I've found that the time itself is less valuable than articulating the workflow changes it can bring about. Saving an hour a week is great, but if you can save

I've found that the time itself is less valuable than articulating the workflow changes it can bring about. Saving an hour a week is great, but if you can save 30 seconds at the right time, it can have a much bigger impact. For example, if I can spend a day tweaking my project's build scripts and CI workflows to get it from taking 30 minutes to build/test/deploy down to 30 seconds, I've dramatically altered my team's workflow. Also, there are very few reasons to buy your own hardware anymore -- cloud services are better at almost everything unless it's a low-latency operation (or you're in Australia - the speed of light is still too slow, sorry mate). Obviously there are exceptions, but with the scale of GPGPU build-out all the big public clouds are deploying, the benefits of anything else are rapidly disappearing. Most managers aren't swayed by the argument that 1 hour = ($annual_salary / 2000). They know that if you give people an extra 5 minutes a day, they'll probably just spend it drinking coffee or socializing. Those certainly aren't bad things for employees to do, but unless your team is already running well beyond capacity, giving them more time to do things doesn't really improve productivity. Improving process (by, say, removing a manual step through automation) really gives you more bang for your buck.