A city archive planned to digitize thousands of photographs. At first, the staff divided the work equally by box, assuming that every box required the same effort. The first review showed otherwise. Some photographs had clear dates and names but needed careful scanning because the paper was fragile. Others were physically stable yet lacked information about where or when they had been taken. A third group had already been scanned, but the files could not be searched because the descriptions were inconsistent. The archive therefore stopped using box count as its only measure of progress. It created four task labels: physical care, image capture, description, and search testing. A box could receive more than one label, but the next action was chosen from the first unfinished task. Staff members did not rescan a clear image merely because its description was weak. Nor did they write a detailed description before confirming that the image file could be opened. The new system did not reduce the number of photographs, but it made unfinished work visible and prevented effort from being repeated in the wrong place.