The business wisdom of “time is money” has never been more relevant in today’s hyperconnected, fast-paced world.
Yet, for many businesses, technical illiteracy within their teams—and sometimes even among leadership—is a direct contradiction of this truth. Let’s explore how this hidden inefficiency is quietly draining your resources.
Might as well throw your money away!
How Much Does Technical Inefficiency Cost Your Business?
To put this into perspective, let’s break down the numbers.
Suppose you’re paying someone on your team $25/hour, which translates to 41.6 cents per minute. Now, imagine this person is responsible for outreach—calling or emailing clients to collect on outstanding orders. The actual activity of contacting clients is where their time should be spent.
However, the technical illiteracy surrounding this task can create unnecessary delays:
- Manually Pulling Reports: If the team member isn’t using a saved search or automated report, they might spend several minutes generating the list every day.
- Poorly Organized Data: If the list isn’t displayed in a logical, actionable way, they’ll waste additional time hunting for the right information.
- Inefficient Tech Usage: Slow typing speed, reliance on a mouse instead of keyboard shortcuts, and excessive back-and-forth navigation between browser tabs further compound inefficiency.
If it takes them five minutes merely to prepare to contact clients, that’s $2.08 spent on preparatory work that could have been completed in seconds. Over the course of a week, you’ve spent $10 exclusively on this inefficiency—a cost that could be nearly eliminated with basic technical literacy. Are you starting to see the real impact of “time is money”?
A Simple Analogy: The Cost of Inefficiency
Imagine one of your team members is in a house and needs to move to another room. They have two options:
- Walk directly to the next room.
- Exit the house through the front door, walk around the house, and climb in through the window of the desired room.
It’s absurd to think anyone would choose the second option when the first is clearly faster and more efficient. Yet, by allowing and accepting technical illiteracy on your team, you’re effectively endorsing that laborious second route in their day-to-day tasks.
Why Is Technical Literacy Important in the Workplace?
Technical illiteracy isn’t just about wasting a few seconds here and there; it’s a “death by a thousand cuts” for your business.
When team members:
- Type slowly,
- Struggle to navigate software efficiently,
- Fail to leverage productivity tools (e.g., bookmarks, saved searches, or password managers),
…their inefficiency adds up. It’s a miracle anything meaningful gets done in a single day.
If you want to see exactly how much time can be gained by shaving seconds off repetitive activities, look at this “Is It Worth The Time” chart by xkcd.
Quick Self-Test: Is Your Team Technically Efficient?
Ask yourself these five questions:
- Do your team members manually generate reports instead of using automated tools?
- Are most of them typing slower than 40 words per minute?
- Do they frequently rely on the mouse instead of keyboard shortcuts for repetitive tasks?
- Do they spend significant time clicking between browser tabs or hunting for data?
- Are basic productivity tools (like bookmarks or password managers) underused in your team’s workflows?
If you didn’t answer a confident “No” to every question, it’s time to make changes. Start with small, impactful steps by exploring our Keyboard Shortcuts Masterclass blog.
The Solution: Invest in Your Team
By not prioritizing technical literacy, you’re effectively signing off on your team taking the long way around for every task. But here’s the good news: you don’t need to overhaul your entire operation to see results.
Small investments in training your team—teaching them to use shortcuts, organize data effectively, and optimize their workflows—can lead to significant gains in efficiency and profitability.
So, the question is, now that you intimately understand how “time is money”: are you comfortable paying for wasteful labor, or will you invest in building a more effective, tech-savvy team?