Every company has a handful of absurd routines that everyone knows about and nobody fixes: copying information from one tool to another, redoing the same export every Monday, hunting for a document that three people saved in three different places.
These routines never get prioritized because they aren't serious enough. Yet added up, they are one of the biggest sources of lost time.
Why they never get fixed
- They're invisible: nobody complains about a three-minute task.
- They're diffuse: everyone suffers a little, but nobody suffers enough to champion the issue.
- They seem too small to justify a project, and too annoying to be done for free.
Three minutes a day, for five people, adds up to more than thirty days of work a year.
What makes a good micro-tool
It tackles a single friction, it can be used without training, and it fits into the place where people already work. One more screen you have to remember to open will be abandoned; a button right where the task happens will be used.
It also has to stay easy to change. Internal needs shift: a rigid tool becomes one more constraint within a year.
The most common candidates
An internal form that replaces an endless email thread. A single screen that gathers information scattered across three tools. An automatic summary email that eliminates follow-ups. A consistency check that flags anomalies before a client discovers them.
The decision criterion
Frequency multiplied by time per occurrence multiplied by the number of people affected. Done honestly, this calculation almost always puts at the top the tasks you would never have thought of tackling, and pushes down the projects that used to fill your meetings.
The question to ask your team
Ask your team this week: “What do you do every day while thinking it's absurd?” You'll get three to five answers right away. That's your list, and it's more profitable than most budgeted projects.
We look for innovation in big projects. Most of the time, it's in the routines we've stopped noticing.
