# The Five-Minute Manual Step

> Too small for a ticket, too frequent to ignore. The math is worse than it looks.

Source: https://christwentyfour.com/blog/the-five-minute-manual-step

Some manual tasks outlive everything. They take five minutes. They are too small for a ticket and too frequent to ignore.

Five minutes twice a week is about nine hours a year. Automating it might take a day, so the ticket never gets written. The real cost is worse. It needs a specific person at a specific time. It blocks when that person is on vacation. Someone forgets it, and a forgotten step costs far more than nine hours. And it drifts a little each time.

## Pick the right targets

Good targets run on a schedule, have the same steps each time, have real consequences if done wrong, and are known by exactly one person. That last one is a single point of failure that happens to be a person. Fix it first.

## Automate the gathering, not the decision

A script that collects everything, shows what it will do, and waits for confirmation removes most of the cost in an afternoon. Leave the judgment to a person. Drop the confirmation after it has been right fifty times.

## Write down what you removed

Toil reduction is invisible. A short list of what the task was, how often it ran, and what it costs now makes the case for the next one.