View source for Third law of worker entropy

{{a|work|}}{{Quote|Q: What’s the difference between a drum machine and a drummer?
A: You only have to punch the information into a drum machine once.
:—''Anon''}}{{third law of worker entropy}}

If an activity is 25% [[tedious]] it is 25% [[waste]]ful.

This stands to the following reasons:

Tasks sit on at least two continuums: one, between “important” and “unimportant”; the second, between “fun” and “boring”. We can put these continuums as perpendicular axes on a [[Quadrant|four-box chart]]. Like so:
{| class="wikitable"
!
|Important
|Not important
|-
|Fun
|Expert 
|Manager
|-
|Boring
|Machine 
|You
|}
Things in the “fun” layer, you may be assured, someone will already be busily doing. 

The important ones will find their way into the hands of some kind of expert: a trader, doctor, racing-car driver, neuroscientists, and so on. Fakers and dilettantes will be quickly found out and ejected. These tasks will tend to be things that machines are not terribly good at: they will have a random element; they will be unpredictable and will not have clear solutions.

For those that are not important, their owner will be someone in middle management. A large preponderance of fun but unimportant activities fall into the general bucket of “telling people what to do”.

About things in the “boring” layer, be vigilant. 

If they important, no-one will leave them to an unfocused grunt. They will find a machine to do it. This stands to reason: there is enough at stake to commission a machine to do it properly, and whatever “it” is will be boring but meaningful: repetitive, requiring unrelenting focus on small details and having a low tolerance for variation or improvisation. These are just the sorts of thing a machine will be good at.

Things that are boring but unimportant will ''not'' be done by machines. That is, firstly, because no-one will have the budget to commission the necessary automation, much less the appetite for being shouted at when it breaks down. (This is why so little [[legaltech]] is ever implemented. It will be expensive, it does a largely useless job, and it will break down). But also this box features a large class of boring but unimportant things that a machine ''could not do'' in a satisfactory way: “being told what to do”. 

Now I can hear the objections already: “Surely, JC, you can’t mean that. Of ''course'' you can tell machines what to do! Why, that is ''all'' you can do to a machine!” 

Quite so, friends: but that takes all the fun out of it for the middle manager. Who wants to be the one telling a computer what to do? Where is the fun in that? A middle manager’s sole joy and purpose in life emanates from wielding that small authority over her colleagues. Why on earth would anyone work in HR otherwise?

{{Sa}}
*[[Laws of worker entropy]]