Effective Ways to Waste Time

The Entrepreneurial Engineer, by David E. Goldberg Copyright 2006 John Wiley Sons, Inc. 

Social organization has been no less successfnl in improving the opportunities to waste time. Kin groups led to tribal organizations to nation-states, to corporations, and, finally, to that most time-waste prone of all organizations, the university. 

Over these tens of thousands of years the variety of ways to dispose of every spare moment has grown tremendously nevertheless, it is possible to categorize fairly broadly the ways to waste time  

In the remainder of this section, we examine these techniques and their effectiveness in some detail. 

In a business that generates more than 10 pieces of paper a year, one of the most effective ways to waste time is misplacing documents you ll later need. Some individuals are quite systematic in their efforts to misplace important documents. These pile drivers have developed an especially effective means of losing any document through the utilization of the pile document retrieval system (PDRS). In this system, the user creates several 3-foot-high piles of recent and not-so-recent documents. When faced with a need for a particular document or approached with an information-retrieval query ( Do you have memo X ), the PDRS adherent wheels around to the piles and utters four magic words It s in here somewhere. Ten minutes later the PDRSer promises to send a copy when he or she finds it. Sure—and the check is in the mail. 

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