The mouse clicks again, a hollow plastic sound in a quiet room. Click. The loading spinner completes its 7th rotation. Click. A dropdown menu unfurls with options that feel vaguely hostile, like a puzzle with missing pieces. Alex is just trying to find one thing: the new dependent care policy number announced last month. He knows it’s in the recording of the all-hands meeting. He’s staring right at the file: “Q3 All-Hands Meeting.mp4.” A 77-minute monolith of data, completely opaque.
There is no search bar.
He scrubs through the timeline, his face a mask of strained concentration, trying to lip-read the CEO on fast-forward. The faces blur into a meaningless stream of corporate beige. After 17 minutes of this digital pantomime, he gives up. He opens Slack and types, “Hey, does anyone remember the new dependent care policy number?”
“He has just converted a problem of information retrieval into a problem of human interruption. The system failed, so a person has to become the backup processor.”
“
This happens thousands of times a day in every company, a silent, grinding tax on productivity.
A Fundamental Misunderstanding of Value
We have a bizarre obsession with the front door of our digital houses and a total disregard for the closets. We spend months designing elegant interfaces for creating information. We build beautiful, intuitive forms, slick text editors, and seamless upload flows. We celebrate the act of adding to the pile. But