Long Division, Short Division

Back in the day

Back in the day, when I was an insolent child rather than an insolent adult, I remember not seeing the point in learning long division. It wasn't difficult, just pointless and slow. The turning point came when a sympathetic maths teacher explained that slow was the point. Sometimes numbers were just too complex to attack with short division and the chance of making a mistake was high, so formalising the step by step process of division, and slowing down meant you could see the maths happening in front of you - you could direct the steps rather than having them running away in your head, you made a plan for how to deal with that kind of number next time.

Where am I going with this?

Look at the problem of managing workloads - projects that are too big, ticket volumes that are too high, that personal development plan that looms at you when you think about it for more than 30 seconds - is delegating or dividing those tasks straightforward? Are you trying to use short division and getting a bad answer?

Sometimes it's fine to go for the method with fewer steps - if you have a team of 20 people and 100 requests for something straightforward and tedious, then 5 requests per person is probably the right answer the first time it happens (automation and bulk handling hopefully being the fix for next time).

Things get complicated though. What if you don't have a documented method for that task? Suddenly your team of 20 might only contain 2 people who can really do the work. Suddenly extra work outside of the immediate problem of your 100 requests might well be the better solution and though it's tempting to dismiss the value of that extra effort, can 50 tasks per person (with 18 people remaining) really be the right answer? Are you doing the maths right or are you dismissing the value of long division because short division worked on the easier problems you handled before?

It's something I've had to learn more than once in my childhood and in my career, but it's a lesson worth learning. Sometimes long division is the better way because it slows us down enough to get us to the right answer.