Hi Reader,

Every business has them. The little workarounds. The “I’ll just do it manually for now” that’s still being done manually two years later.

They start sensibly enough. Something breaks, or a tool doesn’t quite fit how you work, or a process has a gap in it so you patch it. You copy the figures across by hand. You re-type the same client details into a second system because the two don’t talk to each other. You send the follow-up yourself because setting up the automation felt like more effort than just sending the email.

And it is, the first time. And the second. That’s exactly why workarounds are so easy to live with! Each individual instance is often quicker than fixing the underlying thing. The maths makes sense in the moment, every single time.

The trouble is the workaround never announces itself as permanent. There’s no point where it taps you on the shoulder and says, “just so you know, I’m now a fixture.” It just quietly becomes how things are done. The manual step gets absorbed into the rhythm of the week and six months later you’re spending a couple of hours every month on something that was only ever meant to be a stopgap until you got round to sorting it properly.

I see this constantly inside businesses. And it’s almost never the big, dramatic inefficiencies that cost the most, those tend to get noticed and dealt with. It’s the small ones.

• The five-minute task done three times a week.
• The double entry nobody flagged because everyone assumed that was just how the system worked.
• The little frictions that have been allowed to set in because you haven't stopped long enough to ask whether they still needed to be there.

Here’s the thing that makes them so persistent: each one is too small to feel worth fixing on its own.

Why would you spend an afternoon automating something that only takes five minutes? But five minutes, three times a week, is most of a working day every month. Add up a handful of those and you’ve found where a surprising chunk of your week has quietly gone!

The fix isn’t to overhaul everything in a fit of efficiency. It’s much simpler than that, it’s often to notice. For one week, every time you catch yourself doing something manually “for now”, or working around a thing that doesn’t quite work, just make a note of it. Don’t fix anything yet. Just write it down.

At the end of the week, look at the list. The patterns usually jump out. You’ll see which workarounds are fine to leave alone, and which ones have become a tax you’ve been paying without ever deciding to.

Then you can choose what’s worth fixing, instead of letting “for now” make the decision for you.

What will you fix this week?

Katie