How to Make Things Faster

Chapter 72. Mom

Here’s a sequence diagram for preparing dinner:

It’ll get dinner done, but it’s not a smart way to do it. My mom taught me a better way. It was the way her mom taught her. It starts with: hey, don’t chop the salad first; put the water on the stove first. It takes a while for the water to boil. When it finally does, you need the potatoes to be ready to go in. So, while the water is warming up, don’t chop the salad; peel and dice the potatoes. When your potatoes are in the water, then chop the salad.

Why did my mom teach me to do it this particular way? To save time. There’s no sense sitting around twiddling your fingers while the potatoes are boiling. And there’s no sense letting the stove sit there idle while it could be getting work done. My mom and my grandmother were not finger-twiddling idlers, I can assure you. They were latency assassins.

Here’s a picture that shows why it saves time to take the “chop salad” step off the critical path:

Chopping the salad while the potatoes are boiling is a technique called latency hiding. If you google it, you’ll find lots of complicated technical papers, but latency hiding is just the act of saving time by hiding durations behind other durations.

I also learned a lot about latency hiding as a kid playing golf with adults. ...