Side note: this works great for fermions as well…

To save the densest among you the oh so tedious task of extrapolation here are a some anecdotal examples.

Dishwasher: Sort your dishes when you pull them out. Cut your walking time to the minimal possible steps, think of this like accessing cache data. Enjoy the now painless benefit of constantly clean dishes and kitchen.

Short story: Some friends had a geodesic dome company. I’d get brought out to do setup when they were really busy. These Domes had a lot of heavy metal pipes of different and specific lengths. Its hot, it’s outside, its heavy and tedious… pipes would invariably be in a giant pile on a pallet… caught another friend doing bubble sort… the 56’ dome went up in record time with the two of us.

More meta-hierarchical: End of life, parents on cusp of hoarding. Trauma combined with sentimentality manifests as projecting value on to items. Items pile up, life becomes unmanageable, think of this like running out of ram. Solution: be present, calm and patient. Help sort the memories and slowly help sort the items. Word of warning this is NP-hard-af… eventually they will get out of it and the life for them and you will dramatically improve.

Further reading: https://knolling.org/what-is-knolling

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bluGill 2 days ago | parent [-]

Just be careful. Often there are goals other than efficiency. If you get the dishwasher unloaded while cooking - but burn the meal that was a loss. you might be able to do something else while unloading the dishwasher if your sort order is less effient. Or sometimes sorting is less efficent as there isn't enough to do as to make up for the overhead of sorting.

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wizardforhire 2 days ago | parent [-]

Good point, thats how I feel about to do lists most of the time.

I think the key insight you make is recognizing that attempting to do two things at the same time is asking for disaster. Concurrency in my experience is all about rhythm and timing… something humans in their default state are notoriously bad at ie without training and practice. The best approach in my experience is doing one thing at a time with focus and conviction until completion, then move on to the next thing. If concurrency is desired then understanding duration and prioritizing items via dependencies is of utmost prudence. But paraphrasing Michel de Montaigne… something something about something

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bluGill 2 days ago | parent [-]

Concurrency is very hard for humans to get right. It can work in a factory where we can analysis everything and figure out that someone has time to do two jobs (you might be able to put the windshield wipers on at the end of the line and then turn to a different line to put the seat recline buttons on - if the lines are arranged for this and the bottleneck is somewhere else on the line). However most home jobs are not the repetitive and so you can never get good enough at something to take advantage of it. (maybe if you always make the same meal every night you will know where the breaks are and can do something else - but most people like more variety in life)

	▲	wizardforhire a day ago \| parent [-]
		Absolutely! And even this is a challenge! We just weren’t built for doing more than one thing at a time out of the gate, and context switching is our achilles heal. (Not to say there aren’t extraordinary examples to the contrary, its just not the default and requires a lot of practice. I’m thinking specifically about musicians but most people aren’t ready for the kind of commitment necessary to reinforce the neural pathways required to develop the skill) You hit on something really deep about variety. A conversation near and dear to my heart, sadly this forum is not really conducive to the kind of long form dialog the topic is deserving of.