Third law of worker entropy
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Office anthropology™
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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
The JC’s third law of worker entropy, also known as “the law of inevitable tedium”: There is a 100% correlation between
- (i) activities that, however important they might seem, in fact have no value, and
- (ii) activities that are tedious.
All other things being equal, if an activity is tedious, it is wasteful. If it is wasteful, you shouldn’t do it.
If an activity is 25% tedious it is 25% wasteful.
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 four-box chart. Like so:
| 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?