and/or goods. As detailed in an earlier paper, we regard mass customization as the simultaneous and real-time management of supply and demand chains, based on a taxonomy that can be defined in terms of its underpinning component and management foci. The benefits of real-time mass customization cannot be over-stated as goods and services become indistinguishable and are co-produced – as “servgoods” – in real-time, resulting in an overwhelming economic advantage to the industrialized countries where the consuming customers are at the same time the co-producing producers.

Keywords: Big data, decision analytics, goods, adaptive services, digital manufacturing, value chain,
supply chain, demand chain, mass production, mass customization, industrial revolution

For the pointer I thank the excellent Kevin Lewis.

23 comments

How to get stuff done

by on April 21, 2012 at 4:35 am in Education | Permalink

This is a good discussion, I agree with most of it, for most people.  Here is one bit:

The hardest part is often just starting. I’ve found that it’s especially hard for me to start when a task is difficult or complex. The more importance and weight a certain activity has in my life or business, the more I seem to put off starting.

However, if I can just get moving on it, even for a few minutes, it tends to get easier.

Because I know this about myself, rather than setting the intention to finish something, I resolve myself to start. The more often I start, the easier things get finished. Overcoming that first bit of inertia is the biggest challenge (just like getting started on a run, or the first push of getting a car moving).

Once things are moving, momentum is on your side.

That is from Jonathan Mead, hat tip goes to Anya Kamenetz.  You also can enter “time management” into the MR search function, and then scroll down a bit.

12 comments

The culture that is Taco Bell (cheap chalupas edition)

by on June 1, 2011 at 3:50 am in Economics, Food and Drink | Permalink

This article is superb throughout, here is one excerpt:

Every Taco Bell, McDonald’s (MCD), Wendy’s (WEN), and Burger King is a little factory, with a manager who oversees three dozen workers, devises schedules and shifts, keeps track of inventory and the supply chain, supervises an assembly line churning out a quality-controlled, high-volume product, and takes in revenue of $1 million to $3 million a year, all with customers who show up at the front end of the factory at all hours of the day to buy the product. Taco Bell Chief Executive Officer Greg Creed, a veteran of the detergents and personal products division of Unilever (UL), puts it this way: “I think at Unilever, we had five factories. Well, at Taco Bell today I’ve got 6,000 factories, many of them running 24 hours a day.”

…When I take my place on the line and start to prepare burritos, tacos, and chalupas—they won’t let me near a Crunchwrap Supreme—it is immediately clear that this has been engineered to make the process as simple as possible. The real challenge is the wrapping. Taco Bell once had 13 different wrappers for its products. That has been cut to six by labeling the corners of each wrapper differently. The paper, designed to slide off a stack in single sheets, has to be angled with the name of the item being made at the upper corner. The tortilla is placed in the middle of the paper and the item assembled from there until you fold the whole thing up in the wrapping expediting area next to the grill. “We had so many wrappers before, half a dozen stickers; it was all costing us seconds,” says Harkins. In repeated attempts, I never get the proper item name into the proper place. And my burritos just do not hold together.

With me on the line are Carmen Franco, 60, and Ricardo Alvarez, 36. The best Food Champions can prepare about 100 burritos, tacos, chalupas, and gorditas in less than half an hour, and they have the 78-item menu memorized. Franco and Alvarez are a precise and frighteningly fast team. Ten orders at a time are displayed on a screen above the line, five drive-thrus and five walk-ins. Franco is a blur of motion as she slips out wrapping paper and tortillas, stirs, scoops, and taps, then slides the items down the line while looking up at the screen. The top Food Champions have an ability to scan through the next five orders and identify those that require more preparation steps, such as Grilled Stuffed Burritos and Crunchwrap Supremes, and set those up before returning to simpler tacos and burritos. When Alvarez is bogged down, Franco slips around him and slides Crunchwrap Supremes into their boxes. For this adroit time management and manual dexterity, Taco Bell starts its workers at $8.50 an hour, $1.25 more than minimum wage.

