Efficiency is a form of hidden theft and it takes from the weak to give to the visible. We are told that a new system will save time and we see the charts and we see the green lines and we believe the lie.

The man in the suit says he saved a thousand hours and he gets a bonus and he goes home early. He does not see the thousand people who each lost one hour and he does not care because their loss is too small to measure in a single box on a sheet. This is the great trick of the modern office and it is the reason why your day feels heavy even when the machines are fast.

The Cost of “Lean Growth”

I built a desk in my spare room last week and the box arrived with three missing bolts and a scratch on the side. The company saved five cents by not checking the bag and they saved ten dollars by using a thinner box and they called this lean growth.

I spent two hours at the hardware store and I spent three hours trying to fix the scratch and my Sunday was gone. The company is more profitable on paper and I am tired and I am the one who paid for their growth with my own life. This is what happens when you centralize a system and you do not look at the edges of the room where the real people stand.

The Myth of Centralization

The IT team decided to move all the remote work to one big server and they said it would be better for everyone. They spent a month planning and they spent a month building and they finally turned it on.

The head of the team wrote a report and he said the new setup saves his staff eight hours of work every month. He does not have to patch ten small boxes and he only has to look at one big box and his life is simple now. The boss read the report and he was happy and he gave the team a lunch with pizza.

But the report did not talk about the warehouse and it did not talk about the depot where the trucks wait. In the old days the workers there had a small computer and it was slow but it stayed on all day and they just walked up and they typed.

Now they have to log in to the big central server every time they want to scan a box. The login process takes ninety seconds because it has to check the cloud and it has to check the security and it has to load the profile.

Ninety seconds is not a long time if you do it once while you drink your coffee. It is a very long time if you do it forty times a day while a truck driver is yelling at you to hurry up.

The IT team saved eight hours and the company lost two hundred hours but nobody put those hours in a report. The loss is spread so thin that it looks like nothing and the gain is in one big lump so it looks like a win.

This is the way of the world now and it is the way of the machine. In the year 1917 a man named Clarence Saunders opened a store called Piggly Wiggly and he changed how we buy food.

Before he came along you went to a counter and you talked to a clerk and the clerk went to the back and he got your flour and your sugar. Saunders made the customers walk through the aisles and he made them pick up their own heavy bags and he made them do all the work. He called it self-service and he said it was better for the people because the prices were lower. But it was just a way to move the cost of labor from his payroll to your afternoon.

We have been doing the work of the business for a hundred years and we still think it is a gift. The same thing happens with software and it happens with the way we buy our tools.

A manager wants to save money on the budget so he buys the cheapest licenses he can find and he does not think about the friction. He looks at the price and he sees a small number and he feels smart. But then the workers cannot get into the system and the keys do not work and the support team is in a different time zone.

The manager saved a thousand dollars and the company lost ten thousand dollars in wasted time. If you want to avoid this trap you have to look at the total cost of the thing you are doing. You have to think about the person who has to use the tool and not just the person who has to pay for it.

The Physics of Connection

When we talk about remote work we are talking about the way people connect to their jobs and if that connection is hard then the job becomes hard. You need to have the right number of keys and you need to have the right kind of access or the whole thing falls apart.

Many teams find that they need to get their licensing right the first time so they go to a place that knows the math. They might use the

RDS CAL Store

to find the exact pack of licenses they need for their workers.

This keeps the login fast and it keeps the math simple and it stops the hidden cost from growing in the dark. If you buy fifty licenses when you need sixty you are creating a tax on your own people and they will pay it in stress and they will pay it in minutes that never come back.

I spend my days looking at words on a screen and I fix the mistakes that other people make. I see the missing letters and I see the bad timing and I know that a small error at the start makes a big mess at the end.

When a company tries to save a little bit of effort in the middle it always lands on the person at the bottom. The worker in the warehouse stands and he watches the spinning wheel on his monitor and he knows he is losing his life one minute at a time. He knows his boss thinks the system is a success and this makes him feel like he is crazy.

He is not crazy and he is just the one who is paying the bill for the pizza lunch in the IT office. The invisible costs are the most dangerous ones because you cannot fight them with a chart.

You cannot go to a meeting and say that ninety seconds is a crime because the people in the meeting will laugh at you. They will say you are being dramatic and they will say it is just a minute. But a minute multiplied by a thousand is a death of a thousand cuts and it bleeds the spirit out of a team.

The worker starts to hate the machine and then he starts to hate the job and then he starts to look for a new one. The company then has to spend ten thousand dollars to find a new worker and they have to spend five thousand dollars to train him.

All of this happens because the IT team wanted to save eight hours a month on their own schedule. This is the paradox of the modern world and we make things better for the system by making them worse for the humans.

We must start to measure the small things if we want to know the truth. We must look at the way a tool feels in the hand and we must look at the way a screen looks to the eye. If a change makes the work feel heavier then it is not an improvement even if the server is cold and the wires are neat.

We should aim for a world where the efficiency stays in the room where it was made and it does not get pushed down the hall onto the person who did not ask for it.

Living with the Broken Desk

I still have that desk in my room and it still has no handles because I have not had the time to go back to the store. I use my fingernails to pull the drawers open and it hurts a little bit every time.

The factory is happy and the store is happy and they both have my money. I am the only one who knows that the desk is broken and I am the only one who has to live with the missing pieces. This is how we live now and we call it progress.

We should stop calling it progress and we should start calling it what it is. It is just a way to make someone else do the work for free. The next time you hear about a new way to save time you should ask who is doing the saving and who is doing the waiting.

If the person doing the saving is not the person doing the waiting then you have found a lie. You should run from that lie as fast as you can or you will find yourself standing in a cold warehouse staring at a grey screen and waiting for a door to open that used to be unlocked.

We can do better than this if we choose to look at the whole picture and if we refuse to let the small costs stay invisible. It starts with the right tools and it starts with the right licenses and it ends with a worker who can actually do his job without fighting the system that was meant to help him.