10 Practical Tips on Freeing up Mental RAM. Do hardworking employees make their slacker colleagues more productive? Few places are less festive than a supermarket checkout in December, with overworked staff scanning frozen hams and bags of mixed nuts as fast as they can. Not all of us find it easy to spare a smile for these hardworking people at Christmas. But there is now one more reason to give checkout staff our sympathy: Not only do they labor for low rewards, but they are also being spied upon by economists. The researchers in question, Alexandre Mas and Enrico Moretti, decided that checkout staff would be ideal guinea pigs in an experiment to answer a vexed question: What happens when an unusually hardworking (or lazy) worker joins a team?
The question is part of the broader study of "peer effects. " When my neighbor, classmate, or housemate is particularly smart, dishonest, or lazy, what does that do to me? The question is tricky because most people can select their peers. It is not obvious what they should find. This might be an illusory effect. But why? So the cynics have it. How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb? Maximizing Human Performance. Users perform three tasks when using traditional machines.
They form judgements resulting in decisions relevant to the task being performed. They gather the data necessary to perform the task. They manipulate the machine by operating its controls. For example, when using an automobile, users decide where they want to go. Then they supply themselves with the data necessary to formulate a route to get there, drawn from sources such as road maps and radio traffic reports. Finally, they manipulate the steering wheel, acceleration and brake pedals, giving moment-to-moment instructions to the machine in order to carry out the task. More sophisticated than the automobile is the modern mechanical home sewing machine.
User-performance is maximized by attacking each of the three steps, reducing the need for decision-making, enabling the machine to gather its own data, and cutting back on the amount of machine-manipulation necessary to achieve the goal. Reduce Machine Manipulation D ecrease Data-entry.