Is it worth it? (2021)

Summary

Optimisation is an obsession of modern workplaces. But despite a glut of technology for streamlining and simplifying work processes, the average office is still plagued with inefficiencies. There’s a lot to be said for shaving a few minutes off a routine task, especially when those extra minutes are being eaten up by something not working as it should. But how long can you spend trying to make a routine task more efficient before you hit a point of diminishing returns?Fortunately, the ever-brilliant XKCD already worked it out:[object Object]According to XKCD, the formula goes: "If you perform a task N times per day, it makes sense to spend up to M amount of time to get an improvement of Z, amortised over five years."So if you perform a task daily and you want to shave one minute off the time it takes, you can spend up to one day making those improvements and in five years you'll break even on time saved. If you perform this task five times a day, it's worth spending up to six days to improve it. But if you only perform it once a month, it's not worth spending more than an hour trying to make it more efficient.For an individual, spending a full day on something in order to scrape back those extra minutes over five years might not seem like an intuitive or efficient use of time. But the calculation changes dramatically in corporate setting, where routine inefficiencies can impact dozens or even hundreds of people multiple times a day.Let's rederive to account for corporate life:1 minute/event * 1 event/person/day * 1 person * 240 work days/year * 1 year to positive ROI = 240 minutes = 4 hoursIn a corporate setting, if you can improve an incident that affects one person, once per work day, and save one minute per event, it's worth spending up to four hours fixing that per person it affects.For example: you are on a team of five developers. There's a flakey test that fails one tenth of the time. Your test suite takes five minutes to run. When the test flakes, you lose f...