Having analysed - in other words identified - what we actually do, we can start to look at ways of doing it more efficently. This may involve a balancing act between two approaches, both of which offer benefits. These two techniques - Economies of Scale and Chunking may appear to be opposites, but they are frequently complementary. Different pieces of work will benefit from being treated differently.
Economies of Scale
The most obvious benefit we are seeking to achieve is that of economy of scale. As a simple example, it is more efficient to photocopy two class-loads of worksheet together than to photocopy them as two separate classes. This is because if we do them separately, then some aspects of the task (walking to the photo-copier, switching on the machine) need to be repeated.
More subtle economies of scale can be gained by avoiding 'tuning' or switching costs. We incur these 'costs' - wasted time - every time we we stop doing one thing and start doing something. This is because there is a brief period of mental and physical familiarisation involved in every task. You may experience this when you mark a class-pile of exercise books - the first students work will take longer to mark than the others - as your brain becomes familiar with the pattern of the marking, you will speed up.
We should therefore group tasks together to minimise tuning, and to avoid the period of mental re-orientation and familarisation involved. However, you should only batch tasks up in this way if you can pretty much do them automatically, without stress.
Chunking
As I mentioned at the start of this section, Operations Management is not just about efficiency. Organisations tend to be manned by people, not robots, and most people find it hard to work effectively on the same task for extended periods of time, unless the task is very simple - so simple, in fact, that it can be done without thinking. Half-an-hour is a common measure for 'too long' in this context. When we are considering our own work, We therefore need to balance our desire for efficiency against the consequences of soulless repetition: boredom, carelessness and frustration.
When you break down your activities into tasks, you must bear this in mind - there is a tension, a balancing act, which needs to be made. When considering 'self-awareness', we mentioned the importance of understanding attention span, and this is where that information is used.
Let's assume that your personal preferred task duration is 20 minutes. This means that you can pretty much concentrate on a task for 20 minutes and work on it effectively for that time. Too much more time spent on that same task is likely to result in a significant drop in productivity. In this situation, you should be seeking to break your work up into roughly 20 minute chunks. You may, for example, find that you can tick-and-flick three sets of homework in 20 minutes, or mark three pieces of GCSE coursework, or prepare a four-lesson-script (if you are using the magpieplanning method). This ingrained awareness of your standard workspan will help you to remain effective when working for extended periods.
Using the example above, a teacher might plan a one hour non-contact PPA lesson to contain a 20-minute homework marking task and a 20 minute GCSE marking session.
The teacher would not be sensible to schedule a 20 minute lesson-scripting session in the same hour. The principle of chunking only works if you take a respectable break - five minutes is usual - after every chunk. In this example, the teacher has used 50 minutes of their one hour period (2 x 20 minutes work, plus 2 x 5 minutes break) and has only 10 minutes of productive time remaining.