Computer related:
- Don’t be your family computer savy guy, you just found yourself a bunch payless jobs…
- Long desks are cool and all, but the amount the space they occupy is not worth it.
- Block work related phone calls at weekends, being disturbed at your leisure for things that could be resolved on Mondays will sour your day.
Buying stuff:
- There is expensive because of brand and expensive because of material quality, do your research.
- Buck buying is underrated, save yourself a few bucks, pile that toilet paper until the ceiling is you must.
- Second hand/broken often means never cleaned, lubricated or with easy fixable problem.
Explain.
For me, inventory is a way to save money, save time, and it gives you a buffer when shortages happen.
This is at the expense of space, so if you have free (wasted) space, you might as well take advantage of it.
It’s an idea from Lean management. Everything you need to keep, prevents you from keeping something else; requires you to remember where it is, where you could be remembering something else; takes longer to move when you have to move it; takes longer to organise than having less would. It poses fire hazards that having nothing wouldn’t pose. Blocks light that having nothing wouldn’t block. Keeping stuff is inherently wasteful.
None of this is to say that keeping stuff is bad. It may be very useful to keep it. But you should always recognise that doing so incurs a cost that you need to trade off against its usefulness.
While we’re on it, inventory is one of the eight kinds of waste identified in Lean. They are:
Remember TIM WOODS.
All of this is meant for running a factory, but I’ve found a lot of them useful in other bits of life, especially the idea that Inventory is a form of waste.