Details rarely matter

Over the last few days I’ve heard some really interesting stories about administrative policy.

Firstly, the Australian government has said that anyone working from home through this period can simply claim $0.80 cents per hour to cover costs of utilities while using their home as an office. As someone who already worked from home much of the time, this is a vast improvement over the standard policies that require you to calculate the floor area of your office as a percentage of the house, multiply the power bill by the sum of the square of your maternal and paternal grandmother’s birthdates, and subtract any fringe benefits on a sliding scale indexed to Australian wheat board’s wholesale price ticker. (Not really, obviously, but you get the idea).

I just heard from a doctor at Melbourne’s largest and most prestigious hospital that their usual timesheet approval process – which sees senior doctors who earn $300K or more annually, spending their evenings printing, signing and scanning individual timesheets for every single one of their subordinates! 🤨 – now allowed to simply forward the email to mark it as read and approved.

Because our environment has made the world suddenly more complicated, we are responding by making things as easy as possible so we can spend our time focused on more important things, which is great, but…

Why don’t we do that all the time!? Why do have have to constantly suffer through administrative bullshit which is deemed to be unimportant the moment something that actually matters shows up?

I’ll be honest, I’m the least detail-oriented person on earth (I may also be the world’s biggest exaggerator 😂), so I’m particularly allergic to paperwork. But I can’t help but think that the corona crisis has demonstrated how completely pointless most of the paperwork we’re forced to fill out actually is.

Details rarely matter much. Care less about them.