One minute

Have you ever received a message at work that just says hi or some other greeting, and then you need to respond before actually getting to the real message?

Have you ever dealt with a slow work laptop that takes a couple of minutes to fully load before you can even start working?

Endless meetings with no real conclusion—where the whole thing could have just been a quick conversation on Slack or Teams?

These are some of the common examples we run into at work. We’ve all been there, and we’ve all made these mistakes ourselves at some point.

Some of us might ignore them, thinking they only cost a minute.

But in a recent podcast, I heard DHH explain that you’re not just wasting one minute. If your organization has 900 people, and a bad practice wastes one minute for everyone, that’s 900 minutes lost in a single day. That’s nearly 16 hours—almost two workdays—or the length of a return transatlantic flight.

So next time something seems like it only wastes a minute, remember: it’s not just one minute. It’s one minute multiplied by the number of people in the organization.