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Tooling Tax

A distributed team lives inside its tools and pays the rent in minutes. Thirty minutes to find where the tools cost more than they give.

Steps

  1. 3 min
    Set the stage

    Not a tool wishlist. We are looking for minutes lost, not features missing.

  2. 9 min
    List the tax

    Where did a tool cost you time this sprint — waiting, re-entering, searching, or switching between them?

  3. 10 min
    Group and rank

    Cluster the costs and rank them by how often they hit. Frequency beats severity here — a daily two minutes outweighs a rare hour.

  4. 8 min
    Fix one

    Take the most frequent cost and decide one of three: fix it, replace it, or agree out loud to keep paying it.