I’ve long been fascinated by the OMB’s annual “time burden” estimates—billions of hours Americans spend on required work. To me, they’re a national-scale Obstacles-to-Value (OTV) score. My mother imagines a future where people are free to do whatever they want; the engineer in me wants to build it. First, we must measure every burden—what I call Obstacles-to-Value (OTV)—so we can eliminate it. The OMB counts paperwork hours; I want to count—and cut—every burden in life.

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Every year, somewhere in the dense machinery of the U.S. federal government, a quiet little calculation is made. The Office of Management and Budget releases its “time burden” estimates—the number of hours the American public spends filling out forms, reporting data, or otherwise complying with federal information requests. It’s a number that reaches into the billions, and it fascinates me.

Not because it’s perfect—it isn’t. Agencies self-report their own estimates, methodologies vary, and politics often dictates what gets counted. But the very act of trying to measure the total burden of required work is extraordinary. It’s a rare admission, at a national scale, that time matters—yours, mine, and the millions of collective hours we spend on things we’d never voluntarily choose to do.

Over decades, those estimates have mostly gone up, despite multiple legislative pushes to bring them down. That’s the paradox: complexity tends to increase unless something actively prunes it back. And that’s where my own obsession began.

I’ve spent much of my life thinking about what I call Obstacles-to-Value (OTV)—the frictions between wanting something and getting it. It’s the delay, the form, the extra click, the unclear instruction, the pointless meeting. The OMB’s burden hours are, in my eyes, just a giant, nation-scale OTV score. Every hour counted there is an obstacle between someone and the value they want to realize.

But I don’t stop at observation. I’m an engineer at heart, and the engineer in me has a lifelong itch: to see a world where these burdens approach zero. My mother has always painted a vision of a future in which people are free to do whatever they want—no forced labor, no soul-sucking bureaucracy, no arbitrary obstacles. She imagines the utopia; I start drawing the wiring diagrams.

And for me, the wiring diagram looks a lot like a Rube Goldberg machine—a vast, intricate system that, once completed, could eliminate the need for humans to endure burdensome work at all. My whole career has been, in some way, an extended attempt to build pieces of that machine: streamlining, automating, and connecting systems so that what once took hours now takes seconds—or vanishes entirely.

But before we can automate all burdens away, we have to understand them. And that means measuring them. Right now, I call that measure Obstacles-to-Value, though I’ve been toying with a new name: Burden-to-Value (BTV). The idea is simple—just like every box of food in America lists its nutritional values, everything that requires you to do something you’d rather not do should have a burden label. How much time? How much mental effort? How much money? How much emotional friction?

If we could measure that—accurately, comprehensively, and universally—we could do for human labor what calorie counts did for nutrition: give everyone a common, objective way to see the cost of their choices, and then collectively work to reduce it. Imagine a BTV score on everything from renewing your driver’s license to launching a new business. Imagine knowing, before you begin, exactly what the total “cost” in time and effort will be—and then having systems and technologies racing to drive that number down.

The OMB has been doing its version of this since the 1980s, but it’s narrowly scoped to government paperwork. I see it much bigger. The same principle could apply to all human activity that feels like work. Once we can measure it everywhere, we can target it everywhere. And when the targeting is right, automation, AI, and process design can start to strip those burdens away—just as I’ve been trying to do, piece by piece, for my entire career.

My mother’s utopia may sound dreamy, but I believe it’s possible. The road there is paved not in wishful thinking, but in cold, calculated measurement of every unnecessary burden, paired with a relentless engineering mission to remove them. If the OMB has shown us anything, it’s that the act of counting matters. And if my life’s work has taught me anything, it’s that what gets counted can be cut.

In the end, my goal is simple: to hand my mother, and everyone else, the keys to a zero-burden future. We’ll know we’re there when the OTV labels are blank.

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