The assumptions I'm making are: 1. There exists, for many tasks, some indivisible, minimal unit of value created by work. If you need your car today, but your

The assumptions I'm making are: 1. There exists, for many tasks, some indivisible, minimal unit of value created by work. If you need your car today, but your mechanic left an hour early with the engine disassembled, it doesn't matter that they finished 95% of the work. The value of that 95% to you is zero. 2. In practice, how your work is thought to be divided into value-units (by whoever is assigning it) matters more than than how you think it is, or how it optimally could be. 3. Whether the demands on you are self-imposed, or reasonable, or whatever else, not meeting them has consequences. It isn't tautological to say that, even after finding all the better ways to do it, there are things you have to do and there exists some minimum amount of time you need to do them (N). If you work k fewer hours than required, you won't finish work that takes N time. This is just an observation of a fact.