Now I am dragging a cursor across the screen, hovering over a string of characters that represents a vendor ID, hitting Ctrl+C, and then moving that same cursor three inches to the right to paste it into another field that-for reasons known only to a developer who likely left the company in 2019-cannot talk to the first field. This is the cutting edge. This is the fruit of a digital transformation project that cost $1,000,009 and took 19 months to deploy. We are living in the future, and the future is surprisingly heavy, built out of digital bricks that don’t quite fit together, leaving us to fill the gaps with the mortar of our own manual labor.

I’m sitting here, 29 minutes after my third cup of coffee, staring at a dashboard that was supposed to ‘unify’ our workflow. Instead, it has fragmented my sanity into 49 distinct pieces. It’s a common story, one that usually starts with a slide deck featuring pictures of sleek rockets and clean-shaven people pointing at holograms. But the reality is Blake D.R., a precision welder I worked with years ago, would have called this ‘pigeon-shit welding’-a series of messy, disconnected blobs that look like they’re holding a structure together but would snap the moment you put 89 pounds of real-world pressure on them.

Blake was a man of tolerances. He believed that if a joint didn’t fit with a gap of less than 9 microns, it wasn’t a joint; it was an argument. He spent his days in a mask, breathing through a respirator, making sure things were fused at a molecular level. Most software today, specifically the kind sold to mid-market companies under the banner of ‘transformation,’ has the tolerance of a toddler with a glue stick. We take a paper process that had 9 steps, and we transform it into a digital process that requires 19 clicks, 29 dropdown menus, and a prayer to the server gods. We aren’t making things better; we are just making them glowing.

The Cost of Tolerance: Reading the Fine Print

I spent 19 minutes earlier today reading the updated Terms and Conditions for this platform. I actually read them. All 5,009 words of them. It’s a strange habit I’ve picked up, a sort of masochistic desire to see exactly where the company abdicates responsibility for the very efficiency they promised. Deep in clause 29, it essentially says the software is provided ‘as is,’ which is a polite way of saying ‘if it breaks your business, that’s your problem.’ It’s the digital equivalent of buying a car and finding out the steering wheel is an optional add-on available in the next sprint.

This cargo-cult mentality is the real disease. In World War II, islanders saw planes land with cargo and thought that if they built straw versions of planes and runways, more cargo would appear. Modern corporations do the same. They see successful tech companies using specific tools, so they buy the tools, hire the consultants, and wait for the profit. But they don’t change the underlying logic of the work. They digitize the mess. If you have a broken, bureaucratic process and you add technology to it, you don’t get a streamlined digital process. You get a broken, expensive, digital bureaucracy. You get 19 layers of authentication for a 9-dollar purchase order.

Cognitive Load and the Death of Soul

The frustration isn’t just about the clicks. It’s about the cognitive load. Every time a human being has to act as the bridge between two pieces of software, a little bit of their professional soul dies. We weren’t meant to be the API. We weren’t meant to spend 39 percent of our day copying data from an Excel sheet into a web form that was designed to replace that Excel sheet. It’s a repetitive strain on the brain. When I talked to Blake D.R. about this-he’s retired now, probably fixing a vintage motorcycle with 99 percent accuracy-he just laughed. He said, ‘If I welded a pipe that leaked, I’d lose my job. If a software guy builds a pipeline that leaks data and time, he gets a promotion to Product Manager.’

He’s not wrong. There is a profound lack of accountability in the ‘transformation’ space. We have been sold on the idea that more features equal more value. But more features usually just mean more 9-millisecond delays in the interface. It means more buttons that nobody uses. In fact, research (or at least the data I’ve seen in 99 different internal audits) suggests that most users only interact with about 19 percent of a software’s functionality. The rest is just noise that makes the 19 percent harder to find.

The Lie of Granularity

I’ve made mistakes in this arena too. I once advocated for a CRM that was so complex it required a 49-page manual just to log a phone call. I thought the data granularity would give us insights. What it actually gave us was 29 annoyed sales reps who stopped logging their calls altogether. I fell for the lie that more data is always better. It’s not. Better data is better. Useful data is better. Data that moves through a system without needing a human to carry it in a bucket is the only data that matters.

