Free up enough space to bankroll your capacity to experiment

Overhead is the ongoing operating cost of doing something.

It’s the additional bandwidth required to perform a given task.

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with overhead. But it is an expense which can’t be conveniently traced to revenue. It’s not a concrete operating cost like raw material and labor.

This is why companies always harp on keeping overhead low. The obvious example that confronted us all during the pandemic was office space. Since the vast majority of employees were working from home, suddenly companies saw their overhead costs plummet.

I read one study from a global workplace analysis that organizations were saving eleven thousand dollars in rent and related costs for every employee working remotely per week.

Another study showed that employees themselves also saved a few thousand bucks per year, now that commuting, wardrobe and other costs were either drastically reduced or completely eliminated.

Hooray for living the low overhead dream!

And sure, the commercial real estate market lost billions and was devastated for three years. But frankly, that’s not my problem.

What’s interesting about this principle of overhead is, each of us can apply it in the macro and the micro. Because if we’re not careful overhead can creep in and kill us from death by a thousand cuts.

I work for a software firm that focuses in the manufacturing industry, and a big word in our world is waste. When factories have machines that are fifty yards long, the operators can’t afford the motion waste of walking back and forth all day to tap their coworkers on the shoulder, access work instructions and receive on the job training.

The whole reason our society transitioned from craft production to mass production was to avoid this kind of overhead. Moving workers from assembly stand to assembly stand unscalable. Walking, even if only for a yard or two at a time, had a cost.

This is a helpful illustration for thinking about the rest of our lives. We do ourselves a deep service by asking the question:

How much overhead is this going to cost me?

Because in many cases, it’s similar to the pandemic. We realize some equivalent of, oh wait, why the hell are we still paying twenty grand a month to rent this enormous office space, when only four out of fifty employees are stupid enough to commute each day?

That’s over three hundred thousand dollars a year we could reinvest in more effective directions. Like paying people more. Or offering home office stipends. Or god forbid, getting health insurance.

This is the kind of shift that happens when you go on overhead reducing missions. You free up all this psychic space into which new opportunities pour.

My theory is, everyone has their own personal calculation of this. And if we can train ourselves to get into the habit of doing some basic math, we can unlock new sources of joy, calmness and efficiency.

One example is looking at your phone, computer or device and asking which programs have the most unnecessary overhead. Where is the juice not worth the squeeze? Which apps require an excess of computation time, memory, bandwidth, or other resources that are required to perform tasks?

Perhaps you start a new job, and several of your coworkers are obsessed with their project management software to organize work. But you quickly realize that using a simple index card, sticky note, or a blank document would be more streamlined for your purposes.

Great. No need to pay that overhead cost just because of tribal history and social pressure. Let your team know that you you’re your projects lean and do it your way, for the benefit of everyone.

Compassionate, flexible and smart people won’t mind. Because low overhead is good for everyone.

Here’s a different example that has nothing to do with technology.

Lesson learned, keep your overhead low and you’ll keep compromise low too.

Because your risk will be minimal. You’ll free up enough space to bankroll your capacity to experiment. And you’ll have the surplus energy to awaken alternative ways of living.

Maybe you’ll even say no to the activities that no longer serve you.

Whereas if you keep paying the equivalent of thirty grand a month for a huge office that only four employees occupy, you’ll price yourself out of doing interesting things.

Is the ongoing operating cost of doing this worth the additional bandwidth required?