There is a big problem with being efficient.
It’s a particularly big problem amongst tech folk, accountants, and engineers (but there are plenty of people in other professions who fall for this too). And it comes about from not thinking deeply enough about issues.
Often “being efficient” just means skating over the surface of an issue, doing the very minimum required to chalk up a “victory”, and moving on to the next thing selected for a completely superficial make-over.
That’s why people who try to “maximise efficiencies” often end up delivering outcomes which cost the company more than it needed to…and often more than the option of doing nothing at all.
Ultimately, this all becomes completely pointless.
The notes
A great example of this phenomenon at the moment are those AI note-takers people take to meetings with them.
Recently, I was in a meeting with three other people, each of whom had a notetaking app “joining in the meeting”. I had a notebook and a pen.
While we were talking, those apps were busying away, transcribing every word everyone said (sometimes hilariously, but that’s not my point here). And at the end of the meeting I received 3 sets of AI note-taker transcriptions together with a list of action points from each.
Now, first of all, those action points were all slightly different. This is a problem in itself, potentially, but also not my main issue with this process. (Although I should point out that having 4 people all running off to do slightly different versions of the same action point is a recipe for chaos, not a recipe for efficiency.)
But my main issue here is with the process.
In the name of efficiency, we all now had 3 sets of verbatim notes to read if we wanted to make sure we had been correctly quoted – these notes ran to about 10 pages of A4 from each app.
So that’s 30 pages of A4.
Google tells me that would take about half an hour to read. Times 4 people, in this instance. So 2 hours overall.
The people in that meeting were all well-paid professionals, and while I don’t know the day-rate of everyone involved, let’s imagine that’s several hundred pounds-worth of time, collectively.
That’s the cost of auditing the output of a notetaking app for a single meeting to make sure it’s not taking you (or anyone else) out of context.
“Ah, but I only check my own!”
Sometimes people tell me that’s not true because they only check their own notes and don’t read everyone else’s.
Firstly, even if that’s true, it’s still costing you 10 minutes of your own time. If you have 8-10 meetings a day, that’s about an hour and a half of your time every day. On the assumption you’re being paid a salary, that time isn’t free. It has a cost.
Secondly, that’s unlikely to be of much help if it comes to a fight. If someone else’s notetaking app recorded that you said “X”, and you didn’t challenge it, the person you’re arguing with has a pretty decent argument that you did, in fact say “X”.
So if you read all the notes, it’s costing you and your company £100s.
And if you don’t read all the notes, at some point you’re going to get sued so hard you might end up wishing you had read all the notes.
Whether you acknowledge it or not, there’s cost and risk aplenty here.
However, from what I’ve seen in practice, a large number of people don’t read the notes at all. They just rely on the action points generated by the notetaking app.
That’s great for as long as you can get away with it, without being sued. But if anyone ever takes legal action against your business, you can be absolutely certain that the notes you never read will be used by the “other side” in evidence, and you might end up looking like a complete prat who didn’t do their homework properly when the original notes were circulated.
Win, lose, or draw the legal action, getting a reputation as someone who doesn’t do their homework diligently is not going to be good for your career prospects with your current employer.
But it’s worse than that
However, it’s even worse than that.
Let’s say you don’t read any of the notes, perhaps even including your own, because you are “being efficient”.
That means the whole industrial infrastructure of the AI note-taking ecosystem is a complete waste of everyone’s time and money. All those millions of gigawatts of electricity. All those super-powered microchips. All that time and effort in software development.
All to produce a product nobody even glances at.
Because people are too busy “being efficient”.
This is precisely the situation Peter Drucker had in mind when he said: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
Nobody in their right mind would employ a staff member to take verbatim notes of every meeting you attend.
So using tech to “do it more efficiently” is not an advance for society. On average, it’s a net dis-benefit. It makes us all collectively poorer when we do things that take our time, energy, and money, but which don’t move us forward in the slightest.
“But the tech is really clever!”
I’m prepared to bet the tech in a notetaking app is very clever.
But a technology which is very clever, yet ultimately produces no discernible benefit for your business or society at large, is still worthless.
There are plenty of very clever people stuck in dead-end jobs because they were incapable of producing something of value.
Cleverness, of itself, is not something which has economic value – it’s the application of cleverness which, potentially, can create economic value.
There is, however, no economic value in producing sets of verbatim notes nobody reads.
That’s almost a textbook description of a completely pointless activity.
Yet it’s a completely pointless activity that a remarkable number of people are paying $200-500 a year to use.
Here, it’s very clear what’s happening.
The notetaking apps are skimming value out of your business to put into their own pockets. They are considerably richer. Every other business is considerably poorer, to an equal and opposite amount of money.
Across society as a whole, precisely zero value has been added. Money has just been moved out of your pocket into someone else’s.
