How to Stop Optimizing the Wrong 1%

Your team is working harder than ever, but productivity isn't improving.

Sound familiar?

This is the classic optimization problem—and many businesses solve it wrong.

In software development, we learn a crucial lesson: optimization without measurement is just guessing.

When a program runs slowly, developers don't randomly speed up code. They use a systematic process called profiling to find the real bottleneck.

Here's how it works:

Step 1: Find the worst-case scenario. Push the system with the biggest dataset or most complex operation to make the problem obvious.

Step 2: Profile hierarchically. Collect timings in an outline form—big categories first, then diving down into deeper or deeper detail.

Step 3: Optimize the biggest issue first. Work on what's taking the most time, not what seems most obvious to fix.

Your business can be optimized the exact same way.

Business profiling looks like this:

Instead of asking "How can we work faster?" ask:

• Which department is the bottleneck in the organization?

• What group of tasks are slowing things down the most?

• What part of those tasks are taking the longest?

Instead of asking “How can we cut cost?” ask:

• What group of products or services is the least profitable?

• What specific product or service in that group is the least profitable?

• What specific part of that group is the least profitable?

You can apply this to marketing budgets:

• What marketing channel has the lowest return on ad spend?

• What campaign has the lowest return on ad spend?

• What specific ad has the lowest return on ad spend?

You can use this for customers:

• What group of customers are our costliest customers?

• Which of those customers are our costliest customers?

• What about those customers make them costly?

You can use this dive into how you spend your time:

• What is the largest part of my day-to-day work?

• What’s the most time-consuming part of that job?

• What specific tasks are the most time-consuming?

You can also use this for energy, since what drains your energy can have a signfiicant impact on your productivity.

But all this depends on you being able to get the measurements you need.

I've seen many businesses optimize the wrong things because they never measured where the real time-drains were happening.

Imagine a company spending months streamlining their email processes to save 15 minutes per person per day, while ignoring unclear project handoffs that cost each person 2 hours daily.

That's like optimizing a function that takes 1% of processing time while ignoring the one that takes 80%.

This also applies to how you fix the problem.

Many times, you need to change your basic approach to getting something done to get respectable improvements i speed.

• In software: Fix the algorithm before you optimize the individual functions

• In business: Fix the strategy before you optimize the tactics

Sometimes the real issue isn't that your processes are slow—it's that you're doing the wrong processes entirely.

Want to put it to use?

Here's the methodology:

1. Profile your current state: Where does time/energy actually go? Measure it. Don’t make assumptions.
   

2. Identify the biggest bottleneck: What takes the highest percentage of resources?
   

3. Question the algorithm: Should this process exist at all, or is there a fundamentally better approach that eliminates the need altogether?
   

4. Optimize systematically: Start with the biggest impact, work your way down

The most surprising optimization discoveries often reveal that:

• The thing taking 80% of your time isn't your highest value activity
• Small changes in high-impact areas create massive improvements
• What feels urgent isn't actually important
• Some processes can be eliminated entirely rather than optimized

Here's your optimization challenge:

Your reflection question is this:

• What's one area of your business that feels inefficient but you've never actually measured to see where the real bottleneck is?

And for yourself personally, here’s your homework assignment:

• For the next week, track where your time actually goes (not where you plan for it to go). What percentage of your energy is spent on your highest-value activities? What percentage is spent on everything else?

You might be shocked by what the data reveals.