Inconvenience Cost
(Maybe there’s already a formal name and analysis of the thing I’m describing, but I don’t know it, so here’s what you get)
As someone with pretty bad ADD and no small number of emotional problems, I find an enormous number of things can prevent me from being productive at work or at home. I think, however, that the same things that feed into ADD-driven inattentiveness actually affect everyone, I am just more sensitive to them. At its root, we all fail to get things done because of inconvenience.
(Somewhere a 55-year-old just felt an intense sense of condescension towards Those Millenials when I typed that and he doesn’t know why. I don’t care what he thinks, however, because his approach to having a successful career was to contract Stockholm syndrome.)
I propose a formal metric for measurement of this effect:
~Inconvenience Cost (IC)~
It’s calculated like so:
- The task you actually want to accomplish — making coffee, creating a spreadsheet, replacing your lightbulbs — is the core task.
- Every task you have to complete in order to complete the core task imposes IC.
- The IC cost of a task doubles with its distance from the core task.
If your core task is “take out the trash”, and the trash is all gathered in one place in a single bag, the trash can outside is empty, the ground is dry and you are fully dressed already, the IC is 1. Most people can handle an IC of 1 at any given moment.
If you need to put on shoes, the IC is 2. Many people find this irritating, but it’s not usually enough to prevent the chore from getting done.
If you need to put on shoes and clothes, the IC is 4, because the shoes go on after the clothes, so you have to complete the clothes task first. This is enough to prevent plenty of people from actually taking the trash out.
If your clothes are dirty and need to be washed, the IC is 8, because you have to do laundry, put on clothes, put on shoes, and take the trash out. Plenty of people will not overcome this. I have certainly been there.
The above really sounds like a Millenial Thinkpiece about how Life Is So Hard, but stick with me.
You’re at work. Your core task is “call six customers and collect account information.” That information needs to go into a CRM, and that CRM has its own accounts system. (you can already see where this is going)
The IC of calling six customers is 6, because it’s six tasks. Adding information to six accounts in the CRM is an IC of 6, so we’re now at 12. But each core task has an IC of 2 so that’s not so bad.
Now say the CRM expires your password every 30 days and it’s the first of the month.
For the first customer, you have to call and get the info (IC 1) and put it in the CRM (IC 2), but you can’t log into the CRM because your password has changed, so you have to reset it (IC 4), but you’re already on the phone with the customer so you have to hurriedly store the data in a text file (IC 8) and then try four times to reset your password (IC 16) and then copy the data from the text file into the CRM fields (IC 32).
Now suppose the CRM expires your session every 15 minutes, and today your customers are really whiny and slow.
For each customer, you have to call (IC 1) and put the data in the CRM (IC 2) but you have to log back in each time (IC 4). For the five remaining customers, that’s an IC of 4 each, total of 20.
The IC of this entire operation rose from 12 to 44 just because of that first, infuriating task, and then the remaining irritations increased it further to 64. 12 to 64 because of poorly thought out account mechanics.
Okay, so all this hinges on my assertion that things get much harder to follow through on the further you are from the goal you actually want to accomplish. I could try to justify that, but unless you’re a real wizard at life, you probably agree with me. I’ll explain my thoughts on it, which of course are solely from my experience. For me, it’s a combination of emotional and cognitive issues.
Emotionally, the further I am from the core task, the more intensely I feel the insistence from my subconscious that oh my god, this will never be done, every step i take is just deeper into the quagmire from which i will never emerge. This is reinforced by the times in my life and career that this was proven to be completely accurate.
Sometimes a task is just encrusted in so much bullshit that you can’t get it done, but you can easily pour hours or days of effort into it and come up empty-handed. This isn’t always the case, but it’s easy to fear that it will be, and boy, anxiety’s a real prick like that.
Cognitively, because I have ADD it simply becomes harder for me to keep track of why I’m doing things. I frequently forget, while performing a given step in a complex process, why exactly I’m doing it and what it’s meant to accomplish.
Anyone who doesn’t have ADD will probably not believe me (this is a normal experience for people with mental problems, so, “do you” and stay ignorant I guess), but the experience of trying to concentrate on something I don’t want to do in order to accomplish something I do want to do is very much like trying to hang on to an eel in a mineral oil bath.
I’m not speaking metaphorically, it literally feels like I am trying to hold a slippery object. When I try to look at a spreadsheet full of data that I have to reduce in order to obtain new data to add to a spreadsheet full of other data that will produce the info I actually want, my eyes can’t stay on the window. They slip off to all sides involuntarily or won’t focus, and when I try to stare directly at a number it feels like it’s physically vibrating and I can’t read it. This only happens if it’s a complex task. If the task is straightforward I have no problems.
The same thing happens when I try to just think about the information. My mind wanders no matter how hard I try to keep it on point. No amount of effort will keep it from straying to ideas I shouldn’t care about at the moment. It’s hard to explain how this can be a physical struggle, but it feels like one. It feels like I am trying to keep a pen balanced upright on my fingertip, and is about as hard.
This is not meant to be a high-power essay on what’s wrong with everything and how to fix it. Perhaps I will write something like that but for now I just wanted to get this idea out there. please enjoy my proposed metric for how much it sucks to work in a modern office or just keep the damn house clean
