Seth Godin is a marketing guru – author of dozens of books including Purple Cow.

A recent idea on his blog is a workflow audit…

Go find a geek. Someone who understands gmail, Outlook, Excel and other basic tools.

Pay her to sit next to you for an hour and watch you work.

Then say, “tell me five ways I can save an hour a day.”

Whatever you need to pay for this service, it will pay for itself in a week.

Great idea, but is Seth missing the big benefit?

We all have at least one routine task that takes so long that we only bother if we really have to. This could be

• putting pictures in a blog post
• putting photos in an email
• making a back-up

Now just think if the geek showed us a slick way to do the pain-in-the-ass task? The benefit isn’t the time saved – it’s the uplift in quality and performance.

This is in my top-10 list of ideas. Letting website visitors book their own medical appointment online. Like booking a flight or a holiday.

Ultralase is a national chain of laser eye clinics in the UK. Some 90% of their business comes through their website.

At the time I was Interim Web Manager. We had already done several 10% improvement projects and were gearing up for a production-line of small improvements. Online booking was a left-field idea: a possible game-changer.

It seems so obvious now – but it was a tough sell at the time. They were doing very well thank-you beforehand. And now they are doing very-well-plus-30%-thank-you. And another validation is that their 2 big rivals are doing online booking as well now.