Never send a librarian to do a page's job

(EDIT: Sorry the pictures are so tiny! I tried keeping the original size but they really mess up the site formatting!)

I can't remember if I mentioned that Mystery Library has a New Manager. New Manager is pretty cool but also lets me/wants me to do more things, so I've been just as busy as I was under Old Manager, who wasn't as good at managing but also shot my (work-making) ideas down on a regular basis.

New manager wants everybody to be doing things so that we all become empowered employees who love our jobs, or something like that. Accordingly, she came up with a bunch of smallish workflow changes and improvements and asked each staff person to work on one. Since the staff at Mystery Library isn't used to being allowed to do things and New Manager knows that, she started with baby steps. The task she gave me was this: She'd like us to do more pre-sorting of returned items before we take them out to shelve, and wants me to find a way to label our shelving carts to facilitate that.

Simple, right? Here's what she got...

I started by making a list of every single collection in our library and which shelving cart (out of the 6 we have) we currently sort them onto. My listed looked like this (sorry for the not great formatting--I've found that Blogger doesn't handle spreadsheets well):

Noticing that some of the carts had way more collections on them than others, I tinkered around with other possible distributions over the 6 carts that would be easier, and found an arrangement where no individual shelf would have to contain more than 2 distinct collections (this took a little while since I also had to account for the fact that some collections are much larger than others and thus need proportionally larger space). Then it occurred to me that since we shifted the collection around last year, some of the shelving cart groupings no longer match up well with how things are laid out on the floor, so if you take out one cart you might have to go to three or four different areas to shelve the materials on it. That seemed sub-optimal as well, so then I rearranged the groupings again to take into account the physical proximity, or lack thereof, of each collection. Of course, I couldn't completely go by that, since I still had to keep the size and number of each collection in mind as well.

I finally settled on the following distribution:

I emailed my proposed solution to New Manager, but New Manager worked the weekend and is off today, so I'll have to wait until tomorrow to see what she says. It kind of reminds me, though, about how people joke that if you don't want to do a chore, you should do a really bad job, such a bad job that you will never be asked to do it again.