Welcome!

This will be a series of blog posts where I present different ideas around optimizing life and business in a slightly taylorist frame of reference.

Taylor? Our indispensable (past) theorist, from the industrial revolution’s
core era:

Mr. Frederick Winslow Taylor, 1856-1915 (Wikipedia)

Let’s get into the day’s theme:

My morning

Let’s say for the sake of setting us up, that on a Monday morning I..

• Item1: I want to jog 4 km before work
• Item2: need to take kids to the kindergarten, also before leaving to work
• Item3: crucially need to buy a bottle of dishwashing liquid from the shop
• Item4: need to get a shower before leaving to work

What’s the optimal order for achieving these? I need to get everything done. We don’t consider yet relative timing, so as long as all those 4 things get done before leaving work, we’re fine.

Lurking in there: some obvious order constraints

Let’s introduce real world to the list. If I am living alone with kids, or my spouse is not at home in the morning, then there’s one constraint:

1. Constraint is that I cannot do things that would require me to leave the house, before I have done “need to take kids to the kindergarten”.

First iteration based on the kindergarten constrain

Thus we could make a list as follows:

<Kindergarten> + (the rest)

We have sorted now one task to be the first priority, since that relieves us to make room for considering the order of the other tasks.