Dimmer Beach: Main Goal of a Shop: Get Shows Out of the Door
There is no reason to have a shop if you aren’t doing gigs (Otherwise you just have gear sitting in… a shop.) It just makes sense. In the effort to get gigs out the door as quickly and efficiently as possible, there are other things that may suffer. One of the things that is easy to let slip is simply “stuff.”
3 comments:
I've heard this idea before but I have never seen it in action. The idea makes sense but I have a counter offer...just clean up after yourself. There should never be a time when there are tools or coffee cups strewn all over the shop. If you use a drill, when you are done put it away. If you drink a can of soda, when there is no soda left find the nearest trashcan (or better yet, a recycling bin). This should leave you with a shop that is spotless every time you are in it. When you work in a personal shop or a fine woodworking shop this works. The way those shops are set up is to ensure precision, not efficiency so people take their time. In a scene shop, as important as precision is (and it is very important...to a degree) efficiency usually trumps everything else (except safety...at least it should). With efficiency being the number one objective and having a whole bunch of people in a spread out shop, no matter how much we may try, things do get messy and when that happens picking only two things up and putting them away won't cut it. People need to really make an effort for putting things back where they go and part of that is how far away is "away?" This might be a topic for another time but in my opinion, home base for our tools is too far away for where we do most of our building. The reason small shops are usually so clean is because you are working 5ft away from where the tool goes, so when you are done, you reach behind you and put it back on the shelf. In our shop, and pretty much every scene shop or large shop, we have to walk over 150ft to put a tool away and that doesn't include the times when there is a set piece that requires us to take a massive detour. So I guess what I am saying is maybe we need to just bite the bullet and put items away as we finish with them.
I agree with the core message of the story, and like Drew I think that though this is definitely good practice, there might be more effective ways of cleaning your shop than just putting two things away a day. One way of doing this is, as Drew said, just cleaning up after yourself. That is something that everyone who gets anything in the shop should do, out of common curtesy to anyone (including yourself) who might want to use that tool in the future. Because of the fact that sometimes people don’t do what they’re supposed to, and the fact that sometimes things get overlooked, it should also be good practice in the shop at the end of a work day to just take 15 minutes to make sure everything is cleaned up. It’s something we do here to various degrees of success. Taking that small amount of time is just like taking a small amount of time to make sure you have everything you need for the job, it increases the efficiency of projects. So while I agree with Drew’s suggestion, I think that it is the combination of the two practices that would keep a shop in order. On one hand, you have the personal responsibility and drive that every member should have to keep their work environment orderly, and on the other hand you have a safeguard to make sure that at the end of the day, everything is in order and you can walk in to the shop the next morning knowing where everything is.
This cracks me up. I used the same rule on my sisters in the car- it would be endlessly covered in hair, trash, shoes, papers, pens, old breakfast Tupperware. I used to avoid looking in the backseat because it was such a mess. Unsurprisingly, the “two a day” thing actually works really well. It takes reminding, and nagging sometimes, and it can be hard to remember when we are always working on something or going somewhere with an immediate purpose, but it is definitely a way to improve a workspace. I found it most effective to do when getting out of the car (or, in this case, closing up the shop). I don’t like trying to accomplish multiple tasks at once, so I would understand it if I didn’t put things away in the middle of a project. But when going to get another tool, put something away at the same time, grab a coffee cup and throw it away, put the broom back against the wall. To my fellow classmates: this would work in the freshman studio too!! Hint hint.
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