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The next production principle you can apply is to allow slack—a bit of looseness in your scheduling. Highway planners, for example, know that a freeway can handle an optimum number of vehicles. Having fewer cars means that the road is not being used at capacity. But at that optimum point, if just a few more cars are allowed to enter the traffic flow, everything comes to a crunching halt. With the new metering devices that control access during the rush hour, planners can get a fix on the right number. The same thing can be done for managerial work. There is an optimum degree of loading, with enough slack built in so that one unanticipated phone call will not ruin your schedule for the rest of the day. You need some slack.
High Output Management
Andrew S. Grove
The problem with making an extrinsic reward the only destination that matters is that some people will choose the quickest route there, even if it means taking the low road.
In the Northern Hemisphere, the switch to daylight savings time in March results in most people losing an hour of sleep opportunity. Should you tabulate millions of daily hospital records, as researchers have done, you discover that this seemingly trivial sleep reduction comes with a frightening spike in heart attacks the following day. Impressively, it works both ways. In the autumn within the Northern Hemisphere, when the clocks move back and we gain an hour of sleep opportunity time, rates of heart attacks plummet the day after. A similar rise-and-fall relationship can be seen with the number of traffic accidents, proving that the brain, by way of attention lapses and microsleeps, is just as sensitive as the heart to very small perturbations of sleep. Most people think nothing of losing an hour of sleep for a single night, believing it to be trivial and inconsequential. It is anything but.
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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