Another way
I don’t use a notetaking app. I use a pen and notebook.
And I don’t take verbatim notes. I only record action points.
I tend to type them up (I’m a fast typist so it doesn’t take long). But I used to know a guy who would take a picture of his handwritten action points with his phone and send the photo to everyone who was at the meeting so they knew what they had to do before the next one.
I also do something else which AI doesn’t do, can’t do, and never will do.
As we go along, I make a habit of repeating the action point I’ve written down to get everyone’s agreement to that being an accurate reflection of our discussion.
So there are, hopefully, no post-meeting misunderstandings about what people agreed to do.
Now, you might say, that’s what the action point summary of the notetaking app records too.
But firstly, nobody has agreed those action points because nobody knew what they are until the action point summary was circulated. So there is some process, however, short of reading them, assessing them against your own memory of the conversation and/or your own verbatim notetaking app.
So that takes time. And that costs money.
My approach isn’t free. I get paid a salary and I try to always add value.
But 5 minutes to type up some action points I’ve agreed in advance with all the participants doesn’t cost much. And there’s no downstream “that’s not quite what I said” or “I thought you meant this” arguments – so there’s a saving there too.
Factor in the monthly costs of your notetaking app of choice over and above this and the economic return for your business from this whole process is, at best, flat and, more likely, negative.
All from doing something efficiently that needn’t be done at all.
Technology can be efficient – but isn’t necessarily efficient
Amongst the simpler folk in society – people like politicians and tech people – there’s a belief that technology necessarily makes everything more efficient.
I can’t say this strongly enough. People who think those two statements follow one another as unerringly as day follows night are idiots.
Tech can make things more efficient, but it can also make them a lot worse than they were before.
Tasks that used to be as simple, and low-cost, as picking up the phone and speaking for two minutes now take ten times as long by the time I’ve located my account number to log into something, verified my two factor authentication, given the 8th and 14th letter from my security phrase, and entered the PIN I last used six months ago and can’t remember off the top of my head (necessitating a password reset process that takes several minutes more).
That’s not efficient – that’s a process that converted a 2 minute phone call for 2 people (ie 4 minutes in total) into a 10-20 minute process that’s all on me as the customer because the business I’m trying to do something with has decided to “be efficient” and make everything worse for all their customers in the process.
The only thing that “more efficient” process has done is make me determined to find another business who sells what yours does and buy from them instead.
Set against that, tech can lead to improvements.
Moving to computerised bookkeeping was a definite tech improvement, as was the introduction of Word instead of typewriters.
In industry, CNC machines have been a boon, and when I worked in the manufacturing sector, we had equipment which performed activities using automated processes which had previously required human intervention. This saved us time and money, and made the process safer from a health and safety point of view too.
So technology can be transformative.
It just ain’t necessarily so.
It can also be a completely pointless, value-destroying activities like notetaking apps, which might make someone in Silicon Valley wealthy, but all they’ve done is take money out of your pocket and put it into theirs without delivering any benefit.
(Or at least without delivering any meaningful benefit – while it might be clever tech, producing verbatim notes that nobody reads has precisely zero economic benefit to anyone beyond the software developer.)
When we put an automated process into the factory, we had a business case that said “this activity costs us £X per unit now – installing this new machinery to automate part of the process will cost half of £X per unit instead”.
I’m prepared to bet that nobody using a notetaking app had someone sat next to them taking verbatim notes before. And people have got by pretty OK without that since the dawn of the industrial revolution, until now, seemingly.
If we could operate perfectly well before without notetaking apps, introducing a way to produce verbatim records of conversations (even assuming the apps record them correctly) is by definition not adding any value because there is no corresponding saving.
And if it’s taking people’s time to read verbatim notes they never had to read before because they didn’t exist, that’s a reduction in bottom line performance, not an increase due to efficiency.
Granted, it sounds more efficient if you don’t think about it for long – that’s the surface-level thinking tech people are good at.
But dig deeper to really understand what’s going on, and digital notetaking apps drain resources from a business. They don’t add value to the bottom line.
That’s true of most tech nowadays. The times it delivers true bottom line value are few and far between once you understand what’s really going on.
If you’re serious about your bottom line, ask yourself not just about the tech, but about the business processes you’ll need that go around whatever tech solution you choose.
Add up the cost of the subscriptions, the cost of operating all the new business processes, and the impact on your customer experience. Then decide if the new tech tool you want to introduce really adds value.
When you do that rigorously, you’ll find remarkably few tech “innovations” are worth investing in for your business.
They are, at best, often just a distraction from the job in hand. At worst, they destroy value.
Make sure you know which one it is before you sign the order form. After all, there’s nothing so useless as doing something efficiently which need not be done at all.