Office entropy

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Reorganising the laws of worker entropy

General laws of tedium

Law 2: The latent confusion entropy in a complex system increases geometrically with the size of that system.
Law 17: The intrinsic tedium acting on any process, organisation or ecosystem is proportional to the square of the number of individuals comprising that system.
Law 16: The total amount of tedium in an isolated system remains constant. Tedium can be neither created nor destroyed, only be transformed.
Law 3: Tedium and significance are inversely correlated.
Law 18: Work expands to fit the amount of money available.
Law 14: Paradoxes are impossible in sensible discussions because they are, necessarily, the product of asking silly questions.

Special laws of tedium

Principles of management

Law 1: As the number of scheduled participants in a meeting increases, the probability of the meeting beginning on time tends to zero.
Law 6: Any sufficiently primitive middle manager will be unable to distinguish a basic chatbot from magic.
Law 5: There is an inverse relationship between the amount of time, t, a worker is obliged by middle management to spend on a task and its overall importance, i, to the organisation.
Law 8: The longer a middle management-mandated compulsory activity takes, the more tedious it will be. Law 12: The more fun an activity is, the less important its regular use is to management.

Principles of negotiation

Law 15: The more precisely the position of a particular negotiation is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa.
Law 10: One agent’s accommodation of another’s pedantry in the service of a common principal is equal, opposite, and reciprocal.
Law 9: As the number of people involved in a negotiation goes up, its brevity, comprehensibility and utility goes down.
Law 4: The existence of any escalation causes more delay, confusion, aggravation and bureaucracy than can be relieved by the resolution it promises to deliver.

Principles of Change

Law 7: Successful inventions do not make things harder. Law 11: Change is to progress as noise is to signal. Change operates at a faster layer than does progress. Change is fashion. Progress is culture.

Principles of Agency

Law 13: Over time, a given template will tend to a point of “optimal” complication, c ↔ vf = tr.