One practice I&#x27;ve found useful, that is more general, was to issue weekly reports breaking down the cost of each activity. That is, I&#x27;d solicit a ~5-10 line breakdown from everyone in my team of how they spent their time that week, and I&#x27;d apply average costs for their function and tally it up.<p>So we might see posts like $2k for a planning meeting show up on the report, and suddenly people started paying attention to what time was spent on - both for meetings and otherwise.<p>And making arguments like the one in your example. It also meant being able to make actual estimates over whether pursuing a certain optimization would be worth it vs. buying more hardware.<p>Amazingly each place I&#x27;ve done this at, they were initially confused why I wanted to do this, as apparently it was weird and unusual to have engineering issue such breakdowns