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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?

Erin Wade's picture

Scheduling Scarcity

Until fairly recently I'd managed this by essentially scheduling in those non-work activities that I wanted to make sure happened. For example, Monday and Wednesday mornings had a bike ride structured into them - my first meeting of the day was always scheduled late enough after to ensure enough time to get the ride in and a shower after.

Since my schedule often seems to rule my life, placing that human time on it ensured that it actually happened. I had a shift in my schedule a couple of months ago, lost that time, and haven't yet managed to re-institute it.

Many of us have made conscious decisions to move away from 9-5-ish sort of work schedules and manage things independently. There's a lot of good to be said for that, but those structured schedules also structured in that human time. I think Merlin's right here that we have to find a way to put it into the day ourselves.

 
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