Idea Ripper // ArchiveCards: 1555 [Live] | Updated: 2026-10-14
Card #c1127IR // #c1127Synthesis

"…each bricklayer lowering his body, weighing, say, 150 pounds, down two feet and raising it up again every time a brick (weighing about 5 pounds) is laid in the wall! And this each bricklayer did about one thousand times a day." "…Mr. Gilbreth has reduced his movements from eighteen motions per brick to five…"

— In our words · Source: The Principles of Scientific Management (Frederick Winslow Taylor)

[Use when]

A skilled job still has the same physical setup it had decades ago.

[Why it matters]

Frank Gilbreth raised the scaffold, pre-sorted bricks into packs and tempered the mortar so bricks needed no tapping. Taylor reports 350 bricks per man per hour against a local average of 120.

Filed under situations:When you’re building the thing, not just planning it

More from The Principles of Scientific Management

#c1113"The greater part of the systematic soldiering, however, is done by the men with the deliberate object of keeping their employers ignorant…Your team's estimates never get shorter no matter how familiar the work becomes. #c1114"…after a workman has had the price per piece of the work he is doing lowered two or three times as a result of his having worked harder…You are tempted to raise a quota because someone beat it. #c1115"…since they were paid by the hour, the faster they went the less money they got, and finally telling him that if he went too fast the…You are setting up pay for work where you can't easily see the pace.

Same situation, different book

#c1561The Canon: Sensory Infallibility, Preconceptions, and "Waiting"Use when diagnosing why a high-stakes analysis, intelligence assessment, or debugging effort went wrong…From Lives of Eminent Philosophers #c1551The Tripartite Organism: Logic as Bone, Physics as Flesh, Ethics as SoulDesigning a curriculum, worldbuilding a belief system, or diagnosing why a team's rigorous process (Logic) is…From Lives of Eminent Philosophers #c1545The Cosmic Vortex and the Planetary MembraneUse when designing self-organizing markets, talent incubators, or creative communities where high-collision…From Lives of Eminent Philosophers #c1536Thales's Ensouled Matter and Cosmological SuperlativesUse when scoping a complex strategy or world-building architecture and you need to separate negotiable design…From Lives of Eminent Philosophers