Scientists and the Rat Skull

I have a file where I put topics for columns. Now I found this there: “Producer and editor, scientists and a rat skull.” I felt like Mayakovsky, who in his article “How to make poetry?” he told how he once woke up at night and in the dark, with a charred match, wrote down “a single leg” on the lid of a cigarette box, and in the morning he thought for a long time what kind of leg it was and how it got there. Then I remembered, and the leg became part of “Cloud in Pants”: “Like a soldier, cut off by the war, unnecessary, no one’s, takes care of his only leg.”

In my case, everything is more modest - just a text about the organization of labor. The fact is that in the two months of existence of the program in which I work, we managed to recruit a large staff. In the beginning, each of us had to regularly perform all television functions - search for information, negotiate with experts, travel to filming, edit, sit at the remote control in the control room, transcribe, write scripts. Then there were more people, and my work was reduced to what I was called for (“a person who can read and write”). It seemed to me that this was wonderful, but pretty soon I realized that my efficiency had noticeably decreased: it was absolutely impossible to write texts for eight hours in a row, and therefore I had to write them for twelve hours - four of which were spent reading the friend feed.

An eight-hour working day and a fixed schedule are, at first glance, very convenient things: firstly, it leaves some time for the rest of your life, and secondly, everyone is at work at the same time and can discuss it. But they catastrophically reduce the efficiency of any monotonous work - that is, oddly enough, they come into conflict with another important invention - the idea of ​​division of labor.

If you have two robots under your command, then it is extremely reasonable to send one of them to produce a product, and the second to sell it. Each robot will develop the appropriate skills, and the business will flourish. But if you have two people subordinate to you, each of whom has a brain inside, and not a processor, then it may turn out to be much more profitable to teach everyone to both sell and produce. Although learning will be slower, employees who switch from one activity to another every two hours will become more effective at both. If monotonous work is needed from a single robot, it is convenient to turn it on for eight hours. If from a single person, it is much better to provide him with a free schedule and not just allow, but actively encourage breaks in work.

But it’s much better, of course, to organize your work so that you can do different things every day. In this sense, it seems to me that scientists have a lot of opportunities. You can plan your research so that first you spend a month preparing rat brain specimens, and then spend a month processing the data and writing an article, but you can probably organize everything differently: pick out pieces of the skull and tinker with a microtome for two hours, and then process the data for two hours according to yesterday's rats.

Probably, all of this is a truism that can be heard at any lecture on labor organization. As a matter of fact, they were in the biology textbook for the ninth grade, in the form of a story about Pavlov, who went to clear the paths of snow and said that the best rest is a change of activity. But despite this, they are somehow not used at all in our everyday life. When I get hired as an editor, they give me a computer, but they don't give me a shovel. Although, I'm sure it would be a very valuable mental tool.

Anastasia Kazantseva