[blorgle]

Yeah, seems dumb "economist" thinking. The idea that "if someone gives up and walks away, everyone behind them benefits" is a absurd on two fronts.The stall owner clearly doesn't benefit from a lost sale. Mulled wine, mince pies and hot chocolate are not fungible. Maybe you are allergic to chocolate. Maybe mince pies make you gag.

Also, optimising for queue length only makes any sense in the described scenario if all stalls are owned by a single entity.

I'm not even going to touch the "only add something to your todo list if you are going to do it immediately" stupidity.

[iamthemonster]

Of course the position "only add something to your todo list if you are going to do it immediately" is ridiculous at face value.

But if you are a bit more generous with its intentions, then there is something that really chimes with me about it.

I work in engineering support to oil and gas operations (but I'm sure this is applicable to many industries), and we have quarterly workplans and pretty fixed budgets. Of course our budget-holder typically asks us to do more work than we are able to deliver, so I will often have to say "this job does not make the priority list for next quarter, but we can do it the quarter after next?".

However, I've found a pretty good rule of thumb is that if a job was not high priority enough to win a place on the next quarter's to-do list then by the time the following quarter comes around, it will probably get bumped off the priority list by something else higher priority. In other words, our limited budget means there is always some 'cut-off point' where work that looks important is still not quite high enough priority (compared to our other work) to ever get done.

It is easy to 'form a long queue' by saying yes to work and letting it sit on our to-do list forever, but just slightly too low down to ever get done. But in our industry at least, there's a small overhead involved in just keeping that work around and passing the ownership of the task from person to person.

A more realistic rephrasing could be "if you're adding something to your todo list and it's not high enough priority to bump anything else, consider how much inefficiency it will cause long-term by it just sitting in your queue for months"

Maybe a little silly for your personal todo lists, but I think the idea has some applicability at a larger scale.

[olau]

I remember attending a lecture about how to do well in the academic world well back at university decades ago, where the lecturer quoted another (famous) researcher who had a personal rule for incoming requests. Either he did it now or he did it never. Now is not literally now, but close.

Just saying no and not pretending that you might do can also be helpful in other ways. For instance, you or someone else might then realize that to get something like this done, it needs to be made much easier to do.

I've personally just finished planting 450 meters of windbreaking bushes around my orchard. Now, I should have done that four years ago - but I came up with a fancier plan, to put it on top of an embankment, and it would get rid of some of the traffic noise, and I had a guy with lots of soil in spare - great plan, except that person was really slow to respond and was actually depending on another person, and I had to get the municipality to agree, and... as it turns out, the required level of social energy to push this through was just not happening for me in my spare time. So after four years, my wife made me scrap the idea, then I almost immediately realized that hey, I could just plant the damn bushes, and here we are, a few months later, and they're out there and looking great, eight different species, future homes of birds and other wildlife.

[emodendroket]

I think sometimes a "black hole" is exactly what's needed for these requests. OK, sure, it's noted, and that's what we'll do if we somehow have nothing better to do.

[Someone]

> The stall owner clearly doesn't benefit from a lost sale. Mulled wine, mince pies and hot chocolate are not fungible.

If there continuously is a queue, the stall owner doesn’t lose a sale when somebody walks away, and, if the owner is smart, doesn’t lose any produce, as they shouldn’t prepare more than they can, at maximum speed, sell before closing time.

[ngc248]

Exactly, it does not make sense at all. The "queue" is not the main thing and "buying" is the main thing. The "economist" thinking here is akin to "Lets not make everyone rich, lets make everyone poor"