Teck's Blog

Engineer's often spend a majority of their time looking at numbers, graphs, data, and so on. The entire idea is to look at what's going on to make something work, add features, or otherwise improve or broaden our understanding of something. Normally we are looking at devices (digital, mechanical, etc) to improve or broaden our understanding of, but why couldn't we perform the same kind of analysis on life in general.

Gain Vs. Time, (Task Effectiveness)

Growing up we're all always told that the more time and hard work that you put into something, the more you will benefit. I've actually realized that while hard work can be an important factor, it can also be irrelevant. In the same way that hard work is not always important, nor is the amount of time. Here we have a graph which shows 4 quadrants with the Gain (Personal, Professional, Spiritual, whatever) Vs. The Time it takes. This is by far the most accurate way to look at it is as a graph in which everything you do can be put into one of 4 quadrants. They are as follows: 1) High Gain, Low Time 2) High Gain, High Time 3) Low Gain, Low Time 4) Low Gain, High Time I have further categorized these kinds of tasks into another 3 Categorys: Awesome Tolerable RUN!

We want to seek out quadrant #1 because anything that we can do using a minimal amount of time, yet have a high level of gain is Awesome!

We should simply tolerate quadrant's #2 & 3.

Finally, we should try to totally avoid quadrant #4. Why do something if there's very little gain to be had, yet the task takes a very long time.


Some Examples of things that would belong in each Quadrant:

• Quadrant #1
  
  • Doing crayon drawing's of people on StrafeRight for laugh's
    
  • Asking out as many women as you possibly can in a short period of time
  
  
• Quadrant #2
  
  • Learning a foreign language
    
  • Getting a 3rd Degree
  
  
• Quadrant #3
  
  • Taking out the trash before your girl friend/wife can ask you
    
  • Telling Excessive_Kill to shut up while he's talking in Teamspeak
  
  
• Quadrant #4
  
  • Trying to convince Mundane that Fascism, Communism, and Socialism are NOT the same thing.
    
  • Being forced to listen to Excessive_Kill talk in Teamspeak while writing a blog post (This is actually a No Gain situation).
  
  

Anyway, tomorrow I'll see about posting another one of these... I've attached a couple of other picture's that will be used in the future... Kind of a preview.