Throughout my career, I would walk up to someone’s desk, listen to them explain a problem for thirty seconds, and immediately ask:
“How long have you been fighting this?”
The answer was rarely five minutes. It was usually three hours. Or three days. Or even three months. People who wanted to figure it out for themselves or didn’t know who to ask or simply didn’t know there was a better way.
Sometimes it was someone who had fought with a spreadsheet for hours, manually cleaning up an email list or looking for missing data. I would teach them quick text formulas that would save them time not only on the current task but over and over again as this task was a common occurrence in their job.
Once it was an entire social media team creating client content calendars as PowerPoint presentations. Every month they would manually build deck after deck, inserting content and photos one slide at a time. Using the calendar information they had already created in Excel, I created a process that generated 90% of the presentation for them. What once took one or two days per deck took about fifteen minutes instead.
And then there were the support and IT teams. You know, the ones who regularly had to respond to the same issues over and over again. And they would retype the same response over and over again. Until I showed them how to save a response as a template that they could simply pull up and resend. It might not seem like much to write a five-minute email. But when the alternative is a fifteen-second canned response and you’re sending it fifty times a day, the time savings add up quickly.
These weren’t unintelligent people or bad at their jobs. In fact, they were usually the hardest working people, and they were so busy doing their jobs well that they didn’t pause to see how they could do it more efficiently. They were spending time and energy repeating work that didn’t need to exist.
To me, that’s chaos in one of its often-overlooked forms. Many business owners will focus on the big problems: losing a client, missing a deadline, or a major equipment failure. But some of the most expensive problems are much smaller.
Chaos often hides in the tiny tasks that drain time, money, energy, and attention every single day. The examples above all looked different, but they shared the same root problem: repeating effort that didn’t need to be repeated. Other examples:
- Answering the same questions repeatedly
- Training without materials in place
- Last-minute marketing efforts
- Missed deadlines and follow-ups
- Outdated or missing documentation
- Knowledge trapped in one person
- Poor handoffs between people
- Inconsistent client and employee onboarding
- Constant interruptions and context switching
- Decision fatigue and analysis paralysis
- Lack of clear ownership
If you see yourself in this list, you’re not alone. But now is where you sit back and say “is there a better way”? I can tell you there probably is. And spending the time once to figure that out will save you time and money (and brain cells) in the long run.
