Experience, efficiency and enjoyment.

[Cheshirechappie]

"A very quick hand, a little master, working as he called it 'at a slaughtering pace' for a warehouse, made 60 plain writing-desks in a week of 90 hours, while a first-rate workman, also a quick hand, made 18 in a week of 70 hours."

Hands up anyone who can work that fast by hand or by power tools today!

One of the reasons life expectancy in 1850s England was around 40.

To be fair, infant mortality was quite high in those days, which brought average life expectancy down a lot. If you survived infancy, you had a pretty good chance of making 60, and some achieved ripe old ages - 80s and 90s were not unknown.

 

[Brandlin]

An interesting debate with many useful and thought provoking links.

However one of the things that is hampering the discussion is the variable use of the word "efficiency". Efficiency is a ratio, how much you get of one thing for the input or consumption of another. the efficiency of an engine can be the amount of energy put in in fuel compared to the amount of mechanical energy out. Being efficient does not necessarily mean a ratio of output to time in fact thats a quite rare use of it... thats units per hour or perhaps speed. Efficiency could equally mean units per £1 of raw materials, or units per cup of tea (the true british metric). For example a bookcase would be said to be efficient in terms of the material used if it was veneered in expensive hardwoods rather than made of solid hardwood stock - yet this would undoubtedly have taken longer to produce and require more /different skills.

Efficiency in the modern hobby/professional world is also a very complex and subjective thing - and indeed drives a lot of the differing answers to stock questions on this site. For a professional or someone who's time is limited or expensive then comparing things to the time taken is often used as efficiency because that time is likely to have a higher worth/value than perhaps the outlay on bigger, better, more capable equipment. Whereas to an amateur on a small budget time may be the one free thing he has and therefore his solution is not to incur the extra expense but to work at a slower rate. Importantly he is not necessarily less "efficient".

The charateristic of customisation - standard product vs bespoke - complicates the idea of efficiency even further.... and you need to compare the same ratios throughout.


Dont even get me started on the definition of quality. Quality is a measure of somethings fitness for use. An ornate louis XiV writing desk complete with gilding and carving is no more a quality piece of furniture than a victorian pine kitchen dresser. They are both quality items in that they fulfill their purpose. It would not be appropriate for the Louis XIV desk to be nailed together from pine planks any more than it would be for the dresser to have elaborately carved rose and boxwood marquetry.

 

[dzj]

To be fair, infant mortality was quite high in those days, which brought average life expectancy down a lot. If you survived infancy, you had a pretty good chance of making 60, and some achieved ripe old ages - 80s and 90s were not unknown.

Sure, statistics can be stretched one way or the other, but a 70 or 90h work week doesn't spell longevity.

 

[woodbrains]

"A very quick hand, a little master, working as he called it 'at a slaughtering pace' for a warehouse, made 60 plain writing-desks in a week of 90 hours, while a first-rate workman, also a quick hand, made 18 in a week of 70 hours."

Hello,

Does anyone think this is as meaningless as the 10 000 hours quote?

Make an entire desk, simple, granted, in 1 1/2 hours! And continue to do so to 90 hours. From what starting point, lots of team made piecework elements, perhaps? But from scratch, no. So then what can we compare this to. I'm sure mass produced furniture on the production line, Oak Furniture Land stuff is done at a similar pace. Not made by one man from a pile of rough sawn boards and a good kit of hand tools.

Mike.

 

[Brandlin]

"A very quick hand, a little master, working as he called it 'at a slaughtering pace' for a warehouse, made 60 plain writing-desks in a week of 90 hours, while a first-rate workman, also a quick hand, made 18 in a week of 70 hours."

Hello,

Does anyone think this is as meaningless as the 10 000 hours quote?

Make an entire desk, simple, granted, in 1 1/2 hours! And continue to do so to 90 hours. From what starting point, lots of team made piecework elements, perhaps? But from scratch, no. So then what can we compare this to. I'm sure mass produced furniture on the production line, Oak Furniture Land stuff is done at a similar pace. Not made by one man from a pile of rough sawn boards and a good kit of hand tools.

Mike.

a writing desk was often a simple wooden tray with a recess for an ink pot and pens....

but i agree, its a meaningless metric unless you know specifically what the item was and how it was constructed

 

[AndyT]

I picked out the writing desk example to show how much faster the cheap workers were, compared to the already fast reputable workers. There are more examples in Mayhew - I'll try and post some later today.

One way that the scampers managed was to add in the unpaid labour of their wives and children.

