About Dan Markovitz
Dan Markovitz is the founder and president of TimeBack Management. Prior to founding his own firm, Mr. Markovitz held management positions at Sierra Designs, Adidas, CNET and Asics Tiger. Learn More...
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Leveling; smoothing out the flow; e.g., doing two performance evaluations a day for 3 weeks, rather than ten a day for three days -- and then needing to take a vacation because you're so burned out.
Overburdening people, process, or equipment; e.g., people working 100 hour weeks for months on end -- come to think of it, like most lawyers and accountants.
Uneveness or variability; e.g., leaving work at the normal time on Thursday, but having to stay at the office till midnight on Friday because the boss finally got around to giving you that project...at 4:30pm.
Waste; activities that your customer doesn't value and doesn't want to pay for; e.g., billing your customer for the really expensive 10am FedEx delivery because you didn't finish the document on time.
Fallacy of Efficiency
I like the concepts you are kicking around in this entry.
The idea of what constitutes "work" is problematic. For example, I have consulted to numerous software development companies. The common sense notion of "work" was time spent at a computer console generating lines of code.
Careful observation revealed that the lines of code typed typed at the keyboard where actually the product of dialog and gestation that occurred during "non-working" activity. The upshot was that the inefficiencies of idle conversation, skylarking, and down-time, were the essential well-springs of productivity and innovation. In my experience, this phenomenon applies to production lines as well and the back rooms of retail stores as well.
So what is "work" and what is "not work"? Once an enterprise understands the nature of the whole person in the context of the whole of the system of people, it will create a system that embraces such inefficiencies.