51 comments

My email to Ben Casnocha

by on June 11, 2010 at 1:15 am in Economics, Education, Web/Tech | Permalink

He's totally ignoring the market data.  Do law partners and top investment bankers multitask?

Yes.

I won't quite write "end of story" but…

Or look at the top people at [top tech conferences].  How many of them check their iPhones all the time, etc.

Lots of them.

Of course top CEOs don't multitask all the time, they multitask selectively, combined with periods of extreme focus.  Still, I would say that multitasking is passing the market test.  That point does not receive nearly enough attention and oddly it is usually not mentioned in the major polemics against multitasking.  It's one thing to think that a seventeen-year-old teenager will multitask too much; it's another thing to make the same claim about an extremely valuable executive, surrounded by assistants, time management specialists, and so on.

Here is further commentary on the entire issue.

10 comments

MR vocabulary guide

by on November 19, 2009 at 10:33 am in Education | Permalink

1. "Self-recommending": the very nature of the authors and project suggest it will be good or very good.  This also often (but not always) means I haven't read it yet.  I am reluctant to recommend *anything* I haven't read, but I am signaling it is very likely recommendation-worthy and I wish to let you know about it sooner rather than later.

2. An "Assorted link" that ends with a question mark: Worth thinking about, but I wish to distance myself from the conclusion and the methods of the study, without being contrary per se.

3. Hansonian: of, or relating to Robin Hanson.  Yesterday I asked Garett Jones whether his date was as pretty as Robin is smart.

4. The Jacksonian mode of discourse.  I am opposed to this.  Political and economic pamphlets in the Jacksonian era were excessively polemical and sometimes the Jacksonian mode is still used today, in 2009, believe it or not.

5. Wunderkind: Take the average age of that person's relevant peers.  If said person is either under twenty or less than half that average, that person may qualify for "Wunderkind" status. 

6. Markets in everything: Some of these are celebratory but many of these are sad or tragic.  Usually I am trying to get you to think about — as a philosophical question — why the market exists at all and not whether it should be legal.  

7. Tyrone is my brother and alter-ego who believes the opposite of what Tyler believes.  Trudie offers personal advice.  Neither has good time management skills and thus they don't write very much these days.

8. "Shout it from the rooftops": What to do with wordy, obscure truths which the world badly needs to learn.

What have I left out?

21 comments

My sentence on time management

by on December 10, 2008 at 7:19 am in Philosophy | Permalink

All people are equally good at time management, but some people are more willing than others to admit that they are doing what they want to do, while others maintain the illusion they wish they were doing something else.

Here are my previous posts on time management, most of all here and yes this is the single most frequent topic question I receive from MR readers.  I thank Jacqueline for the query.

Addendum: Will comments, worth reading.  My view is simple: forcing yourself to use your time better just isn’t that costly, so if you want to, you can.  What does *Getting Things Done* sell for?  That’s about its marginal value.   It doesn’t reflect a big shift in time use.

12 comments

A superb post on exchange rates

by on November 9, 2007 at 9:39 am in Economics | Permalink

Here, by Menzie Chinn.

And here you can read Bob Solow on Greg Clark for $3.  Here are Solow’s tips for time management, interesting but obviously not written by a member of the email generation.

Here’s an update on the forthcoming Malcolm Gladwell book.

6 comments

How to read fast

by on December 12, 2006 at 6:48 am in Books | Permalink

I am unfamiliar with speed reading techniques, so I cannot evaluate them.

The best way to read quickly is to read lots.  And lots.  And to have started a long time ago.  Then maybe you know what is coming in the current book.  Reading quickly is often, in a margin-relevant way, close to not reading much at all. 

Note that when you add up the time costs of reading lots, quick readers don’t consume information as efficiently as you might think.  They’ve chosen a path with high upfront costs and low marginal costs.  "It took me 44 years to read this book" is not a bad answer to many questions about reading speed.

