Have you ever worked at a com­pa­ny and had to con­tend with con­vo­lut­ed process­es just to get your job done?

I have. I worked at one firm where some­thing as rou­tine as updat­ing a time sheet was a mul­ti-step process that involved log­ging on two web sites. This may have made sense to the depart­ment that cre­at­ed the sites but it sure made life dif­fi­cult for hun­dreds of employ­ees who were expect­ed to use the time sheet every day.

It’s a com­mon occur­rence. The book Hack­ing Work: Break­ing Stu­pid Rules for Smart Results argues that most businesses’s “love of bureau­cra­cy, lin­ger­ing tech­nol­o­gy, and deeply ingrained process­es” is mak­ing life unbear­able for thou­sands of employ­ees around the world. The book was list­ed as the Har­vard Busi­ness Review’s ten break­through ideas for 2010. Here’s an excerpt:

“Today’s top per­form­ers are tak­ing mat­ters into their own hands. They’re bypass­ing sacred struc­tures and break­ing all sorts of rules just to get their work done…More and more of us are find­ing that our work tools and struc­tures are com­plete­ly out of synch with what we need to do our best. Most of our dai­ly needs, dreams, desires, and goals are far ahead of our employ­ers’ tech­no­log­i­cal, pro­ce­dur­al, and social adop­tion curves.”

Like most peo­ple, I used to think of a “hack” as an act meant to do harm. But authors Bill Jensen and Josh Klein sug­gest that a hack can often be some­thing benev­o­lent: “It’s about mak­ing the sys­tem work for you, so you can take con­trol of your work­load, increase your pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, and help your com­pa­ny succeed—in spite of itself.”

This book made me think about labo­ri­ous tasks that I’ve wres­tled with in the past. Two examples:

• I worked for a high-tech com­pa­ny that was bought by a multi­na­tion­al orga­ni­za­tion. After the dust set­tled, the tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tions group was faced with a huge rebrand­ing effort includ­ing chang­ing tem­plates and copy­right con­tent, and replac­ing all old com­pa­ny names with the new com­pa­ny name. On my prod­uct team, I need­ed to replace hun­dreds of old com­pa­ny and prod­uct names. And it wasn’t a quick search and replace effort. It required me to review every instance because of rules about the company’s name and its place­ment with­in a sen­tence. How I’d do things dif­fer­ent­ly today: For all prod­uct and com­pa­ny names, I’d use vari­ables so that if copy­right­ed names changed again, I could change them in min­utes, not days.
• At anoth­er com­pa­ny some years ago, I dis­trib­uted con­tent to sub­ject mat­ter experts for a tech­ni­cal review, and received dozens of com­ments back on a large doc­u­ment. So what did I do? Review the PDF file and com­pare it to the orig­i­nal source file sen­tence by sen­tence. I found myself think­ing, “Sure­ly, there’s a bet­ter way to man­age these reviews so I don’t have to do this com­par­i­son page by page.” How I’d do things dif­fer­ent­ly today: If I’m using the lat­est ver­sion of FrameMak­er or Robo­Help, I’d ful­ly embrace the fea­ture that enables me to import PDF anno­ta­tions back into my source files. Hours of time saved!

These are not so much “hacks” but just dif­fer­ent approach­es I’d take if faced with the same work. As for those time sheets? Per­haps I’d just blunt the tedi­um of the task by try­ing to update the time sheets less frequently.