How do you measure the cost of your team doing things the slow way?

We recently did an exercise with a 10-person service team: tracked how many hours each person spent on tasks they knew could be done faster — reformatting reports, searching Slack for links, re-explaining processes to new hires.

The average was 5 hours per person per week. At a $50/hr blended cost, that is $130,000/year just in wasted motion.

The interesting part: most of these were not technology problems. The team had Notion, Slack, ChatGPT, and every tool you can name. The gap was that nobody had shown them how to use these tools together effectively.

A few 2-hour training sessions later, the number dropped to about 2 hours/week per person. Simple ROI math.

Questions for the community:

1. Has anyone done this kind of audit on their own team? What surprised you?
2. What is the single biggest time sink you see in your day-to-day?
3. Do you think the problem is more about tools or about skills?

Genuinely curious — we are building better ways to measure and fix this, and real-world stories help more than any framework.