Tedium
Hypothesis: all other things being equal, if an activity is tedious, it is wasteful. If it is wasteful, you shouldn’t do it.
This can be articulated as the Jolly Contrarian’s third law of worker entropy:
There is a 100% correlation between (i) activities that, however important they might seem, in fact have no value, and (ii) activities which are tedious.
If an activity is 25% tedious it is 25% wasteful.