An acquiantance planned to start a business making kites. He planned to use an idustrial glue and designs which required gluing on both sides. He devised a technique where he could batch 10 kites in the time it would take to make two kites sequentially.
Likewise, on a train, I overheard two jewellers discussing one of their mutual acquaintances. Apparently, the fellow discovered a lucrative sector of the market (US$900 white gold bracelets). He was making them in batches of 50. He would warm his soldering iron and repeat the same step 50 times. Then he'd repeat the next step 50 times. He didn't care the first few bracelets were bad or if he'd make a mistake because he'd still have 45 or so perfect examples when he finished. Its boring but its very productive.
I once worked a job moving and scanning data from an old paper archive to some custom built software. I developed a batch system which allowed me to spend around half the day browsing the web. When I left, I recommended a fairly smart friend as my replacement, but it turned out he didn't get batching and was fired two weeks later for being overwhelmed with the work.
Of course I would have gladly helped him, but I didn't know there was a problem until it was too late! I had recently moved at the time, and neither of us had a mobile, so we were just out of contact for a while. I thought I was giving him a comfortable gig, so I was shocked to find out he got fired.
At a small company, I once had to put together an big order of 150 PCs for a local college. A one-man assembly line - I had three cordless power screwdrivers. We had an 8-way hard-drive duplicator (I think it was called the Octopus) that we used to make the master HD image. I made a mistake on one of the network card drivers and had to boot up all 150 PCs and update the driver.manually. That taught me a lesson.
An acquiantance planned to start a business making kites. He planned to use an idustrial glue and designs which required gluing on both sides. He devised a technique where he could batch 10 kites in the time it would take to make two kites sequentially.
Likewise, on a train, I overheard two jewellers discussing one of their mutual acquaintances. Apparently, the fellow discovered a lucrative sector of the market (US$900 white gold bracelets). He was making them in batches of 50. He would warm his soldering iron and repeat the same step 50 times. Then he'd repeat the next step 50 times. He didn't care the first few bracelets were bad or if he'd make a mistake because he'd still have 45 or so perfect examples when he finished. Its boring but its very productive.