I was thinking the same thing about google search results. The .1s difference can aggregate to a lot of hours, but in reality, I cannot effectively utilize my .1s - It literally is too small of a unit of time to be useful.

When looking to optimize human time - the low hanging fruit is always the most impactful. Shaving 2 minutes off a 10 minute task means nothing to me if the task is a rare one - I will still schedule 20 minutes for it in my planning. On the other hand, if someone turns what used to be a day-long task into something that takes an hour, my planning will be significantly altered and I'll be able to add more productivity into my time.

(I'm the author.) I mostly agree and I also don't think that saving 10 minutes over the course of a month or a year can be directly translated into 10 minutes of work (as it could be with a computer). I think the value of small efficiency boosts is two-fold: first, they compound. Saving a minute on twenty daily tasks gives you twenty minutes of extra time to do something. You could spend that time sleeping or coding or watching TV, but at least you have a choice. So maybe that 10 minutes saved would only produce 3 minutes of additional productive/non-"wasted" time, but that' still something.

The second value is that while one minute is not significant in the course of a day or a week, it can be significant in the course of a single task. For example, until fairly recently, you could get your bank balance in person or over the phone. The former might be a 10-minute task while the latter might take 3 minutes. However, now you can check your balance in seconds via a website or a mobile app. Even though you might checking your balance once a week or once a month, the thought of spending seconds on a task that normally takes minutes is very appealing. If banks only offered balance info via phone, that would be a large inefficiency and a great business opportunity (perhaps for a company like Mint)