What I would like to add into the mix are some of the price books. These gave a standard design of say, a chest of drawers, then priced all possible"extras" - mouldings, trim, curved fronts, carving etc. Here's an example from 1803

https://play.google.com/store/books/det ... 8GAAAAQAAJ

These books were agreed between sellers and makers and were used in the respectable trade where they kept up standards and wages. I know that modern historians have worked back from known levels of wages and calculated how much time a craftsman would have to spend on making the pieces listed. In general, the answer is that they worked extremely fast, but I can't remember where I read this. Probably a blog. Anyone know?

 

[Jacob]

Some interesting comments - thanks, chaps.

One or two people feel that I'm trying to equate efficiency with deliberately sloppy work. Not so. I'm trying to say that efficiency is something that can only come when sufficient experience has been gained, and the only way to gain experience is by putting the time in. Once someone can work efficiently, they can choose whether to work fast to a good standard, or fast to a sloppy standard and churn out more finished work (as AndyT kindly illustrated), and to point out that examples of Victorian work made to the latter standards are not necessarily good examples for us to follow today, because we're not trying to compete on price with IKEA. ......

Getting there! But nobody has suggested that following bad examples of Victorian work, or competing on price with IKEA, are good ideas, so you are still arguing around your own straw men and not really saying anything.

My personal view of the 10000 hours thing is that this amounts to 5 or 6 years of full time work - which roughly coincides with say; an apprenticeship, a first and second degree etc. and is a useful measure of how how long it takes to be a good at something - given the proper background of support, practice, training, education, work experience, whatever is necessary.

 

[bugbear]

That leaves enjoyment. That, of course, is very personal - but for me, enjoyment comes with the growing abilty to work efficiently and choose the standards I'm going to work to. Personally, I don't enjoy doing sloppy work (though I do take Nabs' point about unnecessary work - and that's a personal choice too, at least for the amateur - for the pro, it's more about what the client will pay for).

I think the whole point of the hobby of model engineering is "unnecessary work" done for the joy of doing.

BugBear

 

[bugbear]

I know that modern historians have worked back from known levels of wages and calculated how much time a craftsman would have to spend on making the pieces listed. In general, the answer is that they worked extremely fast, but I can't remember where I read this. Probably a blog. Anyone know?

I have a similar memory - possibly someone connected with Williamsburg? I'm fairly sure it was in the USA.

BugBear

 

[bugbear]

The 10,000 hours theory is from Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)

Well. It's certainly mentioned in that (published November 18, 2008). But it also gets a lot of mentions in The Craftsman
by Richard Sennett (March 27 2008); Sennett (in turn) is quoting from This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin, published 25 April 2006.

All three books are controversial in their (ahem) bold and clear conclusions.

BugBear

 

[Sheffield Tony]

Regarding the 10000 hours (with apologies for any thread derailment I've caused), some of the reasons for my scepticism have been touched on by Custard and others: 10000 hours to what level of proficiency ? Over what breadth of skills ? With a good level of decent experience and tuition, or including hours of sweeping up, sharpening and other general lackey jobs as cheap labour - a common feature of apprenticeship. And no consideration of transferable skills. Or aptitude. Although it seems modern thinking to deny the existence of talent / aptitude and pretend anyone can achieve whatever they put their mind to.

Coming back to efficiency. I mentioned that I'd been reading Joshua Klein's Mortise and Tenon article about making a reproduction chair using the pole lathe. In there he discusses the importance of cleaving; cleaving as close as possible to finished dimensions means more parts from a billet and less time spent wasting away material at the lathe. So much so that period chairs often have spindles with flat riven areas, which would be tolerated but positioned facing down or to the back of the piece. It was such standard practice that a chair without these features should be viewed with suspicion.

I wouldn't have thought any of us would want to be knocking out writing desks by hand in an hour and a half these days. That's what machines are for. A slightly different, though related, issue engages me, which is getting just the right hand-made look. Treading the line between looking machine made, and looking roughly made. Some of these features like riven flats on spindles, over-sawn dovetails etc can be part of that.

 

[bugbear]

A slightly different, though related, issue engages me, which is getting just the right hand-made look. Treading the line between looking machine made, and looking roughly made. Some of these features like riven flats on spindles, over-sawn dovetails etc can be part of that.

I recall someone mentioning gauged base lines being added to machine cut dovetails - in the wrong place!!

BugBear

 

[Jacob]

Regarding the 10000 hours (with apologies for any thread derailment I've caused), some of the reasons for my scepticism have been touched on by Custard and others: 10000 hours to what level of proficiency ? Over what breadth of skills ? With a good level of decent experience and tuition, or including hours of sweeping up, sharpening and other general lackey jobs as cheap labour - a common feature of apprenticeship.

I see it as not a magic formula, it's just an observation that 5 or 6 years learning/training seems to be what it takes to get started in your trade whatever it is.

