ORDER BY BiggestProblem DESC

I caught a little snippet on NPR this weekend that fits in well with what I've been hearing a lot of on the radio, TV, newspapers and the like. They were interviewing someone who was making drastic changes to their life and spending due to a loss of one of the family incomes.

I had a lot of reactions that made me wonder how they afforded their previous lifestyle if the loss of a part-time job led to things like moving into the cellar to avoid heating the rest of the house. Lots of these stories on TV and radio and in magazines make me wonder how many of these are stories that happen every day, bad economy or not, but we now have crowds of journalists digging to find them because it makes for a good story now.

Digressions aside, one of their cost-cutting measures stuck out at me: dramatically altering what they wear to get down to only one load of laundry a week. What I heard sounded like there was a lot of effort for this and hit me funny because we got a new washer and dryer a couple of weeks ago and an image of those yellow EnergyGuide cards from both popped into my head.

The washing machine's card estimated that our ANNUAL energy cost for both electricity and gas (for our hot water) was . . . $11. That's right. Less than a buck a month to wash all of our clothes.

I'm not going to pretend that I understand their situation, but, if we needed to find an extra $1000 or even $2000 a month to scrape by in tough times, it's pretty clear that OUR laundry isn't a gold mine of wasted cash, just waiting to be tapped into.

Whenever I see huge effort going into places where it isn't going to pay off proportional to that effort, I start thinking in SQL. To me, given the amount of data I work with on a daily basis, it's entirely natural to take all of the expenses and ORDER BY the biggest expense when it's time to start cutting.

And, if a quick look at the top of that list doesn't reveal much, a quick ORDER BY "least important" works as well to reveal the easiest cuts.

This approach is something that's impressed me with how the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation went about choosing the areas to attack first. Everything I've seen about that process says that they were pre-occupied with choosing problems that affect the lives of the highest number of people. They did an ORDER BY "number of people who die from ???" on the giant spreadsheet of problems in this world.

When I go out of my way to consider a problem or situation through this lens, I often end up with a much more obvious place to start my solution. I think this pattern is really powerful. Imagine going through your typical cubicle farm and following this simple process:

1. Ask everyone the following questions:
   1. What is the most tedious computer-related task you do daily/weekly/monthly?
   2. How much time do you spend on it?
   3. If that task wasn't yours to do any more, what project that isn't being done now would you be able to do instead?
2. Compile those results, along with salary-type information and start doing ORDER BY's to see what the most tedious, time-wasting tasks are actually costing.
3. Start tackling the top of the list with a portion of your IT budget.
4. Act on that list of projects that aren't being done by enabling people to get moving.

Imagine how many thousands of hours, tens of thousands of dollars are being wasted on things like manually comparing 2 reports, line by line for discrepancies because there isn't a reconciliation report that SHOWS the differences.

Imagine how many good ideas for projects, ideas for improving your business, for making a better product or offering a better service are stagnating in your cubicle farm. And, imagine that, after eliminating or reducing these tedious tasks, instead of laying people off, you reinvest that previously wasted time into those ideas and project.

I have to wonder how this little exercise might affect an organization's position in a tough market.