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Do people find that time spent in motion or moving between tasks is ever the determining factor of how quickly or effectively you can prepare a meal in the context of a home kitchen? Granted, I've rarely cooked for more than ~4 people, I've never stopped and thought "wow, if only the cupboard with x in it were a few feet closer to the stove, I could have cut three minutes off my prep work."

It's unclear to me how Taylorism could have been applied in a transformative way to kitchen layout.




I think when you're cooking for the two thousandth time and trying to prepare multiple recipes simultaneously & time them together, you start to have an interest in efficiency. I've definitely burned things because I took a minute or two longer than I had to spare working on another dish. The better the kitchen is laid out, the more simultaneous multithreads I can run before I miss an interrupt...

Part of the point of this article is also that the kitchen you take for granted, even one that isn't especially Taylorized, is still a sea change vs only a century ago.


If you are a designer (or have the mindset of one) you can spend a significant amount of time thinking about this. Both my girlfriend and I are rooted in design and we were thinking 3 days about how to order things in the kitchen, where to put the sink, the stove, the fridge, preperation areas, cuttlery, garbage, etc. We drew out the routes and movements for common tasks on each variant and iterated through it, till we got a combination that seemed to be very efficient and didn't look too odd.

And it totally paid off. Investing a few days of thinking and planing to avoid something that might annoy you for years to come is totally worth it.



Have you ever been in an apartment where the fridge door opens "the wrong way"? ;)




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