Ask: How do you apply “programmer’s” efficiency in everyday life things?

51 points by 5_minutes 7 years ago | 79 comments

I notice myself towards fellow human beings that I try to optimize simple everyday tasks. “They” mainly try to optimize certain events, by using Google Maps for the shortest route.

But I try to do this with numerous things, from filling up the dishwasher, to taking out the thrash, to (quite often to irritation to my SO), postponing things: to add things up and then to everything in one-efficient go.

Some of these moundaine tasks are “repeated” items with a reminder of a todo-app. Or by paying all bills every 2 weeks, instead of when they come in.

My wife (2 kids) cleans the house basically constantly. While when I’m alone, I just do it at the end of the day, cause it doesn’t matter to clean up multiple times the toys.

I buy things that don’t expire (like toothpaste) in bulk. While she buys them by one.

Do you guys/girls have similar instincts and events happening? It’s really not about non-chalance, but rather the strive to do things as efficiently as possible with as little effort as possible, while having the same good outcome.

wskinner 7 years ago |

I store physical items in my home in an LRU cache. Items I use all the the time are close to the places where I use them. Less frequently used items are stored further from the place they are used, for example in a closet or the garage.

This clashes badly with my roommate, also a programmer, who strongly prefers to store items by category. He will put all the kitchen gadgets on a shelf by the kitchen even if those gadgets go months without being used.

The advantage of his method is that you always know where something is, because it’s in the right place. The advantage of my method is that most of the time I get things done faster, though sometimes I end up spending some time looking for a thing I use only infrequently.

It turns out he also has much more stuff than I do. Since caches are more efficient with a smaller working set, it makes sense that we would each prefer our own strategy. Who knows which direction the causation goes.

Cieplak 7 years ago | |

This reminds me a lot of Marie Kondo's book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, which had a huge impact on how I organize things.

tchaffee 7 years ago | | |

Also reminds me of Sandra Felton's book The Messies Manual: The Procrastinator's Guide to Good Housekeeping which had a huge impact on my approach to most things in life requiring organization. I'll one-up the idea of an LRU cache: you can own several pairs of scissors. And the right place for them can be the workshop, the sewing room, the art studio room, the kitchen, and your home office. That one tip has saved me loads of time.

flukus 7 years ago | |

I've always done this but I always find my cache being polluted because I didn't estimate the frequency of use correctly. Regular purges are important otherwise it ends up as a fragmented mess.

A good alternative is how I handle my clothes, many would call it a pile but my clothes are stored as a few LIFO stacks, one for work, one for weekends, one for underwear, etc. For work the shirts are all the same so it's just the simplest option, for weekends it works out well because my favorites are always at the top. I suspect most people manage their pantries the same way.

wskinner 7 years ago | | |

I handle my clothes as a combination of LRU cache in each drawer for clean clothes and min heap for dirty. Ish. I agree with you that most people probably do something like this as well. It’s not rocket science, just computer science.

rjblackman 7 years ago | |

Came here to say this. My system is basically an LRU cache also. Also I have a storage system that I can lookup anything I need to use (that I don't use often) that is just labelled boxes and database I can string search. This is really related to a kaizen approach to things that I've read about in various books, things that don't get used get sold off.

kimdotcom 7 years ago | |

What an excellent answer!

asah 7 years ago | | |

I have the same problem.

IMHO do both: multiple LRU caches by category.

tchaffee 7 years ago |

You are task oriented, while your wife is goal oriented. If there are twenty dishes to wash and you only have time to wash seven, the goal oriented person washes the seven. Goal oriented people actually tend to be better organized and get more things done. All of the time you spend planning doesn't add up to enough savings for it to pay off. Try timing a few things and see for yourself. Loading the dishwasher in a different way might save you one or two seconds total. But you spent more time thinking about it. Just get things done. You'll find you are faster, and you spend less time thinking. Thinking requires effort and energy. Save that for the stuff that really matters.

projektir 7 years ago | |

Such claims are very major and significant, but rarely have strong evidence behind them, and as such I would recommend that they are not made, and that the OP continues to do whatever it is that they find efficient.

_8j50 7 years ago | | |

Opinion does not require evidence. He was commenting based on experience.

tchaffee 7 years ago | | |

How much effort would it take you to pay attention to whether or not you are goal or task oriented and to time a few things to see if you are being too focused on efficiency when you could just be getting things done?

