Methods of Prioritizing Knowledge Work in Comparison to Lean Methods

The Lean method of prioritization (First in, first out) is the most used strategy in manufacturing and studies support its effectiveness. The present study examined strategies of task prioritization in knowledge work and compared them to performance to assess effectiveness. Four methods of prioritization were compared to five aspects of performance. Participants, who were recruited from LinkedIn contacts and through Amazon Mturk completed a survey on SurveyMonkey. There were 76 participants, 52.6% were male and they had an average work experience of 8.9 years. In contrast to manufacturing results, due soonest was the most used prioritization strategy. The first in, first out method correlated significantly with quality of work. Shortest preparation time correlated with creativity in performance. Future studies could examine specific types of work

Diffusion-limited reactions and mortal random walkers in confined geometries

Motivated by the diffusion-reaction kinetics on interstellar dust grains, we study a first-passage problem of mortal random walkers in a confined two-dimensional geometry. We provide an exact expression for the encounter probability of two walkers, which is evaluated in limiting cases and checked against extensive kinetic Monte Carlo simulations. We analyze the continuum limit which is approached very slowly, with corrections that vanish logarithmically with the lattice size. We then examine the influence of the shape of the lattice on the first-passage probability, where we focus on the aspect ratio dependence: Distorting the lattice always reduces the encounter probability of two walkers and can exhibit a crossover to the behavior of a genuinely one-dimensional random walk. The nature of this transition is also explained qualitatively.Comment: 18 pages, 16 figure