We had a stopwatch on the tax return.
Not a metaphor. An actual stopwatch. During a Danaher Business System Kaizen event, our team took apart the State and Local Tax returns process piece by piece and timed every step. The ERP data pull. The workpapers. The reviews. The handoffs. All of it.
What we found embarrassed us. Layers of review that added zero value. Handoffs that existed because they had always existed. Hours per return, burned on steps nobody could defend.
We cut them. Hours saved on every single return. Costs down. And the team had more energy, because nothing drains people faster than work they know is pointless.
That is what efficiency actually looks like. Not an app. Not a hack. A stopwatch and the willingness to ask an uncomfortable question about every step.
Waste hides behind “we’ve always done it this way”
Every bloated process I have ever seen had the same defense. Not data. Not logic. Tradition.
“It has always been done this way” is the most expensive sentence in business. It protects every redundant approval, every triple sign-off, every report nobody reads. It sounds like prudence. It is usually just unexamined habit.
I learned to see this as a young consultant in public accounting. I would walk into a large retailer’s or manufacturer’s tax department with fresh eyes and spot the warts immediately. The back-and-forth loops. The sign-offs stacked three deep with no better outcome than one. The people inside couldn’t see it. They were too close. That is not a criticism. It is how human attention works. You stop noticing the friction you walk past every day.
Which is why the outsider’s question is so powerful, and why you should ask it of yourself on a schedule. If a stranger watched your process for a day, what would they ask about first? That is your waste. It is always the thing you have stopped seeing.
You cannot improve what you haven’t measured
The Kaizen event worked because we measured before we opined. Timing each step turned arguments into arithmetic.
Most efficiency efforts fail in the opposite order. Someone declares the process broken, proposes a fix, and implements a solution to a problem nobody quantified. Sometimes it helps. Often it just rearranges the waste.
Measure first. Pick the process that annoys you most. Map every step, honestly, warts and all. Time it. Then ask the only question that matters: if we removed this step entirely, what would actually break?
You will be shocked how often the answer is nothing.
A tax review cycle I once dissected had four rounds of review. Four. We traced errors caught at each round. Rounds three and four caught essentially nothing. They existed because, years earlier, one bad return had scared everyone, and the extra reviews were scar tissue. Understandable. Also wasteful. We kept two rounds and redirected the saved hours to work that actually reduced risk.
Scar tissue is the right image. Every bloated process is guarding against some old wound. Respect the wound. Question whether the guard still needs to be there.
Efficiency is a system, not a sprint
Here is what the productivity gurus get wrong. They sell efficiency as a set of tricks. A morning routine. An app. A hack.
Tricks don’t compound. Systems do.
The Kaizen mindset is the opposite of a hack. It is the unglamorous discipline of questioning one process at a time, on a schedule, forever. Observe. Measure. Cut what doesn’t earn its place. Repeat next quarter.
It works on factory lines. It works on month-end closes. It works on client approvals and email habits and meeting cultures. Anywhere work repeats, waste accumulates, and a stopwatch plus honesty will find it.
Start this week. One process. Map it. Time it. Cut one step that can’t defend itself.
Then do it again next quarter. That is the whole operating system.
Your calendar is the most honest record of what you actually value. Spend it like it matters, because unlike the budget, you never get a refill.
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