Aaaaah, I get it! I can never tell something on HN is a Michael O'Church-ishm or something I ought to be familiar with. I am going to have to start using that one.
Brownian Motion is a fractal that is the limiting case (step size -> 0) of a Random Walk. It scales as O(x^0.5). For example, the per-day volatility of a stock might be 1%; then the per-year volatility is (in theory) 16% (assuming a 256-day year).
At work, there seems to be an accurate square-root metaphor (probably unrelated to actual Brownian motion) in the use of resources and time. You really get stuff done in 3 hours out of your 9-hour day; the other 6 are meetings and face time and bullshit. 2 days out of your work week see real, macroscopic progress; 3 are wasted. Seven of your 49 work-weeks are on projects that actually get used, and the other 42 are on manager-blessed busywork. Six years of your career end up actually mattering; the other 30 are wasted on jobs that go nowhere. So you get 3 h/d * 2 d/w * 7 w/y * 6 y = 252 hours per career that really mean something. Better make the fuckers count.
That's depressing and probably not that accurate. If you can take charge of your time and responsibility for your progress, you can do a lot better.
Brownian Management is the pointless drifting about that goes on when no one has any sense of direction. It generates the world where (as they say in many businesses) 90% of work is counteracting negative side effects of other work.
That's like 31 8-hour days. I'm trying to imagine what I could get done if I had a personal assistant to manage all the non-technical bullshit, and a month's supply of speed.
I think of the "no sense of direction" people as weather vanes. They just point wherever the wind happens to be blowing hardest. When the winds change, they do too.
