Stalker was rattled reading an article on productivity in harvesting in the March edition of Mushroom Business.
The article was about measuring the rates of picking on farms and how best to express it. As the author put it, kilograms per hour is the most common way to express the productivity at a farm or at the individual level of picking. The author alluded to a potential new rate measure as "seconds per mushroom".
This approach was examined and explored in the article. On breaking down picker performance at one point, the picker or harvester was examined in a time period of an average 5.1 seconds.
During that averaged slot of 5.1 seconds, the picker was only productive for 2.5 seconds, with 1.3 seconds lost at the workplace and another 1.3 seconds spent away from the workplace.
Stalker had visions of workers flitting to and fro, as if in some high speed film.
However, the author made the point of calculating what pickers would pick if they didn't lose those vital seconds.
Stalkerknows that such time and motion studies are probably important - but, to imagine that pickers, workers or harvesters should be at a peak work level for all of the time that they are "at work" is simply crazy.
People are not machines, nor are they or should they be, slaves. Time for a Kit-Kat - just take a break why dontcha?