If you posted about how you approached flying a drone and someone noticed something they thought could use improvement, would you ask for a source? Or just give it a try if their advice sounded reasonable?

Let's not get so enthusiastic about asking for sources and evidence that we insist on sources for things which we could quickly and cheaply experiment with on our own and find out for ourselves if the advice has any merit.

pommers 7 years ago |

I've gone down the path of minimising my choices to a small good set for a lot of things. I do this for everything from clothes and shoes to managing my money.

Clothes are simple. 10 shirts that are either black or grey. Three shirts that are work branded. close to ten pairs of chinos and jeans (all work appropriate, some kevlar lined for motorbikes) Bulk undies and socks, all patterned so they are easy to pair up. Two pairs of shorts for summer and a pair of sports shorts for sport and the beach. A couple of suits for the odd time I need them (weddings and interviews)

For getting stuff done like cooking or making stuff, I operate with the minimum number of "tools". For actual tools, this means a cordless drill and screwdriver, couple of power tools, a good screwdriver set, a spanner set and a socket set. For the kitchen it means three good knives, the minimum set of kitchen utensils I need to make everything I make regularly, one good pan and two good big tiered pots that I can steam stuff in.

Financially I assign resources as they come in. I split my paycheck into fun money (pub and lunches/dinners out), food money (going to the shops and making stuff myself), savings and bills. All my bills are direct debited and the amount I put in to paying bills is higher than I worked out it would cost me over the course of the year. This means i only ever have to think about how much of the fun money and food money I have when making decisions.

By minimising my options when it comes to making decisions, I minimise my time working through all the options to make them.

pidge 7 years ago |

A literal one that I probably picked up from another comment section here:

Treat your closet as an LRU cache—always put clothes away on one side, and start looking for items from the same side. As an added benefit when you run out of capacity, anything that has ended up on the far side is a likely candidate to be evicted to a higher latency storage layer (bins in the attic), or simply deleted and recomputed if ever needed again (just drop it off at Goodwill, you can always buy another).

derekp7 7 years ago | |

You also have to add a recompute expense to that calculation. The $500 3-piece suit that you only wear to special work events, weddings, etc. shouldn't get deleted just because you haven't used it in a year.

hakfoo 7 years ago | |

I've found clothing to be a problem because it tends to be a stack organization for things in drawers, which means you tend to keep pulling out the same few pairs of shorts, wearing them and putting them back, but the ones at the bottom stay untouched for years.

Rjevski 7 years ago |

Don't have much to say about how to do things, but I'd say try to reduce the number of things to do, so the little you still have to do won't be a big deal.

For example, I only communicate with companies/suppliers via email/phone (and change suppliers if they can't accommodate that). This means any physical mail that arrives must be spam, and goes in the trash without even being opened - anything I care about would instead come through phone or email. This means I haven't needed to fiddle with papers for ages, while my flatmate still wastes a good 10 minutes almost every day reading incoming mail (and then putting it into a huge pile she'll eventually have to sort out - akin to technical debt).

Bills are paid out automatically (via "Direct Debit") so I don't have to worry about that either.

Shopping is taken care by Amazon subscriptions, which means new stuff arrives soon before the old boxes run out. Haven't been grocery shopping in ages.

Food is handled by Deliveroo/Uber Eats, so no cooking necessary. I use throwaway forks & plates so no dish washing necessary either.

Cleaning/housekeeping is handled by a company that does it every week in the flat while I'm away, so no worries about that either.

Not all of this is possible for everyone (things might be different depending on your location, whether you have a family, your financial situation) but personally it works great for now and I have plenty of time when I get home. Basically for anything that you're doing, try to see if there's a way to not do it at all or to outsource it to someone else (who might be an expert at it and thus do it more efficiently than you can).

lovich 7 years ago |

I dont. If I applied what I did at work all day to what I do at home, both would become very monotonous. Sometimes I like to do things slowly just to take enjoyment in the act of doing, or I like to keep a routine so I can do chores on autopilot and not have to really think about it

teeray 7 years ago |

I have a hybrid system with my closet and Evernote:

The closet was something of a mess—assorted things used with varying frequency. After purging what obviously could go, I bought identical boxes that would fit in the shelves of the closets and labelled them with letters.

