Do you recognise this situation? You are drafting a text message on your phone. You type a perfectly sensible word and it changes it into something entirely different.
You correct it and it changes it again. After several attempts to get the word you want, you slow right down to type the word one letter at a time, and carry on with the rest of the message - while a feeling of frustration and then irritation slowly builds at the back of your mind.
Even worse, after all that effort, you press send only to discover that it replaced one or more words with other perfectly spelled - but completely wrong - words. Your text is now meaningless, confusing, or maybe just inappropriate. That feeling of frustration and irritation speeds to the front of your mind. A line of emojis follows to quickly get your feeling of frustration across to your recipient - usually including the exploding head one - immediately followed by a second message explaining what you actually meant - which if you are lucky, won't also have wrong words in it.
The HUGE irony is that the spell checking software, designed to save you time, has just interrupted your thinking, broken your flow, and probably cost you more time than if it had simply left you alone - even if one of your words did contain a typo.
We all know how infuriating this is, and yet organisations frequently do exactly the same thing - at an organisational level.
Efficiency isn't that hard to find; however, we do need to know where to look, and what to look for - things aren't always what they seem. We often think about efficiency in terms of time. We look to make a process quicker, automate a task, or remove a few clicks here or there. And while those are worthwhile aims, they overlook something equally important: flow.
Most knowledge work isn’t limited by typing speed, form filling, or mouse clicks, but by our ability to think clearly, stay focused, and maintain momentum. And every time there is an unnecessary interruption to that, there's a consequent efficiency cost. Attention residue is a psychological effect that occurs when our focus is interrupted, and a small part of our attention remains attached to the previous task. This means that when we have been interrupted and then resumed what we were doing, we’re rarely back at full cognitive capacity immediately. A spell checker that interrupts your thinking isn’t just costing a few seconds of typing, it’s disrupting the thread of thought you were trying to capture, and that can have significant consequences.
But the crazy thing is that businesses (or rather the people in them) often create exactly the same problem. In the name of solving issues, we constantly add features that interrupt our flow: another approval step, another form, another dashboard, another mandatory field in the CRM, another report, another compliance check, another meeting. Each addition is usually well intentioned - and may seem like a good idea - and each one probably only takes a minute or two.
And so viewed individually, none of them seem significant, but collectively they fragment the working day as people spend less time doing meaningful work and more time navigating the systems designed to support it.
The irony strikes again: the processes introduced to improve efficiency can gradually become the very things that reduce it.
Part of the problem is that we keep trying to optimise the wrong thing, we have a natural tendency to solve the immediate or presenting issue, but can lose sight of the overall or overarching intent. A spell checker isn’t there to produce perfectly spelled words - although that can be useful as long as they are the right words. But more importantly, it is there to improve communication, and while those may sound similar, they are not the same objective. If the spell-checker produces a perfectly spelled sentence that no longer conveys what I intended to say, then technically it has succeeded while practically it has failed. There is a saying in process improvement of 'make sure you are doing the right thing before you spend time doing the thing right'.
Businesses fall into exactly the same trap: individual departments optimise their own measures, teams improve their own processes, and individual systems become more sophisticated. Solutions become embedded in the 'way we do things', and then new imperfect solutions to resulting issues are layered on top. Over time, the organisation becomes a museum of historical decisions, each one perfectly rational when it was introduced, but collectively increasing complexity and creating unnecessary friction today. Meanwhile, the overall experience for customers - or employees - may actually become worse.
Whenever setting out to fix a part of the process or system, go back to first principles. Rather than immediately thinking about how process can be improved or fixed, take a moment or ten and ask: "what is the purpose we’re actually trying to achieve?" and maybe "do we still need a process to do this at all?" Those questions can change everything.
The biggest opportunities for improving working efficiency are not always found in major transformations or expensive technology projects, but very often can be found by removing unnecessary requirements or process steps. Just like the spell checker, the systems and processes we create should help people achieve their purpose, not become obstacles to it.
What can you stop doing that will enable you to work more efficiently?
Ad Futurum
Graham
And yes, I do keep turning off my spell checker, then one day, I realise that I am getting frustrated while texting; somehow, the spell checker has decided that I really do need it and has switched itself back on. Do you think I need a new phone??? !!!!!!
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