Quotes About Optimization

Optimize processes, he urged, not people.

These are the knowledge work equivalents of speeding up the craft method of car manufacturing by giving the workers faster shoes.

As a 2018 article from the MIT Sloan Management Review explains: "The 'keep everybody busy' theory remains alive and well . . . in knowledge work."39 (The article elaborates that the manufacturing sector, by contrast, figured out in the 1980s that relentless busyness was not an optimal way to run things.)

Once we view these personal technology processes through the perspective of diminishing returns, we'll gain the precise vocabulary we need to understand the validity of the second principle of minimalism, which states that optimizing how we use technology is just as important as how we choose what technologies to use in the first place.

Perhaps, as the final step in this optimization, you discover through trial and error that you're best able to absorb complex articles when you clip them throughout the week and then sit down to read through them all on Saturday morning on a tablet over coffee at a local café.

organizing the raw materials of your work to minimize energy-dissipating friction

The Protocol Principle Designing rules that optimize when and how coordination occurs in the workplace is a pain in the short term but can result in significantly more productive operation in the long term.

As I mentioned in the introduction, I have one such philosophy to propose: Digital Minimalism A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.

Once you break free from this mind-set, however, and begin seeing new technologies simply as tools that you can deploy selectively, you're able to fully embrace the second principle of minimalism and start furiously optimizing—enabling you to reap the advantages of vaulting up the return curve. Finding useful new technologies is just the first step to improving your life. The real benefits come once you start experimenting with how best to use them.

This is why it's not uncommon to see a company fire unproductive clients. If 80 percent of their profits come from 20 percent of their clients, then they make more money by redirecting the energy from low-revenue clients to better service the small number of lucrative contracts—each hour spent on the latter returns more revenue than each hour spent on the former.

If you are working on a computer science programming assignment, schedule yourself to finish a week early so you can add a host of extra bells and whistles.

Work smarter, not harder

These days, you've gotta milk a dollar out of every dime.

An organization is only as effective as its processes.

Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.

Being able to take needless work out of the system is more important than being able to put more work into the system.

Remember, it goes beyond reducing WIP. Being able to take needless work out of the system is more important than being able to put more work into the system.

In any value stream, there is always a direction of flow, and there is always one and only constraint; any improvement not made at that constraint is an illusion.

By relentless and constant experimentation in their daily work, they were able to continually increase capacity, often without adding any new equipment or hiring more people.

Incidentally, until you do this, no matter how many more Brents you hire, Brent will always remain your constraint. Anyone you hire will just end up standing around.

The flow of work goes in one direction only: forward. Create a system of work in it that does that. Remember, the goal is single-piece flow.

Another benefit of having Development and Operations using a shared tool is a unified backlog, where everyone prioritizes improvement projects from a global perspective, selecting

Lean defines two types of customers that we must design for: the external customer (who most likely pays for the service we are delivering) and the internal customer (who receives and processes the work immediately after us). According to Lean, our most important customer is our next step downstream. Optimizing our work for them requires that we have empathy for their problems in order to better identify the design problems that prevent fast and smooth flow.

Get humans out of the deployment business.