I then created an index. Each box got a new note in a dedicated Evernote notebook named according to its label, and in the body of the note I listed its contents.

My closet now had full text search. This made it ridiculously easy to find any random item I might need. I just had to type the name of the thing, and the matching note's name would tell me what box to look in.

Also, when I needed to find something, I always added an "x" on a newline under the thing when I retrieved it. This updated the last modified time of the note. After awhile, the boxes with the oldest last modified times became prime targets for future purging. It also made it very obvious when frequently used items should get dedicated space with quick access.

brlewis 7 years ago |

I use the "sort first" optimization more than non-programmers in my household.

For example, my technique for putting away groceries is to take the contents out and set them next to the grocery bags, then sort them by where they're going (kitchen fridge, pantry closet, etc.). This is faster than repeatedly taking one or two items out of a bag and bringing them where they go.

analog31 7 years ago | |

Amusingly, my family has an additional habit: Our shopping list is organized according to the aisles of our preferred supermarket. It really speeds up shopping.

brlewis 7 years ago | | |

Is it a paper or electronic shopping list? I've thought about that, but we're still using a pad of paper stuck to the fridge with a magnet, so it seems hard to implement. I generally do the shopping, and as I move to a new section of the store I run through the list placing dots left of items in that section. Then when I get each item I draw a vertical line through it. I find it easier to spot breaks in a vertical line than to spot missing check marks.

kqr2 7 years ago |

Also see the book Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions:

https://smile.amazon.com/Algorithms-Live-Computer-Science-De...

strictnein 7 years ago |

I have very similar instincts, and it weirds me out sometimes. I have an in-depth understanding of the efficiency difference of the direction I mow my lawn (NW/SE is the best for the shape of the yard, but you can't do that every time. N/S is second most efficient. E/W is third and I can't stand it), and am constantly wondering if there is a better way to snowblow my driveway.

Past that, I feel myself optimizing paths through the office and hand movements for juggling things and the door, stuff like that. And then when I see people use less than optimal routes and techniques I wonder why that's the case.

jrrrr 7 years ago | |

Just be mindful of what you're optimizing for. Like, minimum energy exerted or minimum distance traveled might not be the best choice for a sedentary office worker.

I, too, spend an unreasonable amount of thought on mowing optimization.

wenc 7 years ago |

Whenever I'm trying to look for something in a (mostly) sorted list, I always do a binary search. I can't recall the exact circumstances this has come up in real life but it has.

jolmg 7 years ago | |

Dictionaries and other sorted books is what comes to mind for me. Always open from the middle and pick the next stack of paper to split from either the left hand or right hand until we get to the page we want.

In school, we'd need to open a specific chapter of our textbooks, and I'd search by the same method.

FrozenVoid 7 years ago |

Classifying tasks into priorities. 1.Urgent and required. Sorted by urgency. 2.Required. Waits until all #1 completes. 3.Optional. Waits until all #2 completes. 4.Leisure/Misc. Waits until all #3 completes.

Reducing wasted space by putting items with lower usage into storage space category that is in proportion to usage: 0.Items with daily use priority 0. 1.Items which aren't used daily get priority -1. 2.Items which aren't used weekly get priority -2. 3.Items which aren't used monthly get priority -3. etc, the less used items occupy their own category(e.g. yearly use "yearly storage space") .

Reducing decision space iteratively: 1.Enumerating all possible choices/options. 2.Discarding all low-quality choices. 3.Discarding all mediocre choices. 4.Selecting a set of top choices. 5.Writing down a comparison table for #4. 6.Filling the table in #5 7.Eliminating choices that sound worse than average. 8.Repeat #7 until you're left with one choice.

Solving complex problems by breaking them into sub-problems. 1.Formulating on paper the scope of the problem as separate sub-problems. 2.Sorting the sub-problems in order of difficulty. 3.Connecting the sub-problems to their potential solutions. Like a graph from sub-problems -> solutions 4.Selecting the most connected solution. 5.Improving the solution to include more connections(so a single solution solves all or most sub-problems in #2) 6.If a solution can't be improved, try next most connected solution. Focus on the solutions that can be improved. 7.The best-performing solution is implemented. 8.Repeat with next best solution.

bradlys 7 years ago |

I try to parallelize as many tasks as possible. My SO absolutely hates this a lot of times because it means you have to work for longer period of times instead of breaking up tasks. But stuff does get done in less absolute time.

