The 17th Click
The cursor hovers over a grey, beveled button that looks like it was rendered in 1997. It’s the 17th click of this specific cycle. Leo, a senior UX architect who spends his daylight hours obsessing over micro-interactions and the emotional resonance of a ‘Submit’ button for the company’s flagship app, is currently being dismantled by the company’s own internal expense portal.
He has to enter the project code ‘PRJ-887-ALPHA’ exactly 7 times for 7 different line items, because the system, in its infinite, fossilized wisdom, doesn’t support a batch ‘Apply to All’ function. Each click takes approximately 7 seconds to register, a delay long enough to allow the soul to start drifting out of the body through the nostrils. It’s not just a bad interface; it’s a monument to the organizational belief that an employee’s time is a renewable resource with zero cost.
The Friction of the Machine
There’s a specific kind of cognitive dissonance that happens when you work for a company that preaches ‘user-centricity’ while simultaneously forcing you to use software that treats you like a hostile witness in a high-stakes trial. We’re told to optimize, to lean out, to find the 27 percent efficiency gain in our production cycles, yet we spend 47 minutes every Friday battling a time-tracking system that requires us to account for our time in 15-minute increments using a drop-down menu that contains 107 options, none of which actually describe what we do.
It’s a form of soft violence. It’s the friction of the machine grinding against the ghost in it.
“
I’m writing this with a strange sense of levity, though, because I just found $20 in the pocket of some old jeans I haven’t worn in months. It’s a tiny, unearned victory that feels disproportionately large against the backdrop of a digital environment designed to nick-and-dime my sanity. It’s almost enough to make me forget that I’ve spent the last 37 minutes trying to find the ‘Save’ button, which is mysteriously hidden behind a floating ‘Help’ bubble that won’t move.
The Sinister Optimization
Optimized For Auditor
Creates Exhaustion Barrier
Optimized For Employee
Enables Actual Work
Internal software isn’t bad by accident. That’s the lie we tell ourselves to maintain our composure. We say, ‘Oh, the IT department is just underfunded,’ or ‘This legacy system is too hard to replace.’ But the truth is more sinister: these systems are optimized for everything except the human being using them. They are optimized for compliance, for data extraction, for the ease of the auditor, and for a pervasive sense of control. If the expense report is easy to fill out, people might spend more money. If the time-tracker is intuitive, management might have to admit that the data they’re collecting is actually meaningless. By making the interface a labyrinth of 77 different validation checks, the company creates a barrier of exhaustion. It’s a deterrent. It’s a fence made of checkboxes and broken JavaScript. I realize I’m being cynical, and perhaps I should acknowledge that sometimes things just break because they’re old, but when a system is this consistently terrible, you have to start looking at it as an intentional architectural choice.
The Chimney Inspector’s Burden
Take Isla D.-S., for instance. She’s a chimney inspector, someone who deals with the very real, very physical world of creosote and crumbling brickwork. She’s the kind of person who knows the smell of a house built in 1927 just by the way the draft hits her face. When Isla gets off a roof, her hands covered in the soot of 37 winters, she has to pull out a company-issued tablet to log her findings.
She told me once, after a particularly long day checking 7 chimneys in a single zip code, that she feels more tired from the clicking than from the climbing.
The app she uses was clearly designed by someone who has never stood on a 12-in-12 pitch roof in the wind. To record a single crack in a flue, she has to navigate 17 screens, many of which require her to type on a virtual keyboard with fingers that are physically exhausted. The app times out every 7 minutes for ‘security reasons,’ forcing her to re-log her credentials using a two-factor authentication code that she can’t receive because she’s in a rural area with zero bars of service. She’s an expert in her field, yet she’s being reduced to a data entry clerk for a system that doesn’t even understand the nature of her work. That’s the enterprise tragedy in a nutshell.
The Illusion of Progress
We talk about ‘digital transformation’ as if it’s an inherently positive migration toward light and speed. We ignore the reality that for millions of employees, transformation means their relatively simple manual processes are being replaced by complex, brittle digital ones.
Internal Tool Waste (137 Tools)
27% Lost Time
When you call a service like Kozmo Garage Door Repair, you expect a straight line from problem to solution, a grace that enterprise internal software utterly lacks. Yet, the people behind the scenes of most large organizations are bogged down by 137 different ‘productivity’ tools that, in aggregate, make them significantly less productive. I once knew a project manager who spent 27 percent of his week just moving data from one dashboard to another because the two systems, purchased by the same company for $777,000, couldn’t talk to each other. It’s a farce of the highest order.
[the machine requires a sacrifice of time it can never repay]
Friction as Value
I’ve often wondered why we tolerate this. Is it because we’ve been conditioned to believe that ‘work’ must be difficult, and therefore the tools of work should be difficult too? There’s a certain Protestant work ethic hangover here-the idea that if you’re not suffering, you’re not really earning your paycheck.
A tiny, unearned victory that feels disproportionately large against the backdrop of digital attrition.
If I can file my expenses in 3 clicks, am I really being a diligent steward of the company’s finances? If the CRM is easy to use, am I really ‘grinding’? We’ve conflated friction with effort, and effort with value. It’s a massive mistake. The $20 in my pocket feels like a rebellion against this logic. It’s value without effort. It’s a reminder that life doesn’t always have to be a series of hurdles. Sometimes, the universe just hands you a win, and you don’t have to fill out a 7-page justification form to enjoy it. I’m going to spend it on a sandwich that I will eat slowly, far away from my keyboard, while I ignore the 47 notifications currently pulsing on my screen like a digital migraine.
The Law of Thermodynamics for Business
There is a deep organizational hypocrisy at play when a company invests millions into a ‘seamless’ customer experience but treats its employees’ internal experience like an afterthought or a burden. It creates a culture of resentment that eventually leaks out. You can’t expect Isla D.-S. to provide world-class service with a smile when she’s been fighting a software bug for 57 minutes on a Friday afternoon.
The Shift Required: Reverence Over Gatekeeping
Time to Task
Measure Internal TTOC
Human Potential
Astronomical Gains Possible
Service Provider
IT/Finance as Internal Support
If we actually cared about efficiency, we would treat the internal user with the same reverence we treat the external customer. But that would require a shift in power. It would require the IT and Finance departments to view themselves as service providers to the employees, rather than as gatekeepers and enforcers. It would require a move away from the ‘Death by a Thousand Clicks’ model and toward something that actually respects the finite nature of a human life. We only have so many clicks in us. Why are we wasting them on ‘Required Field: Please Select From List’ when the list is empty?
