I think there is a tendency to get bored by repetitive tasks an find ways to do them better. No forward planning necessary.
One of my first jobs was maintaining a national phone book library: 50lbs of new books in and 50lbs old books out every day, just the kind of thing to keep a 15-year-old busy all day. Within a couple weeks I had redesigned my pipeline to reduce labeling errors and speed the whole thing up by a factor of 2 or 3, which meant I could do other work as well (which lead to me learning print design, then animation, then programming).
I was not planning ahead, just bored, and it seemed normal to me. I was shocked when I tried to train my replacement: she stared at me like I was from Mars. I tried to explain how she should sort the new books first by state, not size, rip through the label printing process in one shot, remember that the list is now backwards when you apply the labels, spot-check every tenth book (ie, when you hit a perforation in the label fan-fold)... etc. She just went on with print-stick-shelf process for each book, and it took her all day.
One of my first jobs was maintaining a national phone book library: 50lbs of new books in and 50lbs old books out every day, just the kind of thing to keep a 15-year-old busy all day. Within a couple weeks I had redesigned my pipeline to reduce labeling errors and speed the whole thing up by a factor of 2 or 3, which meant I could do other work as well (which lead to me learning print design, then animation, then programming).
I was not planning ahead, just bored, and it seemed normal to me. I was shocked when I tried to train my replacement: she stared at me like I was from Mars. I tried to explain how she should sort the new books first by state, not size, rip through the label printing process in one shot, remember that the list is now backwards when you apply the labels, spot-check every tenth book (ie, when you hit a perforation in the label fan-fold)... etc. She just went on with print-stick-shelf process for each book, and it took her all day.