When a company announces an efficiency review, most people do the same thing: work longer hours, show up earlier, and try to look busy. The logic feels intuitive. The result? You prove you’re busy. Not valuable.
One developer on r/PromptEngineering took a different approach when his company started evaluating team efficiency. He had two weeks. Instead of working more, he built something that worked for him. And when the review wrapped up, his name came up in a very different kind of conversation than his colleagues expected.
The core idea: stop being the doer, start being the architect
When you automate the most tedious part of your job, your relationship to the company changes. You’re no longer a cost that produces output. You’re the person who built the system that produces output.
That distinction matters more than most people realize. Doers are measured by hours and throughput. Architects are measured by the systems they leave behind. One is a resource that gets allocated. The other is a multiplier that gets protected. The developer in this story didn’t just save himself time. He changed which category he belonged to, permanently, in the eyes of leadership.
Old way vs. new way
The old approach: 3 hours every week writing manual summaries that looked exactly like everyone else’s. Consistent effort. No leverage. And here’s the part nobody talks about: manual summaries don’t just cost time. They cost attention. You spend cognitive energy reformatting data that already exists somewhere, translating it into a format someone will skim for 90 seconds and then archive. That’s the invisible tax of repetitive work. It doesn’t just consume hours. It consumes the hours you could have spent thinking about actual problems.
The new approach: one focused sprint building a self-maintaining dashboard with Power Query and advanced formulas. It pulls data from project management tools, runs the calculations, and generates a weekly snapshot automatically. Every Monday morning, no manual input needed. The same summary that used to cost 3 hours now costs zero. That recovered time goes somewhere more interesting.
The productivity review didn’t focus on his output. It focused on his leverage.
How he built it
The stack is accessible. No custom code, no advanced engineering. Here’s the basic playbook:
- 🔗 Connect your data source. Use Power Query to pull directly from your project management tools. Asana, Jira, and Monday.com all support query-friendly exports or direct API connections. If your tools don’t have native connectors, a CSV export on a shared drive works fine as an intermediary. The goal is eliminating the copy-paste step, not building a perfect pipeline on day one.
- 📊 Define your calculations once. Set up the formulas that generate your weekly snapshot: totals, completion rates, velocity, whatever your team actually tracks. The key is to build these calculations so they reference the data dynamically. When new rows come in, the numbers update automatically. No manual adjustment, no risk of forgetting to update a cell.
- ⚙️ Automate the refresh. Power Query can refresh on file open or on a schedule. The data stays current without you touching a single cell. If you’re working inside Microsoft 365, Power Automate can trigger a refresh at a specific time each week. If you’re working locally, setting the file to refresh on open and opening it Monday morning is still a 10-second task instead of a 3-hour one.
- 📅 Time the delivery. Schedule the workbook to refresh Monday morning so the snapshot is sitting there before standup even starts. Pair that with a shared link sent to your manager automatically and the whole thing runs without you. You’re not just producing a report. You’re producing a report that arrives before the meeting, formatted consistently, every single week, with no reminders needed.
Total setup time: a few focused hours. Payoff: every Monday for the rest of your tenure at that company. That math compounds fast. By month three, the dashboard has already saved more time than it took to build. By year one, it’s not even a comparison.
The real takeaway
Efficiency reviews feel like a threat. They don’t have to be.
Most people respond by working harder. That’s the wrong move. Working harder signals you need more hours to produce the same output. It’s not leverage, it’s exposure. You’re essentially telling leadership: my current pace is already my maximum. That’s not a position you want to be in when decisions are being made.
Building a system that removes you from the equation signals something completely different. It says: I don’t just do the job, I think about how the job gets done. That’s the gap between a doer and an architect. Companies don’t cut architects during efficiency reviews. They’re the ones those reviews are designed to find.
The practical question isn’t “how do I look busier?” It’s “what’s the one manual process I can convert into a permanent asset this week?” Start there. Pick the task that repeats most often, costs the most time, and produces the most predictable output. Those are the best automation candidates because the logic is already clear. You’re not solving a creative problem. You’re removing yourself from a mechanical one.
One Power Query dashboard won’t save a bad performer. But for a competent person grinding through repetitive manual work, it can shift how leadership sees them entirely. That’s a much better conversation to be in when the review results come in. And once you’ve built one system like this, the instinct to build the next one becomes second nature. That’s how doers become architects. Not in a single sprint, but in a pattern of decisions about where to spend their focus.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What project management tools and stack does this require?
The post doesn’t get into specifics, but u/Papa_Steque’s question is spot-on. It depends on what your company already uses. Asana, Monday.com, Jira, Linear, whatever. The real requirement is whether they have Power Query connectors, API access, or native Excel integration so data flows automatically.
Q: Does this have to be Excel, or can I use something else?
Excel with Power Query is what the post covers, but u/green1s points out Google Apps Scripts is another path. They got results fast, taking a 1-hour report down to 4 minutes. Use Excel if you’re not comfortable coding; try Apps Scripts if you can write some JavaScript. Either works depending on your skill level and what integrates with your existing tools.
Q: How much time does it take to build and set up initially?
The post focuses on the payoff (3 hours saved per week), not setup time. A basic dashboard usually takes a few hours to a day depending on complexity and how well you know the tools. Once it’s running, it handles itself every week without any additional effort.
Q: Does this approach work for things other than reporting?
Absolutely. The example is weekly summaries, but you can apply this to anything that’s repetitive and data-driven. Status updates, performance metrics, expense reports, whatever your team churns out on a schedule. Find the boring manual task and automate it; suddenly you’ve got hours back in your week.
The single Excel skill that saved my remote job when the company started ‘evaluating team efficiency’
by u/designbyshivam in PromptEngineering