498
People often ask why I contribute to open source projects or otherwise work on building automated tooling. They see me spending hours to automate a task or fix a bug that take seconds to do or avoid manually, in a way that the original XKCD comic says won't pay off. The disconnect seems to be that the comic and those people only consider time it saves me, not time it saves the tens to thousands to millions of other people who will use the script or patch or whatever when I publish it. So, here's a version of xkcd.com/1205 updated for making decisions that benefit a thousand people instead of just one.
Remember though, this is the amount of time savings something has to represent.
So you still have to accomplish the task.
So doubling it: your entire repetitive job. Would have efficiency increased to halve the time. Pretty rare.
I mean, there are some lower hanging fruit.
For example, if it takes 10 minutes to poop, but you can get that down to say, 5, with a decent centerfuge, across an entire company (1000 people, assuming every one is pooping five times a day).
... holy shit. Brilliant.