The hidden cost of manual work

Fifteen minutes.

That's how long it takes someone in your office to do a small thing.

Copy the hours off the crew sheets.

Update the job list.

Send the Friday reminders.

Fifteen minutes doesn't feel like a cost.

Nobody writes it on an invoice.

Nobody puts it in the budget.

So let's work it out.

Fifteen minutes a day, five days a week, fifty weeks a year.

That's more than sixty hours.

A week and a half of somebody's year.

For one small task.

Now, most offices don't have one task like that.

They have five or six.

Six of them is more than three hundred and seventy hours.

That's over two months of a full-time person's year, spent on the same small things, done the same way, every time.

What's it worth?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a general office clerk at a specialty trade contractor earns a median of about twenty-two fifty an hour.

And at a small company, the wage is only about three quarters of what that hour really costs you.

So call it thirty dollars an hour.

Three hundred and seventy hours at thirty dollars is more than eleven thousand dollars a year.

For one person.

On work nobody would miss if it disappeared.

And that's only the time.

When people copy numbers from one screen to another by hand, about one in thirty come out wrong.

That's from a study of nearly seven thousand hand-copied entries.

One wrong number on an invoice, and you wait another month to get paid.

Then there's the looking.

In a survey of construction leaders, people spent five and a half hours a week just looking for project information.

Every week.

So there's the hidden cost of manual work.

It's not one big expense you can point to.

It's a hundred small ones nobody ever adds up.

And because nobody adds it up, nobody fixes it.

Here's one thing you can do this week.

Ask everyone in the office to write down one task they do every day, exactly the same way.

Put fifteen minutes next to each one.

Then do the math.

That number is what the way you work is costing you.

And unlike most costs, it's one you can get back.