The Click-Cost of Compliance

Click number thirteen. The small gear icon spins. Click fourteen. A dropdown menu appears with 23 options, none of which are ‘Done’. Click fifteen, ‘Status Change’. A modal window, slow as a glacier, overtakes the screen. Clicks sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. You navigate a series of dependent fields that exist only to populate a report someone might look at once every fiscal quarter. Click twenty-two. Save. Click twenty-three. Close. The task, which took you 43 minutes to actually complete, has now taken an additional 3 minutes to document for the great digital panopticon.

And then you open the real tool: the illicit Google Sheet, bookmarked under a fake name like ‘Lunch Spots,’ where the actual work gets tracked. Your team updates it once a day, a quick copy-paste job to placate the new $3,333,333 ‘Agile Synergy Hub’ we were all forced to adopt. The official system is a temple; the spreadsheet is the busy workshop out back where things get made.

The Real Problem: Not Developers, But Direction

For years, I blamed the developers. I truly did. I pictured them as out-of-touch code-poets, obsessed with frameworks and architectural purity, who had never experienced a real day of work in their lives. They built these monstrous, click-heavy platforms because they didn’t understand the simple, fluid reality of getting a job done. I was convinced it was a failure of technology, a colossal design flaw repeated across an entire industry. I even championed this view. I once sat in a meeting with executives and, with all the confidence of a zealot, recommended we build our own system from scratch. I’m still embarrassed about that. It was a stupid, arrogant position, and it was completely wrong.

The problem is the command itself. The software isn’t built for you, the person doing the work. It is not designed to make your day more efficient or your tasks more meaningful. It is built for your manager. And your manager’s manager. It is a dashboard-delivery-system disguised as a productivity tool. Its primary function is not to facilitate work but to render work visible, trackable, and legible to people who are not involved in it. Your 23 clicks are not a bug; they are the central feature. Each click is a data point. Each data point feeds a chart. Each chart justifies a manager’s existence.

This isn’t a new idea, of course. I fell down a rabbit hole the other night reading about the origins of ‘scientific management’. A hundred and thirteen years ago, Frederick Winslow Taylor was obsessed with stopwatches and pig iron. He believed every task, from shoveling coal to machining a part, could be broken down into its constituent motions and optimized for maximum efficiency. It worked, for a certain kind of manual labor. But the ghost of Taylorism haunts the server farms of today. We’ve tried to apply the same stopwatch logic to creative problem-solving, to writing code, to designing a user interface, to any form of knowledge work. The system demands that we atomize our thinking into ‘tasks’ and ‘sub-tasks’ and ‘story points,’ not because it helps us think better, but because it makes the messy, unpredictable process of thinking look neat on a Gantt chart.

We build these elaborate surveillance systems because we, as a culture of management, fundamentally don’t trust people to do their jobs without being watched. The entire architecture is predicated on the assumption that, left to your own devices, you would do nothing of value. The software is a digital supervisor, perpetually looking over your shoulder, asking, ‘What are you working on now? And now? And how much progress have you made in the last 13 minutes?’ It’s infantilizing. And it pushes the best people to simply check out or leave.

My Own Mistake: The 33% Productivity Drop

I made this exact mistake. I was leading a project team of 13 people a few years back. I championed a platform that cost our department $373,000. I was so proud of its reporting capabilities. I could see everything. I saw ‘velocity’, ‘cycle time’, ‘blockers’. What I couldn’t see was the soul-crushing administrative burden I had placed on my team. I couldn’t see the duplicative work, the secret spreadsheets, the morale cratering with every new mandatory field I added to the workflow. The dashboard was beautiful; the work was miserable. Productivity didn’t go up. It went down by 33 percent in the first three months. I had optimized for my own peace of mind at the direct expense of their effectiveness.

The Art of Real Work: Jamie G.’s Neon

Contrast this with my friend, Jamie G. Jamie is a neon sign technician. He bends glass tubes over a hot flame, fills them with noble gases, and bombards them with thousands of volts of electricity. His tools are specific, unforgiving, and perfectly suited to their purpose. He uses a crossfire burner for tight curves, a ribbon burner for long sweeps. He has a manifold for pumping vacuums and backfilling gas that looks like something from a mad scientist’s lab. There is no ‘Neon Bending Hub Pro (Enterprise Edition)’. There is no dashboard tracking his ‘glass-bent-per-hour’ metric. His workflow is dictated by the physics of hot glass and the behavior of ionized gas, not by a project manager’s need for a status update.

His success is binary and brutally honest: the sign either glows with a perfect, ethereal light, or it doesn’t. No amount of data entry can fix a leaky manifold or a bad weld. The work is the work, and the result is the proof. He doesn’t track his time in some clunky CRM; he just knows. At night, to decompress from the intense focus, he sometimes watches streamers from around the world, people who’ve built entire careers on direct connection, funded by things as simple as a شحن بيقو. It’s a world away from the corporate obsession with manufactured metrics. It’s about genuine value exchange, not performative productivity.

We keep buying new software hoping for a technological solution to what is, at its core, a human problem. A problem of trust. A great team with a simple, shared text file will outperform a mistrustful team with the most expensive, feature-rich platform imaginable. Every time. We think we’re buying a productivity tool, but what we’re really buying is an incredibly expensive, soul-crushing spreadsheet that doesn’t trust us to do our jobs.

And the really wild part is that this isn’t a secret. The people buying the software know it creates overhead. The managers using the dashboards suspect the data is gamed. The employees filling out the forms know it’s performative. Yet the cycle continues. The next version is demoed, promising even more granular tracking, even more comprehensive dashboards. And another check for $3,333,333 gets signed.

It’s a terrifying thought for a certain kind of manager, because it makes them feel obsolete. If you trust everyone to do their job, then what is yours?

Maybe that’s the real question. The software isn’t the spreadsheet. The modern manager’s role, in too many companies, has become the spreadsheet-a human interface for collecting, aggregating, and presenting data, whose own productivity is measured by the quality of their reports, not the quality of their team’s output. Jamie’s finished sign, a beautiful, humming piece of craftsmanship glowing against the dark brick of a building, needs no progress report.