And no consideration of transferable skills. Or aptitude. Although it seems modern thinking to deny the existence of talent / aptitude and pretend anyone can achieve whatever they put their mind to.

Yes I think people can achieve almost whatever they set their minds too, given the right opportunities. I don't believe in innate talent or aptitude, though innate brain power might be needed for some things

 

[MusicMan]

I think 10,000 hours is not a bad estimate for *mastery* of a *field* (not simply competence in one aspect). Yes, I have read the original source (Gladwell) and the arguments either way. In my own career, my scientific academic work did need a high level of mastery, which I think I achieved by the age of about 35, after about 5000 hours of undergraduate work, more like 10,000 hours of postgraduate and the first 10 years of a research career. In the case of musical instrument playing, which I'm also familiar with, that is also about right; 5,000 hours gets you decent competence, 10,000 mastery of one or two instruments and many more for top international status. Students at the Royal College of Music (where I am doing a geriatric PhD in my retirement, in musicology not performance) are expected to do six hours practice a day for the four years they are there (this is after they have got Grade 8 or higher to get in, probably 3000 - 5000 hours total), probably around 5000 hours, plus the theoretical instruction. That will get some of them a professional orchestral position and all of them into a musical career at some level. I've probably had about 5000 hours playing over 65 years, and am a decent amateur standard but could not compare with any RCM student as a player.

Clearly individuals vary. But the key element of Gladwell and similar approaches in musical education is of "intelligent practice", of spending the practice time discovering and dealing with difficulties rather than plain repetition; too often one repeats and thus embeds one's mistakes. Sweeping the floor and making the tea contributes little (though not zero) to the 10,000 hours. Learning how to cut dovetails does contribute, as does learning to make them better each time. Keeping on making dovetails that do not improve does not. Attention to detail and how it can be improved is essential. For example, I am always impressed by Custard's thoughtful posts on the selection of wood, matching of grain, design and layout of joints, choice of finish, etc., etc.

Very often, when we speak of a "talented" woodworker, musician or whatever, we actually mean someone who has done the (intelligent) practice. When anyone says to me "I wish I could play a musical instrument", my response, whatever their age, is to say "Practice one for an hour a day, preferably with a teacher's guidance, and within a year you can say that you can play one." and of course play it better every year. You don't need 10,000 hours to get going. I am more and more feeling that "talent" means "the ability and motivation to put in the practice".

And BB's point is valid for us hobbyists. It is how we choose to spend our free time and resources, and improving our skills by intelligent practice is an end in itself.

Keith

 

[Trafalgar]

It's easier to start with the absurd case -- could you work at something for 10,000 hours and be less skillful than when you started? Not likely. And you'll inevitably get faster, though different people will do so to different degrees. Some may choose not to work faster, though they could if they felt like it.

And of course people have innate talent. How could one ever explain Da Vinci otherwise?

 

[Tasky]

There is an errant assumption here, and that is that doing something efficiently means that you'll have to do it to a lower standard.

Not entirely errant... or even at all, if you take teh technical definition of the word - Lowering standards and cutting corners is a typical way of increasing what many people consider to be efficiency.
What constitutes efficiency is the assumption.

Regarding how long efficiency and indeed proficiency both take, a lot of that time can be cut out with good* instruction and focussed, correct practice. Too often people practice the same thing over and over for hours and hours and hours, waiting for that time when they finally get good at it, which is why it's so often thought to take years to become a master at anything... That's a flawed tradition long upheld fallaciously by those misinformed by The Old Ways.
Truth is, if you start and keep someone practicing something with absolute perfection, efficiency is built in and proficiency follows far far quicker. Practice does make perfect, but only if what you practice is also perfect.

While we might not be as fast as someone who has done those things for 25 years 50 hours a week , we can still learn from people doing something efficiently.

Part of what enables people to produce high quality work very quickly for sustained periods of time is economy of effort. This could be the reduction of micro-tensions, as mentioned on the other thread, or it could be a heightened proficiency in aligning tools, or any number of other things.
As also mentioned - What they do is only part of it. Why they do it is just as important.

Yes I think people can achieve almost whatever they set their minds too, given the right opportunities. I don't believe in innate talent or aptitude, though innate brain power might be needed for some things

Unfortunately (annoyingly?) there are people with innate leanings toward certain things, as evidence by those who can turn their hand very well to something they've never done before, yet so often also have no interest in it while others struggle on in abject jealousy to get even half as good.

