Minimize your therbligs until it becomes automatic; this doubles your effective lifetime—and thereby gives time to enjoy butterflies and kittens and rainbows.
— Robert A Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
When in high school, I enjoyed reading Robert Heinlein’s science fiction stories. The above quote fascinated me and, once I had at least a vague idea of what a “therblig” was (as I couldn’t just look it up on the internet back then), I set about minimizing mine. Perhaps obsessively so.
I have had a dense and interesting life, from singing backup vocals for the Righteous Brothers to being part of the Space Shuttle launch team, from being an internationally published writer to a practicing family physician and psychiatrist, from authoring a body of open-source software to raising two phenomenal children… not to mention building Twoprops’ gated compound in partnership with the amazing HA. There is no way to know how much of a contribution the minimization of therbligs made versus, say, my privileged middle-class upbringing or the wonderful grandparents who nurtured and supported me as I explored my options in life. I would be willing to assert, in any case, that developing a habit of looking for inefficiencies in motions made at least a little difference.
But…
I have always been a bit high strung. (“A bit?!?” I hear my friends echo incredulously.) It didn’t help, either, that working in healthcare meant that whenever I wasted time, it might mean that somebody could quite literally suffer and die because of that inefficiency.
Since I’ve retired, I have definitely learned to slow down. Living on island time has helped with that. But I have been watching for things that make me anxious and uptight. I discovered one that was unexpected: having my hands full.
In order to optimize my motion, when I’m moving from place-to-place (going from one room of the house to another, or from my office to the front desk when I was working) I was always trying to make sure that I took everything that might need to move in that direction, even if not directly related to the immediate task to which I was attending. So when I’m heading to the garage to get a wrench to tighten a nut on a fixture, for example, I try to remember to grab the laundry basket that will next be needed in the garage where the washer and dryer are, and to take the tire inflator that has been charging on my desk out to the car, and as I’m coming back in to grab Luna the Big Dog’s toys that she has left in the yard. That works, and makes me more efficient most of the time, but it can fail dramatically.
If my hands are full and I see something else that I should carry with me if I want to save time, I’ll sometimes be paralyzed and frustrated. I could get a bag to carry things, but now I have to set something down and find the bag. Or maybe I could just kind of juggle things, but then that affects the order in which I dispose of the items in my hands. It sounds trivial, but I quickly become overwhelmed with dealing with all this stuff in my hands. At that point, I would be much more efficient just making an extra trip, but so ingrained is the drive for efficiency that, instead, I become frustrated and angry trying to work out an optimal solution.
It plays out too, I’ve noticed, when people try to just hand me things instead of asking me to take them. “Are you going to the break room?” and thrust a coffee cup in my path and I’ll feel attacked: “can’t you see I’m already struggling with a juggling act just to get where I’m going?” No, of course, they can’t see that. The struggle is entirely in my brain. But I wonder how many times in my life I’ve snapped at someone just for holding something out in my direction when (unbeknownst to them) I was desperately trying to optimize the use of my hands.
—2p