A kitchen timer measures the food’s readiness while the cook negotiates everyone else’s.

The timer handles the one thing in the kitchen that has fixed requirements. Everything else, the hunger, the moods, the arrivals, the people who said they would help, must be managed by the cook without any instrument at all. The visible timing is the easy part and it is the only part with a device.

Recognise this wherever coordination happens. The measurable component gets the tools and the attention, and the human synchronising gets neither. If you are doing that second job, it is real work even though nothing beeps for it. And if someone else is doing it, taking one piece of the invisible half is worth more than offering to watch the pot.