When someone says something is simple, hard, difficult, easy, complex, or complicated, they are referring to the effort and amount of steps involved. People associate these two groups as one commonly because…

Effort

• Easy – Achieved without great effort, presenting few difficulties
• Hard – Not soft, solid, firm to touch, unyielding to pressure, unpenetrable and almost penetrable
• Difficult – Needing much effort or skill to accomplish, deal with, or understand

Steps

• Simple – Easily understood, presenting no difficulty, non-complex, individual / made of one part (e.g. simple sugar)
• Complex – Difficult to understand (inferred meaning), presents difficulty (inferred meaning), non-simple, consisting of many different and connected parts (e.g. complex sugar)
• Complicated – Consisting of many different and connected parts, same as “complex”

A formula can be used to decrypt the effort and time as you can calculate electricity using amps and volts.

Power of a system in Watts can be found by multiplying the volts and amperage together.

Development Cost (stress units) of a system can be found by multiplying the Effort and Quantity of steps together.

• Work = Weight * Distance
• Work = Force * Displacement
• Work = Effort * Qty of Steps
• Watts = Volts * Amperage

Each step or collection of steps requires an amount of effort expended. The two together gives you the Development Cost value of the step or collection of steps.

If you have 8 hours in a work day and each hour you are doing the same action over and over again, your development cost will be the number of steps taken during the 8 hours multiplied by the effort it took to accomplish each step.

If each step is similar to the step/s after it, the difficulty will physically be low, but will mentally increase over time due to boredom. The physical effort is low but the mental effort grows over time to a limit. You can add the mental and physical effort together to get the total effort of the step/s.

The overall development cost (stress units) can be seen in that example to be very low. Each process can be pick up part, locate part on stamp machine, activate stamp machine, move part to finished bin. That is 4 easy steps.

Assuming each effort rating is between 1 and 10, we can start to have a numerical value range to work with.

We can assume that you will never meet “Too Easy” or “Too Difficult” as both are unattainable realistic states to be able to work on or complete.

Effort Range Values

• 00.00) Too Easy
• 01.25) Very Easy
• 02.50) Easy
• 03.75) Sort of Easy
• 05.00) Hard (Easy / Difficult)
• 06.25) Sort of Difficult
• 07.50) Difficult
• 08.75) Very Difficult
• 10.00) Too Difficult

Effort Work Unit Part Stamping Calculations (8 hour day)

• 60 minutes per hour / 0.25 minutes per brick = 240 stamped parts per hour
• 240 stamped parts per hour * 8 hours = 1920 stamped parts per 8 hours
• 1920 stamped parts * 4 steps per brick * 1.25 effort rating per step =  2400 effort work units

If we had a worker that did more complicated work, we increase the number of steps. The effort of each step can be considered to be how much effort it takes to comprehend. More difficult to comprehend concepts get a higher effort rating than simple to comprehend concepts.

If we change from stamping parts to making bricks, we can see the steps and effort change.

You take the components, mix them, load mixture into form, activate form, remove brick from form, move brick to storage location. That is 6 steps with a rating of approximately “Sort of Difficult” to “Difficult”.

Effort Work Unit Brick Making Calculations (8 hour day)

• 60 minutes / 5 minutes per brick = 12 bricks per hour
• 12 bricks per hour * 8 hours = 96 bricks per 8 hours
• 96 bricks * 6 steps per brick * 6.25 effort rating per step = 3600 effort work units

The effort tends to be subjective due to the physical and mental capabilities of the worker. Many jobs will become easier in terms of physical and mental effort, while other jobs can have mental effort go up due to boredom and stress.

With projects that have a varying amount of steps and effort values, you can still put the information together mathematically. The total value will be the sum of the sub-components. The sub-component values can be figured out individually. A project value formula may look like this: Project = Process1(step qty, time per step, effort per step) + Process2(step qty, time per step, effort per step)

With people, you could consider the effort values to be a combination of calories burned and stress accumulated.