Fifth law of worker entropy

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The Jolly Contrarian’s fifth law of worker entropy states that there is an inverse relationship between the amount of time, t, a worker spends on a task and its overall importance, i, to the organisation.

Examples

• Human resources: The organisation will wrack itself for four months of the year crashing mainframe computer systems trying to get a performance appraisal system to work; enforcing its clear desk policy, by way of putative apology celebrating the existence of one half (only) of the population, formulating and updating its risk taxonomy and promoting an internal career fair, but expend exactly no energy promoting actual risk management or risk reduction.
• Negotiation: A negotiator will spend literally days battling away on the precise waterfall of dispute fallbacks for a NAV trigger — never to be used once the agreement is signed, except to periodically waive triggers that will have inevitably been set too sensitively — but will agree a failure to pay event of default — the one realistic event ever needed — without her counterparty so much as pausing to for breath before moving onto the next item.

See also

• First law of worker entropy
• Second law of worker entropy
• Third law of worker entropy
• Fourth law of worker entropy
• Sixth law of worker entropy