This is why I’ve become obsessed with the idea of ‘true’ automation. It’s not about doing the same things digitally; it’s about doing fewer things because the system is smart enough to handle the context. It’s the difference between a tool that waits for you to tell it what to do and a system that understands the goal. When you look at how a platform like invoice factoring software approaches the chaotic world of freight factoring, you start to see the difference. They aren’t just giving you a digital version of a paper invoice; they are building a workflow where the data has a job to do. It isn’t just sitting there waiting to be copy-pasted. It moves. It validates. It solves the problem before the human even has to click ‘Submit’ for the 19th time.

Measuring Real Value: Beyond Go-Live

We need to stop celebrating the ‘go-live’ date and start measuring the ‘click-reduction’ rate. If a new software implementation doesn’t remove at least 29 percent of the manual steps in a process, it shouldn’t be called a transformation. It should be called an expense. We are currently drowning in these expenses. We have 99 tabs open, each one a different ‘solution’ that requires its own login, its own training, and its own special way of formatting a date. It’s 2024, yet we still haven’t agreed on whether it’s MM/DD/YY or DD/MM/YY. We just built 19 different converters to handle the disagreement.

I’ve noticed that the companies that actually succeed in this digital age are the ones that are willing to kill their darlings. They are the ones that look at a 49-year-old process and realize that simply putting it on a tablet isn’t enough. They are willing to ask, ‘Why are we doing this at all?’ If the answer is ‘because we’ve always done it,’ they scrap it. They don’t try to find a software vendor that can accommodate their bad habits. They find a system that forces them to have better habits.

The Art of Subtraction

I remember Blake D.R. working on a custom frame for a racing bike. He didn’t add more metal to make it stronger; he took metal away. He knew exactly where the stress points were and where the dead weight was. He understood that ‘perfect’ isn’t when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. Our digital workspaces are currently overloaded with ‘dead weight.’ We have features upon features, a 19-car pileup of functionality that serves the vendor’s bottom line more than the user’s productivity. We are afraid to simplify because simplification looks like we aren’t doing enough.

But as I sit here, clicking that 19th button just to move a file to the next stage of a ‘seamless’ workflow, I realize that we are doing too much. We are working for the software, rather than the software working for us. We have become the grease in a machine that was supposed to run on its own. The robots didn’t take our jobs; they just gave us 49 more sub-tasks to perform on their behalf.

The Engineering of the Future

If we want to fix this, we have to demand more from the architects of our digital world. We have to stop accepting ‘it’s a known bug’ as an answer. We have to stop buying tools that don’t talk to each other. Most importantly, we have to stop digitizing the past and start engineering the future. That means looking at the 9 steps of your current process and having the courage to turn them into 0 steps. It means finding the friction and melting it away, just like Blake used to melt steel, until two separate pieces become one single, unbreakable unit.

“

True innovation is the act of making the complex invisible, not making the simple complicated.

– The Principle of Subtraction

I often wonder what Blake would think of our modern interfaces. He’d probably look at the screen, see the 89 pixels of wasted space in the margin, and shake his head. He’d see the lack of fusion between the CRM and the accounting software and call it a structural failure. And he’d be right. Until our software behaves with the precision of a master welder, we are all just clicking our way into a very expensive, very digital grave. It is time to stop the ‘transformation’ and start the actual work. It is time to value the time of the person behind the screen as much as we value the data they are entering. After all, if the system doesn’t respect the user’s 9 minutes of focus, why should the user respect the system?

Maybe tomorrow I’ll find a way to automate this copy-paste task. Or maybe I’ll just go back to paper. At least with paper, the only thing that could crash was my pen, and a replacement only cost 99 cents. But in the meantime, I have 19 more invoices to process, and the cursor is still blinking, waiting for me to do its job for it. The digital sun is setting on my productivity, and I am still 49 clicks away from going home.