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Thursday, June 05, 2008

5S -- the Management Mantra of Tidiness

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5 comments:

Sambaran said...

I used to categorize my books on book shelves by topic, genre etc. I used to classify movie-CDs similarly. These classifications frequently led to ambiguities like you described in your blog.
So now I do not try to categorize at all by theme/genre. I just keep the books alphabetically by author's name as index. I keep the CDs by their alphabetical order of titles. For the past 4-5 years this categorization has minimized sorting ambiguity in my life.
An interesting side effect has been my complete familiarity with bengali/devnagari alphabet sequence now. You are forced to find out whether talabya-sha comes before pet-kata-sha, ta-borgo comes first or pa-bargo etc.

In your sample case for bills, I recommend date as unique field to index.

Sujit Kumar Chakrabarti said...

That's quite a radical but interesting solution Sambaran. :)

I wish we found a way that makes use of the semantics in a nifty way, rather than giving up on it. But then, if the problems of ambiguity are unsurmountable, then, perhaps there's no other go! :(

Arnab De said...

Sujit da is writing a self-help book on tidiness! Where the hell the world has come to (an what marriage does to people)!!!
Well, I like tidiness but you might often find my room untidy as I find ANY work (including sleeping) far more important than doing the tiniest bit of work for keeping things in order. I clean my room only when its untidiness prevents me from doing anything else (including sleeping :P). Any solutions for that? (You can always ask your better half :)).

Sujit Kumar Chakrabarti said...

Sujit da and Tidiness! Well. You could look at it like he is again fiddling around with a new field of study (he has done so before many times; may be it's his nature).

I think you are just doing fine Urban Day. No need to change. I would say, if you ever end up with a clean and tidy room someday, and see it actually helping you in achieving things which you value more, possibly then you could it a second thought, and come back to 5S. Till then, enjoy life! :)

Pritesh Dagur said...

Very well written! Now that I am about to sail in the boat Shilpi di is in, this has come as a saviour! I hope Ananth reads and understands this too! But I think being overly tidy can be suffocating some times for people who aren't terribly neat by nature. I suppose once the balance is established, all will be fine! :-)