Another way to read quickly is to cut bait on the losers.  I start ten or so books for every one I finish.  I don’t mind disliking a book, and I never regret having picked it up and started it.  I am ruthless in my discards.

Fairfax and Arlington counties have wonderful public library systems, and I go about five times a week to one branch or another.  Usually I scan the New Books shelf and look at nothing else.  I can go shopping at the best store in the world, almost any day, for free. 

I am both interested and compulsive.  How can I let that book go unread or at least unsampled?  I can’t.

Virtually every Tuesday I visit the New Books table at Borders.  Tuesday is when most new books arrive.  Who knows what might be there?  How can I let that New Books table go unvisited?  I can’t.  About half the time I buy something, but I always walk away happy.

Here is another reading tip: do less of other activities.

Blogging hasn’t hurt my writing, it has helped by non-fiction reading, but I read fewer novels.  That is the biggest intellectual opportunity cost of MR, though for the last month I’ve made a concerted effort to read more fiction.  But it is not like the old days when I would set aside two months to work through The Inferno, Aeneid, and the like, with multiple secondary sources and multiple translations at hand.  I no longer have the time or the mood, and I miss this.

Here are two earlier posts on time management.

Addendum: Jane Galt comments.  And here is Daniel Akst.

19 comments

Trudie on time management

by on August 3, 2006 at 2:51 am in Education | Permalink

A loyal MR reader asks the following:

I’m a law student and am working in a litigation firm this summer. I have been quite disappointed how little energy I have for "high" culture when I get home from work.  It’s just so easy to watch Friends!  I’m also a writer and was planning on working on several things this summer, but haven’t really gotten started on anything yet.  My real interest here is your schedule and will to avoid passive forms of entertainment.  I would love to see a post (I’ll take a reply) about how you manage to write your blog, work, visit restaurants, consume academic writing, literature, non-fiction and movies at what seems to me an amazing rate.  I believe my time is better spent reading an academic article than playing snood, but don’t you ever look down at the Journal of Law and Econ, and decide to watch the Paris Hilton True Hollywood Story instead?  If I were completely rational I would read a couple books a day and a couple of newspapers, go to work, work out, and then watch a Nigerian film [sic] and hit the hay.  I have the requisite curiosity, but I seem to not have the energy/time/will for it.  What kind of planning goes into your day?  Do you have no passive will to overcome?  How can I work, write fiction and consume culture in a workable way?  Is the problem the ten hour work day?  I’m interested to hear about your schedule and your thoughts on overcoming a (hated) tendency towards passivity.

Tyler is out of the country, but Trudie’s answer is simple…

Read More →

8 comments

The addict speaks (Ec 10 is over)

by on May 29, 2006 at 1:58 am in Education | Permalink

Lately, I have been spending some of my time writing this blog, which
started as a by-product of teaching ec 10, the principles class at
Harvard. I am still trying to figure out if this is a good use of my
time or not. On the one hand, this feels like providing a public good.
(Perhaps at a low cost: some of the time I spend on it has come from
watching reruns of Law and Order.) On the other hand, at times writing
this blog feels like being hooked on crack.

The real question is whether the addict realized this before his readers realized it about him.  By the way, here are the addict’s tips on time management.  (I disagree on travel, which I consider to be the best way of learning things.)  Here is the addict linking to advice on getting through graduate school.

Has the addict figured out the biggest benefit of blogging, or is he just being coy?

We welcome the addict to a more lasting presence in the blogosphere.

Addendum: He also points our attention to economics videos.

1 comment

Simple advice for academic publishing

by on June 19, 2005 at 6:36 am in Education | Permalink

Last week I gave a talk on career and publishing advice to a cross-disciplinary audience of graduate students.  Here were my major points:

1. You can improve your time management.  Do you want to or not?

2. Get something done every day.  Few academics fail from not getting enough done each day.  Many fail from living many days with zero output.

3. Figure out what is your core required achievement at this point in time — writing, building a data set, whatever — and do it first thing in the day no matter what.  I am not the kind of cultural relativist who thinks that many people work best late at night.

