August 10, 2009

Optimal Microwaving with Fitt's μλ-Number

This trick will save at least five otherwise wasted minutes of your life if used religiously. This is intended as a joke, but yeah, I actually do this. :)

When pressing buttons on a microwave, “a lot” of time is wasted moving your finger around (as predicted by Fitt’s Law). You can regain these precious lost fractions of a second by modifying your button pressing behavior just slightly to minimize “costly” movements. The trick is to never press 0 (zero) on the microwave. Simply pick a number string of all the same number that is closest to your target time.

For instance if microwaving for 1 minute, which is normally 1-0-0, instead press 5-5 (55 seconds). You’ll be off a little bit but variations in microwave power make this negligible (when following directions on microwavable food for instance). Also, many microwaves allow input of seconds beyond 60sec (e.g. 00:88). So, in the above example 6-6 would work as well.

Given that cooking instructions are almost always in whole minutes, it’s generally pretty easy to translate to a same number sequence. Imagine all the time you’ll be saving now!

This table shows the sequence of 2- and 3-digit Fitt’s

μλ

-Numbers: