Use to audit any job — yours or someone else's. Ask the single question: could the person doing it, if honest, justify its existence? If not, it's bullshit. Use this as the umbrella before slotting a job into the five categories below.

The master test. It locates the diagnosis in the worker's own judgment, not the employer's — which is why it catches jobs that look productive from outside but feel pointless from inside. If the person doing it cannot convince themselves there is a good reason for it, it's bullshit regardless of pay or how busy it looks. (The telling example: a German soldier moving computers two rooms down could just carry it, but the job is outsourced through three subcontractors and fifteen pages of paperwork.)