Example: We're baking something. Say cornbread. My usual thing is to immediately wash the dishes after putting the stuff into the oven. This means two things happen at once: dishes and cooking. Then when while we're eating, the dishes are drying. So then someone can put away the dishes and then the other can start putting any other dishes we used into the sink.

Basically, I just try to parallelize tasks as much as possible. Grouping them is good too but sometimes mentally it's too much to wait for the grouping to occur. I do cost benefit analysis on things like multiple trips vs one heavy and awkward trip. Sometimes multiple trips is faster and less stressful. Try to factor things in like: well if I have less stuff in my arms I can /run/. I can't do that when I have a bunch of stuff in my hands.

Other things I do are like: try to step up 2 steps at a time at the pace of doing 1 at a time. Basically 2x up stair climbing performance. Run/jog to various parts of the home or between the car and getting inside. Just trying things to speed things up and get little bits of exercise in.

Unfortunately, I live in very small spaces so I frequently optimize for time over space (cost of being a newer resident in the Bay area). Very small cache here so no option to buy in bulk. :)

Oh and other unusual things: try to do stuff with your non dominate hand. I only brush my teeth with my non dominant hand. Incredibly difficult at first with a manual brush (small circles are hard!). But after 10+ years, much better. I try this with various tasks just to try to up my dexterity and keep life interesting.

bad-joke 7 years ago |

I tend to "think" in Logo. Often this comes down to shouting "forward" at slow pedestrians but thankfully my family has learned to keep me away from the reptile exhibit at the local zoo (I have been ejected several times).

It's really quite stunning how many people have difficulty thinking of things in terms of birds and turtles.

roryisok 7 years ago |

Loving the LRU cache IRL posts :)

I'm constantly tweaking my laundry sort algorithms to try and find the fastest. My latest is to have bins for the two youngest, two oldest and myself and my wife. I grab and chuck dry clothes into each. Then I take those to the appropriate place in the house and sort.

I also have toy cleanup bins stashed in each room so I can pile stuff away quickly for easier tidying.

And I have a dustpan just for toy tidying, scooping things off the floor.

And I try to keep the vacuum in the centre of the house where it has the least distance to travel to any room.

And I try to quietly take the messiest toys (small parts) out of circulation.

And all our devices use the same charging cable, and there are charge points with those cables in the most strategic places in the house.

And I try to tidy as a background "garbage collection" task, never leaving a room without removing something that's not supposed to be there

simonpantzare 7 years ago |

Hard to measure but I believe I think more about how things might fail than other family members.

taberiand 7 years ago | |

I've seen similar - Them: "You're too pessimistic" vs. Me: "You haven't thought this all the way through".

There's a balance to be struck though, because often worrying too much about things that don't happen or saying "I told you so" when they do only really serves to annoy people.

jolmg 7 years ago | | |

There is indeed a balance, because opportunities tend to have time limits. Thinking things through for too long to arrive at a sure and optimal way of doing something might mean failing to take the opportunity you had to do it at all.

fshaun 7 years ago | | |

Thinking things through isn't necessarily pessimistic. When I have a contingency plan already in mind, I worry less about the event actually happening.

bgongfu 7 years ago | |

It sort of makes sense in an engineering/programming context, but life in general doesn't really lend itself to that level of control.

Did you ever try thinking about how they might turn out for the best instead to compare results? Energy follows thought, the more you focus on it the more likely it is to happen from my experience. And the only place and time you're ever going to stop failure from happening is here and now using up to date local knowledge.

Take it or leave it...

peterburkimsher 7 years ago |

When someone's walking towards me head-on, I don't do an awkward side-step in sync with them. That usually ensures a collision. I stop still, and close my eyes. They then avoid me.

Taking a bus in a foreign country (e.g. China) without reading the timetable is challenging. So I would get on the first bus going the right direction, and stay on until it deviated from my desired path. Then I'd get off, walk to the next stop, and repeat.

