Dead Money
”Any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy is indistinguishable from necromancy.” I’m just making these up
Previously at the Volcano Base I’d gone back in time to a 1950s dentist. Since then I’ve had a slow week. I’m between projects (accepting new briefs!), which usually (always) means picking through LinkedIn garbage, worrying about biz dev, and Tinkering. Yes, note the capital T. This is no ordinary tinkering. This is M&S Tinkering, which happily comes with a bottle of wine and a side dish of Pissing About.
Mission Briefing
Dead Money
Somewhere in the heart of your business, possibly near that broken printer, something unnatural is stirring.
It doesn’t wear a cloak or chant in Latin. It looks like a spreadsheet. Or the twelfth urgent notification of the day. It consumes time, talent, and attention with the inevitability of a Hollywood curse. It is called Dead Money: the portion of your salary budget devoted not to actual work, but to the ritualistic reanimation of data across systems that never should’ve needed human hands in the first place.
The medium? Administrivia.
The method? Copy-Pasta.
The result? A team of accidental necromancers. Now that's a good sixth form band name.
Administrative Necromancy
Dead Money is what you spend keeping your people locked in a bureaucratic séance. They channel data from one place to another: rekeying, reconciling, reformatting, summoning numbers from ancient PDFs, performing calendar incantations, muttering passwords into the ineffable void of Microsoft Teams.
It’s not work. It’s artefact maintenance. It’s the digital equivalent of tending a haunted doll collection. We've all been there.
So I built an admin cost calculator to help people quantify the Dead Money. I almost called it The Adminomicon or The Phantom Ledger or the Clerical Price Index, but I reigned it in just in time.
Enter three numbers and it estimates how much of your payroll is being used for clerical necromancy. The numbers are almost always shocking. Like “unsanctioned ritual in the stationery cupboard” shocking.
It Hides
Dead Money doesn’t show up in financial reports. No one ever presents “Weekly Hours Wasted” to the board. But it’s there. Lurking in the shadows of your systems. Multiplying like pre-meetings about the upcoming meeting.
Most companies don’t fix it until the screams get loud. Because automation still feels like a luxury, not a cure. It’s hard to invest in what you can’t name.
So I named it! And then I gave it a damn calculator!
Resurrection Protocol
Automation doesn’t really replace people. It resurrects their time. It exorcises the repetitive tasks that keep them trapped in looping purgatory. It lets them think again. Create again. Choose something more meaningful than formatting a cell border or slide 39's transition effect.
Machines are brilliant at rituals. Let’s stop using people as glue between cursed systems and start using them for what they’re actually good at.
So how much Dead Money are you spending? And what might you resurrect if you stopped?
Classified Intel
Some interesting stuff I discovered on my adventures.
1X Technologies
Summary: This product from 1X claims to perform mundane household tasks via an AI‑powered robot, thereby reclaiming human time from routine. I’d say this is still pretty beta, given the bot currently needs a remote human operator to learn about your house. Oh, and it's a mere $20k.
Why it matters: It’s a vivid analogue for turning mechanical human labour into automated labour, and freeing people to do something better than just moving files.
Summary: Alertmouse tracks web mentions and alerts users when their brand or keywords appear online, picking up what free tools miss. It’s by the guys at Sparktoro, who in turn, are ex Moz, so worth checking out.
Why it matters: Cost-effective “brand” tracking for today’s internet. You're totally going to put your name in there, aren't you.
Cursor 2.0 and Composer update
Cursor Team
Summary: Popular AI-enhanced IDE Cursor’s 2.0 launch includes a “Composer” model and multi‑agent interface designed to let software handle large‑scale coding tasks more efficiently.
Why it matters: It shows the bleeding edge of automation, not just tedious admin but creative/technical work being assisted by agents. Time reclaimed via automation is not just for “lesser” tasks.
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