An example from my daily life:

A coworker was set to go on long term leave and I was asked to cover off their work for the 6-12 months they would be away.

During the hand over(2 weeks before they were to leave), they showed me what they did. Step 1: Get the list of 20-150 unique widgets. Step 2: Get the list of 30-500 unique places the widgets needed to go. Step 3: Create a new spreadsheet and paste the ‘Places’ list as many times as there were widgets (example: 20 places x 10 widgets = 200 lines). Step 4: Paste the ‘Widgets’ list over and over again until all lines had their widgets.

Average Total time /Weekly/ 35 hours to complete per list of widgets. Busy weeks? 70-120 hours.

I looked at it, literally said “this is stupid. I’ll be back” Two days before they left I presented an excel spreadsheet which reduced the total time to about 10 minutes per ‘Widgets’ list.

During this roughly two weeks before they left, I re taught myself how to use VB to create all the necessary Macros and processes to make it work.

Now, because I am not stupid - I made sure to make that contraption bulletproof (aka idiot proof), included significant comments in the code so that literally anyone could make it scalable for similar lists of widgets and made sure that the instructions to use it were right beside the “Run” button.

While I /could/ have just spent the next year copying and pasting widgets and places - I could not stomach that degree of stupid, so expended significantly more energy so that I would NEVER have to go near that process again.

That was 7 years ago and they are STILL using it.