Death by a Thousand Clicks: The Slow Murder of Productivity
The Cognitive Drainage System
Everything looks fine on the landing page. It’s got those rounded corners and that friendly cerulean blue that tech companies use to pretend they aren’t sucking the life out of your afternoon. But beneath that veneer, it is moldy bread. It is a slow, structural decay of time. We’ve been conditioned to accept that work is just ‘hard,’ but we rarely stop to ask if the work is hard because of the complexity of the problem or because the tool we’re using was designed by someone who seemingly hates human fingers.
Update Address
Update Address
This isn’t just a UI quirk. It’s a tax. It’s a cognitive drainage system that we’ve all just agreed to pay without ever seeing the invoice. We hunt for these massive, multi-million dollar optimization projects-the ones that require 48 consultants and a 128-page PowerPoint deck-while we ignore the colossal waste generated by the thousands of tiny, frustrating software interactions our teams endure every single day.
The Bankruptcy of Inefficiency
I was talking to Simon J.D. about this the other day. Simon is a bankruptcy attorney who has spent the last 28 years watching companies dissolve into nothingness. He told me something that shifted my entire perspective on ‘efficiency.’ He said that in at least 18 percent of the cases he handles, the company didn’t go under because of a bad product or a market shift. They went under because they became too expensive to operate.
“They went under because it took 18 clicks and 8 screen loads for an employee to perform a single, mundane task. You aren’t paying for labor at that point; you are paying for the friction.”
– Simon J.D., Bankruptcy Attorney
“
Calculated from 58 people * 18 delays * 38 seconds.
The Fallacy of Complexity
I’ll admit, I’m a hypocrite. I love complex systems. I spend my weekends fiddling with vintage synthesizers that have 48 different knobs just to produce a sound that mimics a dying vacuum cleaner. But there’s a difference: I choose the synthesizer. The employee doesn’t choose the 18-step address update. For them, it is an involuntary drainage of their soul.
Choice as Dignity
The difference is agency. The synthesizer is chosen; the 18-step task is imposed.
Agency Matters
There is this weird tension in modern business where we equate ‘complex’ with ‘robust.’ In many cases, complexity is just the residue of laziness-the inability of the designer to make a hard choice, so they just gave the user every possible option in the most inconvenient way possible. It’s like the mold on my bread. It wasn’t supposed to be there.
Where the Real Metric Lives
If you want to know how a company is doing, don’t look at their quarterly earnings first. Look at how many windows an employee has to have open to process a single invoice. Look at whether they have to copy-paste the same data 18 times. That is where the truth lives.
Logistics Firm Container Tracking Fragmentation
The company was running a marathon in a deep-sea diving suit.
Refusing the Rot
When you use something like cloud based factoring software, you realize that the streamlining of a workflow isn’t just a ‘nice to have’ feature. It is a preservation of human dignity. It is the refusal to let the termites win.
“I once spent 28 minutes trying to find a ‘cancel’ button on a subscription service that I didn’t even remember signing up for. I eventually found it hidden in the ‘Accessibility’ settings.”
– Personal Anecdote
“
Change the Bread, Not the Topping
I think back to that moldy sourdough. I threw the whole loaf away. I didn’t try to cut around the green parts. Once the rot starts, it’s in the fibers. Software is the same way. If your core processes are built on a foundation of 18-click tasks and fragmented data, you can’t just ‘optimize’ your way out of it with a new management style. You have to change the bread. You have to demand tools that respect the finite nature of time.