 

[John15]

As a hobbyist endeavering to improve my skills and knowledge with each item I make, I am finding this thread very interesting. I've no idea how many hours I've spent, but I've noticed that particular tasks that took me an age 5 or 6 years ago take me a fraction of the time now. Also the quality of my work is improving all the time. I know Paul Sellers gets some stick on here but he has helped me a lot. Also Peter Sefton's School where I did a beginners course. The third item in the title is Enjoyment. I can't over-emphasize the enjoyment that making bits of furniture brings me, just 2 or 3 hours on most days and it's quite a talking point in the pub!

John

 

[D_W]

Tasky- the dictionary states efficiency as being efficient:

ef·fi·cient
əˈfiSHənt/Submit
adjective
(especially of a system or machine) achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense.
"fluorescent lamps are efficient at converting electricity into light"
(of a person) working in a well-organized and competent way.
"an efficient administrator"
synonyms: organized, methodical, systematic, logical, orderly, businesslike, streamlined, productive, effective, cost-effective, labor-saving More
preventing the wasteful use of a particular resource.
suffix: -efficient
"an energy-efficient heating system"




There is nothing in there about cutting corners. What you're alluding to is a sometimes sleight of tongue used in business where a manager wants to cut corners or fire people without coming right out with what you're doing.

The tension argument doesn't hold water here like it does in music, especially with hand woodworkers. It is not a material problem for anyone except rank beginners.

 

[Jacob]

I think 10,000 hours is not a bad estimate for *mastery* of a *field* (not simply competence in one aspect). Yes, I have read the original source (Gladwell) and the arguments either way. In my own career, my scientific academic work did need a high level of mastery, which I think I achieved by the age of about 35, after about 5000 hours of undergraduate work, more like 10,000 hours of postgraduate and the first 10 years of a research career. In the case of musical instrument playing, which I'm also familiar with, that is also about right; 5,000 hours gets you decent competence, 10,000 mastery of one or two instruments and many more for top international status. Students at the Royal College of Music (where I am doing a geriatric PhD in my retirement, in musicology not performance) are expected to do six hours practice a day for the four years they are there (this is after they have got Grade 8 or higher to get in, probably 3000 - 5000 hours total), probably around 5000 hours, plus the theoretical instruction. That will get some of them a professional orchestral position and all of them into a musical career at some level. I've probably had about 5000 hours playing over 65 years, and am a decent amateur standard but could not compare with any RCM student as a player.

Clearly individuals vary. But the key element of Gladwell and similar approaches in musical education is of "intelligent practice", of spending the practice time discovering and dealing with difficulties rather than plain repetition; too often one repeats and thus embeds one's mistakes. Sweeping the floor and making the tea contributes little (though not zero) to the 10,000 hours. Learning how to cut dovetails does contribute, as does learning to make them better each time. Keeping on making dovetails that do not improve does not. Attention to detail and how it can be improved is essential. For example, I am always impressed by Custard's thoughtful posts on the selection of wood, matching of grain, design and layout of joints, choice of finish, etc., etc.

Very often, when we speak of a "talented" woodworker, musician or whatever, we actually mean someone who has done the (intelligent) practice. When anyone says to me "I wish I could play a musical instrument", my response, whatever their age, is to say "Practice one for an hour a day, preferably with a teacher's guidance, and within a year you can say that you can play one." and of course play it better every year. You don't need 10,000 hours to get going. I am more and more feeling that "talent" means "the ability and motivation to put in the practice".

And BB's point is valid for us hobbyists. It is how we choose to spend our free time and resources, and improving our skills by intelligent practice is an end in itself.

Keith

Interesting stuff.
I came back to music very recently. Having more or less given up 30 years ago I got dragged into a local group of geriatrics - most having owned unplayable instruments for just as long.
What I suddenly realised was that in the meantime I had become a moderately competent woodworker and that learning to play an instrument is just another craft skill, not unlike woodwork. No magic talent, innate gifts involved - it's just a question of constructive learning and practicing as MusicMan says above. Wish I'd (re) started sooner - I could have been a contender!

ps banjo and several guitars. I'm into North and Latin American music. Abel Fleury et al. Another 5 years (if I live that long) I might be able to play like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQEXX1W9bZk

 

[Jacob]

.......
Unfortunately (annoyingly?) there are people with innate leanings toward certain things, as evidence by those who can turn their hand very well to something they've never done before, yet so often also have no interest in it while others struggle on in abject jealousy to get even half as good.

You can only guess that they have no useful prior experience and you are probably guessing wrongly. For instance - I learned to play a few nursery rhymes with my kids, on recorders. As a result I can pick up a clarinet, saxophone, probably any woodwind and after making the first few squeaks can fake the beginnings of a tune. To an absolute beginner this could look like uncanny skill, but it isn't and I can't actually play any of them (except the recorder).
The destructive and pernicious notion of "innate" skill and talent probably does more than anything else to deter people from having a go at something they would be perfectly capable of, eventually