Efficiency Theater

Beware the trap of faux efficiency.

I like to streamline processes at my job. It's fun, rewarding, and can save a ton of time. But it's really easy to hit diminishing returns and waste more time than you save trying to optimize endlessly.

An extreme example: people who use non-standard keyboards and map custom functions to them. They'll say things like,

"Check it out bro, instead of moving my hand 4 inches over to my mouse and clicking, all I have to do is traverse 3 layers down in my bespoke keyboard map, click Ctrl+Alt+7—why that? Oh, it's arbitrary, I didn't have any other free keys—and then press Tab 3 times to get to the 'Send' element of my email client. Of course, I couldn't get this muscle memory down until after I spent 6 months testing and tweaking different keyboard layouts, but now that it's engrained I must be saving at least a quarter of a second every time I send an email! I don't have to take my hand off the keyboard!"

^Anyone who reads the above and thinks, "That's me," is probably far too focused on the wrong stuff to actually increase their productivity. Unless you're a virtuoso pianist playing Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee," you don't need to keep your fingers moving that fast all the time. Just use the dang mouse, brother.

What I'm trying to say is: after a certain point, optimizations to your work processes become so miniscule that they would take, like, 600 years to yield a return that's actually worth anything. But I always see people working on them anyway—probably because they're a lot easier than solving real problems.

So, before you go trying to speed up a process, take a step back and ask:

1. How much time will this actually save?
2. How much money would that equate to?
3. Would that time be better spent working on a new initiative that can actually generate money?