4. Buy a book of stamps and use it.  You would be amazed how many people write pieces but never submit and thus never learn how to publish. 

5. The returns to quality are higher than you think, and they are rising rapidly.  Lower-tier journals and presses are becoming worth less and less.  Often it is the author certifying the lower-tier journal, rather than vice versa.

6. If you get careless, sloppy, or downright outrageous referee reports, it is probably your fault.  You didn’t give the editor or referees enough incentive to care about your piece.  So respond to such reports constructively with a plan for self-improvement, don’t blame the messenger, even when the messenger stinks.  Your piece probably stinks too.

7. Start now.  Recall the tombstone epitaph "It is later than you think."  Darth Sidious got this one right.

8. Care about what you are doing.  This is ultimately your best ally.

Here is a good article on academic book publishing and how it is changing.

Time management tips

by on November 7, 2004 at 7:05 am in Education | Permalink

John Quiggin offers some time management tips over at CrookedTimber.org.  I’ll second his call for a daily "word quota", but express horror at his notion that you should ever devote a morning to "8-10 jobs that ought to take 5 minutes each."

Here are my suggestions:

1. There is always time to do more, most people, even the productive, have a day that is at least forty percent slack.

2. Do the most important things first in the day and don’t let anybody stop you.  Estimate "most important" using a zero discount rate.  Don’t make exceptions.  The hours from 7 to 12 are your time to build for the future before the world descends on you.

3. Some tasks (drawing up outlines?) expand or contract to fill the time you give them.  Shove all these into times when you are pressed to do something else very soon.

4. Each day stop writing just a bit before you have said everything you want to.  Better to approach your next writing day "hungry" than to feel "written out."  Your biggest enemy is a day spent not writing, not a day spent writing too little.

5. Blogging builds up good work habits; the deadline is always "now."

Starting out as a Professor

by on June 3, 2004 at 11:09 am in Uncategorized | Permalink

Alex and Tyler like to post advice to graduate students (click here), which is usually on the mark. Here are some reflections from someone who has just finished the first year as a professor. I hope non-academic readers will enjoy knowing what this job is about.

1. Being a professor is all about time management. It’s important to spend time preparing classes and completing research but you have to be efficient. Unlike graduate school, you can’t spend years on a single dissertation chapter. It has to go to review soon, so you had better learn to write well and quickly.

2. This is really a cool job, but it is not for everybody. Although I am at a research university, I am expected to teach a fair amount – large undergraduate classes and doctoral students – and I must do a fair amount of administrative work. Anybody who is allergic to either activity should seek other employment. But if you like teaching, and you can thrive when you are expected to produce a lot in an unstructured environment, then it can be very satisfying.

3. Success in the academy is about writing skill – even in technical areas. Tyler might be interested in knowing that I learned this from him. Having brilliant ideas and doing the research to prove you are right is only half the battle. You must work very, very hard to clearly express your ideas and persuade skeptical readers.

While I consider myself to be a happy person, I still advise people not to go into academia – it is very competitive, smart people can make much more money elsewhere, there is little security pre-tenure and you can enjoy great ideas without getting a Ph.D. by reading Marginal Revolution every day.

Calendar facts

by on December 24, 2003 at 6:15 am in Current Affairs | Permalink

1. The U.S. calendar industry accounts for $1.2 billion a year.

2. The average American buys 2.5 calendars.

3. Dog calendars are especially popular. Bush and Britney Spears calendars have not been selling well.

4. The 2004 Nuns Having Fun calendar is now sold out.

5. Women prefer larger calendars than do men.

6. 70 percent of all calendar business is done in December, talk about seasonal business cycles.

7. Many calendar prices are cut in half on December 26.

8. Many calendars cost no more than a dollar by the end of January.

9. Less than one-third of Americans plan their workday in writing. One CEO of a time management firm reports: “Most people walk into work and don’t have a plan.”

From USA Today. If you are wondering, I bought my 2004 calendar in October and it portrays Hokusai prints.