Comment by godelski

I used to work as a physical engineer and a common task is "where's that tool?" People leave things at their work station and they float around and well... you can't keep track of things you can't see.

Manager finally got fed up (yes, he was the biggest offender lol) and we organized the whole shop. Gave every tool a specific place. Required tools to be put back. But it actually became easier to put back because everything had a home and we made it so their home was accessible (that's the trick).

Took us like a week to do and it's one of those things that seemed useless. But no one had any doubts of the effectiveness of this because it'd be really difficult to argue that we didn't each spend more than a week (over a year) searching for things. Not only that, it led to fewer lost and broken tools. It also just made people less frustrated and led to fewer arguments. Maybe most important of all, when there was an emergency we were able to act much faster.

So that's changed my view on organizing. It's definitely a thing that's easy to dismiss and not obviously worth the investment but even in just a year there's probably a single event that is solved faster due to the organization. The problem is you have to value the money you would have lost were you not organized. It's invisible and thus easy to dismiss. It's easier because everything else seems so important. But there's always enough time to do things twice and never enough time to do it right.