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Vox Pop: Re-creating scarcity

I have a friend who told me he was thinking about giving his project managers a weekly pile of chips that could be redeemed for person-hours in meetings. So, to schedule firewalled, group face-time, the PM would need to cough up the equivalent number of tokens from her pile. Thus, one, long, all-hands meeting might require the whole week's stack. While, fewer, shorter meetings with smaller groups made the pile go further.

It was just an idea, and I'm pretty sure he never implemented it, but I think it's a fascinating concept. Why? Because I love the idea of re-introducing scarcity into systems that lack boundaries.

Think how the internet in particular (for better and worse) is working to erase any sense of scarcity in our lives -- at least in terms of access to people and ideas. You can email anybody any time; you can divebomb onto someone's radar screen with an IM or SMS; you can have Amazon deliver almost anything to your door tomorrow morning; you can find and download from millions of files instantly; and, given the right tool, you can locate almost any fact in seconds.

But what about the very real (and truly limited) resources that involve human time and attention? Do we want to make ourselves as available as Google and Wikipedia are? Do we want our entire staff to be "always on" for anyone who wants them? What if, for example, emails to a distribution list cost something?

The Question to You

Have you thought about ways to re-introduce scarcity into your life and work? Are you or your team using any homemade systems to govern resources that might otherwise become overtaxed or abused? How would you solve the “too many long meetings” problem?

CM Harrington's picture

Artificial Scarcity

I think the main problem with this working "in the real world" is that the system relies on artificial scarcity for it to work. If the meeting manager decides that this meeting is "really important", s/he will plough right through any self-imposed barriers.

Instead of long giant meetings where the agenda is several high level bullet points, why not apply the GTD concept to the meeting itself. Have a very short meeting to discuss one topic that can be covered in about 10 minutes, then go back to your workspace and follow-up based on the outcome of that meetlet.

Of course, then you run into the problem of context switching. Humans aren't good at context switching. If you're in "the zone", you suffer huge mental penalties for stepping out of that, and doing something else.

 
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