The Transaction Costs of Work

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Phase 1 — Decide what to do
Surfacing the universe of possible work (pulling candidate tasks out of email, chat, meetings, your own head, others' mouths)
Capturing before it's lost (the cost you pay later if you don't: re-remembering, things falling through)
Deduplicating — the same task arriving through three channels
Clarifying ambiguous requests — what is actually being asked
Sizing — rough effort/time estimate
Prioritizing / sequencing — the actual judgment ⟵ irreducible core
Re-prioritizing when conditions change (re-paid every time priorities shift)
Declining / negotiating scope — saying no, pushing back
Recording the decision + rationale so you don't re-litigate it
Meta-decision: deciding whether to plan at all vs. just start
Phase 2 — Acquire what you need (info, knowledge, access, tools)
Knowing what you need — you often don't know what you're missing
Knowing where it lives / who has it
Searching / retrieving — digging through drives, threads, docs
Requesting access — permissions, credentials, licenses
Waiting for that access (latency)
Learning the concept or skill the task requires ⟵ partly irreducible
Tool/environment setup
Evaluating quality and trustworthiness of what you found
Reconciling conflicting sources
Re-finding things you already had once (the tax on poor personal organization)
Phase 3 — Do the work
Activation energy — overcoming the cost of starting
Entering focus — loading context into working memory (the ramp-up)
The actual production / thinking ⟵ irreducible core
In-flight micro-judgments ⟵ mostly irreducible
Self-correction — debugging, iterating, checking your own work
Sustaining focus — resisting interruption, fighting fatigue
Recovering from interruption — attention residue, reload
Parking mid-stream — saving state so it's resumable
Resuming — reloading context again
Tool friction during execution (slow, broken, fiddly workflows)
Phase 4 — Realize the value (ship / share)
Packaging — making the work presentable
Legibility / translation — making it understandable to whoever receives it (often a second project bolted onto the first)
Channel & audience choice — where it goes, who sees it
Distribution mechanics — sending, publishing, uploading
Getting it reviewed / approved
Handling feedback — revision loops
Confirming it landed — receipt, acknowledgment
Capturing the outcome — did it actually work? ⟵ partly irreducible (it's learning)
Archiving so the work is findable and reusable later
Cross-cutting A — The seams (between every phase)
Context-switch tax between tasks
Attention residue — part of your head stuck on the last thing
Handoff friction between phases — the output of one phase isn't shaped as the input the next phase needs (e.g., your notes from "decide" don't feed cleanly into "do")
Mode switching — maker schedule vs. manager schedule collisions
Cross-cutting B — Coordination (other people)
Dependency latency — blocked, waiting on someone
Communication overhead — explaining, syncing, status updates
Meetings — scheduling, attending, the synchronizing tax
Alignment — building shared understanding before work can proceed
Handoffs — transferring loaded context into someone else's head
Chasing / following up on the unresponsive
Expectation management
Conflict resolution
Cross-cutting C — The system itself (meta-overhead)
Maintaining the system — grooming the task list, organizing files
Tool/process churn — adopting, migrating, relearning
Decision fatigue accumulating across the day
Emotional overhead — dread, anxiety, perfectionism, context-dread
Energy management — hard work demands your best hours, and there are few of them
Reporting on your own work — timesheets, status, justification

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The Transaction Costs of Work

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