The Hidden Cost of "It Only Takes a Few Minutes"
"It only takes a few minutes" is the most expensive sentence in your workflow. The real bill is context switching and inconsistent output — here is what it actually costs, and what fixes it.
Look, I do it too — take the same action over and over, even when I know there’s a better way.
In my last role, I used Claude every day to ask the same questions. I’d paste a similar Slack message in and say, “do x, y, and z.” Every time, I told myself the same thing: this only takes a few minutes.
I was wrong.
The prompt and Claude’s response really did take a few minutes — but the end-to-end task cost me far more than that.
Here’s what it actually looked like. First I’d spot the Slack message, and groan. Switch my brain into another mode. Read the message, and groan again. Open Claude, ask my question, wait for the response, then take action — which usually meant updating another tool, like Jira, with the result. “Just a few minutes,” right?
The real costs were two things I wasn’t counting: context switching and inconsistent results. Because I was retyping my prompt from scratch every time, the outputs came out a little different each time. And then there’s the cost of the context switching itself — which is much higher than we realize.
Say the whole thing takes fifteen minutes end-to-end. Pulling your focus off what you were doing and onto this is taxing. It takes time to re-jigger your brain for a different task, and the task you just finished is still rattling around in the back of your mind. For me, there was a nagging thought running underneath all of it: you really need to find a better way. So the next task takes longer too, because now you’ve got three things swirling around at once.
I know — we all think we’re great at multitasking.
We're not. Multitasking just means you give part of your brain to one thing and part to another. The results diminish on both.
And for the marketers and creatives thinking it only takes a second to Slack the team for the latest creative — you’re wrong about that too. It’s not just costing you in context switching. It’s costing the teammate on the other end, the one who has to stop, find the file, and send it back.
When I finally stopped for one day and built the Claude skills for my own workflow, the unlock was monumental. The same is true of a DAM. On top of saving you all that switching cost, it means you can actually find and repurpose the content your whole team is creating, instead of asking for it one Slack at a time.
Trust me, it's worth the effort.
It does take effort — and I'll write more on actually implementing a DAM later. But it's a worthy endeavor.
Stop losing the work you paid for.
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