DougN7 7 years ago |

I plot my routes in the car based on the total score of a route composed of points for left turn, right turns, lights, etc. Avoiding left turns at a light is a big goal. I know others do this too (notably UPS’s supposed optimization of only making right turns).

taurath 7 years ago |

Moving is pretty easy. Everything is staged in a priority queue, all boxes are “databased” by room -> type. Also since I’m lazy, it’s pretty good easy to classify things that are wasting time, though a good distraction is definitely sometimes worth it.

dmh2000 7 years ago |

I have a glass walled shower, and I experimented with different patterns of squeeging it until I got one that looked like the best. I would have solved it analytically if my math was better.

rajacombinator 7 years ago |

Perhaps you should be optimizing for overall happiness of your household rather than your own. Perhaps you should try communicating in a collaborative manner with your family.

serf 7 years ago |

i'm meticulous about checklists, mostly due to programming.

I have extensive records, self-kept for a few hours a week, regarding any and all finances, home maintenance, car maintenance, etc.

It mostly serves as a form of self-flagellation in the form of financial guilt associated with over-spending, but it's a useful trait to have once-in-a-while.

I was a prodigious note-taker in school, too. I think that may be related.

tonyarkles 7 years ago | |

I was hoping someone else would mention checklists. It’s the closest I’ve come to “automating” a lot of chores. These are kept in org-mode with habits associated with them, so they’re both reoccurring and have a nice chart to show how frequently they’re being done.

As an example, “kitchen - daily”. My partner and I have determined that I’m totally blind to things, so I have a checklist that looks like:

- clean dishes from dishwasher to cupboard

- inspect counters, clockwise starting at dishwasher

- dirty dishes from sink to dishwasher

- if dirty, wash and oil cast iron pans

There’s a bunch of these, one for each living area, and a daily/weekly one for each. They pop up in my schedule with the rest of my consulting tasks, and since I work from home I can just grab one from the day’s master todo list when I need a break.

jaco8 7 years ago |

I structure things , whenever possible, around a simple rule: Faster, better, more efficient .

megaman22 7 years ago |

I can't help trying to ruthlessly optimize repetitive tasks. It's sort of like the rule of three in real life. Quick example:

Yesterday, I was building a set of shelves in my garage. These are pretty beefy to hold hardware and tools and stuff, so I was building them with a 2x4 frame and plywood on top. Three levels, and I wanted them to be 10 feet by 2 feet, so I had ten foot front and back rails, with shorter stringers every two feet. So I had six rails, and six stringers per level, total of 18.

For the rails, I measured one, marking center lines for each stringer. Then I lined up all six, and drew the lines across all of them with my square. Probably saved fifteen minutes compared to marking and measuring each one individually.

For the stringers, each one needed to be 21 inches, and you really want them to all be as close to exactly the same as you can get, or else your the frame gets all out of true. If you try to measure each one and cut them one at a time, you never get them just right, and it takes forever. So I figured the first one, and screwed down a stop block to my miter saw bench, to make a jig. Now I don't have to measure, I just slide the 2x4 down to the stop, hold it against the fence, and zip zip zip, I cut the whole batch in a couple minutes, all just the same length.

Going onto the assembly, I've got my rails all marked out, and my stringers all cut, so I can start screwing things together. The hard part is lining things up, holding it all together, and trying to get the screws started and driven without anything shifting. So I went down my rails and started all 24 screws on each rail where I had the center lines started. Works best if you drive them just through, so there's like a sixteenth of the point sticking out. Now I've just got to line up the stringer square and hit the already started screw with my driver. It also helps keep everything square and reduce walking around if you do them in a snake pattern, so start on one end, screw to one rail, go to the other rail and screw the other end, stay on that rail and start the next stringer, then go to the other side.

Last, getting to the installation, the really fiddly part is trying to get everything lined up and level, while you're trying to hold the assembled shelf up and then screw it all in. Real PITA if you're working alone. I was screwing them into the wall studs against the back wall of the garage, with a few posts on the unsupported front. So I cut some cheater blocks out of scrap 2x4, that would span two studs, and that the shelf could sit on as I'm installing it. Measure where the shelf should fall on one stud, and screw one side of the cheater there. Then take a small level to level it up before screwing the other side. Then use a four foot level to mark where the other cheater should go, and level that up. Even better, I was in a corner on one side, so I had another stud I put a third cheater on, leveled up kitty-corner with the others. Now when I pick up the whole heavy shelf, I just set it on my blocks, and I've only got to worry about supporting one corner as I'm getting it leveled and attached to my outside post. When that corner is level, everything else is level. Repeat three times for the three shelves.

I do this kind of decomposition and optimization in everything, and always have, way before I even saw a computer...