The Permanent Temporary Fix: Which Workarounds to Keep and Which to Replace
Written By: Mathew Patterson
Last Updated November 9, 2026
That shiny candy you just ate probably started off pretty dull before it was glazed by shellac made from the resin excreted by female lac bugs. The same product might be protecting the table you’re sitting at too.
Shellac was a global wonder substance. Phonograph and gramophone records were originally made of shellac, and the nature of the material limited the length of songs. Those tiny tree bugs will never know they shaped the popular music industry.
During WWII, though, supply lines were disrupted, and shellac coming from South Asia was hard to obtain. That’s when the record industry was forced to find a wartime alternative, eventually adopting vinyl, which was already used for wire insulation. Vinyl turned out to be stronger, quieter, and more flexible, and it allowed for more music per disc. Shellac records faded away.
But stopgap measures don’t always age so well. When computer memory was desperately scarce and expensive in the 1960s, using just two digits for the year made perfect sense. It was only when the new millennium loomed that the danger became clear — would “00” mean 1900 or 2000 to your bank or your airline? Would a website age check think that people were negative 40 years old?
After the memory-saving approach of the 1960s, computer capacity and software both expanded enormously, and nobody paid much attention to those earlier decisions. Then there was a $300 billion scramble to fix the problem before it became catastrophic.
Fixes often need to be made under pressure, and it’s impossible to know in advance where they will end up. Some will be vinyl and turn out to be a perfect fit. Others will be Y2K — ideal for the moment but disastrous later on. Can you tell the difference?
The half-bricks in your business
At my house, there’s a side gate that I’ve been meaning to fix. Instead, a half-brick has been holding it up like a champ for at least eight years now. Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution, at home and at work.
Behind the neat reception desk or shiny front counter of most businesses, things are considerably less put together. There’s a ratty shift-swap note taped to a wall. There are sticky notes with passwords securely located on the monitor.
At least your physical temporary fixes are in your eye line. It’s the hidden fixes that can really cost you: the extra steps in a daily process or the dubious workaround that becomes the official method.
In 5 Hidden Causes of Workplace Slowdowns, 53% of surveyed managers point to processes that aren’t regularly reviewed or updated as a cause of workflow breakdowns. Consider the payroll admin who is manually entering data from timesheets because five years back the time tracker was incompatible with the payroll tool, and nobody ever read those software update notices.
Your business has its own stack of half-bricks in the corner, and at least some of them need to be replaced.
How to know what’s not serving you
Here are a few ways to figure out which of your temporary fixes should be addressed sooner rather than later:
- Only one person knows how it works: If a “fix” relies on the veteran office manager, it’s inevitably going to break when she’s finally off on that Italy trip she’s been planning for years.
- You’re spending time maintaining a workaround: If it’s a fiddly, recurring “update the sheet and then manually do these three things” type task, it’s probably worth the work of a proper long-term fix.
- It’s got a built-in deadline: Like two-digit dates and Y2K, some fixes are inevitably going to fail. Will this system break when you have more than 10 people or when overtime laws change? Better to change it now.
- You’d never do this today: If it’s a small fix, but one that you’d never implement that way if you started from scratch, it might need replacing.
If you have temporary procedures or manual systems that will keep working even if your staff change and the tools you use are upgraded, then by all means keep using them. That half-brick is doing its job well.
Vincent, the owner of The Brick House Bakery, had a temporary fix for employee scheduling. He’d print a shift roster and hang it on the wall. That was fine for a small team, but with success came more staff:
“They were texting me constantly. I need this day off. I need this day off. And then they would forget that they needed a day off, and I would already have a schedule posted, which I did on Excel, and then I would have to go back and alter it. And one day I just got tired of it, and with 18 employees, I said, I need to find something better.”
That something better was Buddy Punch, which Vincent says helps him build three weeks of schedules in under 30 minutes and save 7+ hours every week.
Ideally, you want to catch temporary-fix issues while they are still annoyances and before they grow into genuine problems. The first step is simply to notice them. Start a list: the gaps you’re filling in processes that don’t quite work, workarounds you’ve been doing on autopilot, the little fixes your staff have been making. There are probably more than you think.
By working through the questions above, you’ll be able to prioritize the Y2K issues, and stop worrying about the vinyl fixes.
The warmth of vinyl
Over $1 billion in vinyl records was sold in the U.S. in 2025 as people continued to get into a format that was considered almost extinct. They’ve made it a long way from being an emergency gap-filler when there weren’t enough bug excretions to go around.
Vinyl survives because it’s an effective solution that people love using. You’ll have vinyl solutions in your business too, and they’re worth celebrating. Just make sure they are really earning their place and you’re keeping them on purpose (like my gate-brick, which I’ve just decided is a valuable structural addition to my house).
