As a software agency one of our qualities is to help our clients to innovate and automate their processes – whenever it makes sense. Usually this happens on a large scale and in the middle of our clients usual business processes. We speak of several hours a day that we help to save our clients through automatisation, which then their employees can invest in more demanding and meaningful activities. But while it absolutely makes sense to keep a watchful eye on your company's processes, you don't always have to think big. Sometimes it is all about details and smallest optimisations.
So ask yourself: What processes do you repeat every day, that could be simplified or automated? Does your e-mail program for example open too slowly? Such small things can add up. That's why for instance the frequent Facebook check of many employees is controversially discussed.
Nevertheless I'm more interested in keeping an eye on the frustration threshold. I don't like to wait for a program to open, because I subjectively feel that this is an insanely long time the more often I get into this waiting situation. This annoyance and the distraction it causes are the real damage and not the lost time (apart from extremes).
In my article on Medium I describe such a small optimisation that affects us developers every day when we switch between terminal and development environment: Path handler in MacOS X
