Your Go-To Process Might Be a Burden

Picture pulling into a gas station. The pump right in front of you is open, but so is the one a car length ahead. Pulling forward those few extra feet costs you almost nothing, and it leaves the closer pump free for whoever rolls in behind you. This is a widely understood courtesy move, right? Imagine being the person who stops at the nearest pump, forcing the next person to awkwardly go around you to get to the open one ahead. That would be inconsiderate, and you could have spent a tiny fraction of additional effort to make the other person’s life much easier.

You can also imagine a shopping cart parked dead center in the aisle while its owner examines a shelf. You try to slip past, and he or she shoots you a look, like you’re the inconvenience. It doesn’t even occur to that person that he or she is the problem.

Just a little effort or awareness on your end saves the people around you a lot more. Being considerate is really just remembering that other people exist and imagining how your actions might affect them - that your behavior can carry a cost somebody else ends up paying.

Being uncritical about your own processes can have the same cost - but not just for other people, also yourself.

The Habit That Broke My Brain

I’ve been lucky enough to work for some brilliant people. One boss I had in particular had spent decades running his own business, was sharp with decision-making, and was just the kind of person you’d trust with anything important. But he had some process quirks I could never wrap my head around.

For example, after he typed up a letter to a client on his PC, he performed the same ritual. He’d print it out, read the physical copy to proofread it, and hand it to a staff member to scan and save to his network drive for future reference.

That’s right, he typed a digital document, converted it to physical paper, then had someone convert the paper back into a worse digital format. The scan was effectively an image, so no selectable text, search, or indexing - just a flat document. A strictly downgraded version of the file he already had open.

When I showed him you can just export as a PDF straight from his word processor to his network drive, he was genuinely surprised (and to his credit he changed his process after that). I think about that loop all the time, because it’s a tiny picture of a much bigger problem.

Match the Medium to the Purpose

Pick the medium that fits the purpose, not necessarily the medium you naturally default to.

Most of what we exchange in a day is transactional. Paying someone back, sharing when you’re free, sending a document, or passing along a piece of information are just some examples. For all of these, the digital and asynchronous version is faster, cheaper, and less work for everyone involved.

I’m not saying merely choosing the most convenient digital option is always right. In some cases, I’ve actually argued the exact opposite when it comes to actually owning your stuff. For things you want to keep forever, you want local copies, open formats, control, and durability, which can sometimes mean a physical (rather than digital) or local backup (rather than relying on third-party cloud storage).

But for the transactional stuff or the everyday exchanges, there’s almost never a good reason to drag it into the physical world.

The Friction You Hand Off

I didn’t know why it bothered me so much when I’d get a call that could have been a text, or someone decided to give me a paper version of something he or she could have emailed me, but then it hit me. When you choose paper or a phone call for something transactional, you are moving the work off yourself and onto the other person.

Think about what a paper check, let’s say, actually does. Someone had to drive to the bank to get the checkbook, then had to write it, and then hand it to me. Now I have to photograph it, deposit it through an app, and wait. The person who wrote the check then has to store something physical, or take a photo of it to document that the transaction occurred for solid bookkeeping. Compare that to something like Venmo where the whole thing is one tap and the money is just there and every transaction is tracked automatically. The check didn’t save anyone time! It spent mine so the sender could keep doing what felt familiar - or what was already part of his or her process (even in this case, the sender’s process would probably benefit massively from being digital-first).

A phone call in the middle of a workday is the prime example of this. With no warning, it says “whatever you’re doing right now is less important than what I want to say.” It demands that I stop, context-switch, and perform a real-time conversation on your schedule. A text, an instant message, or an email lands in a queue I can handle when I surface. Same information, but one of them respects that I have a life happening and the other assumes I don’t.

Voicemail or audio messages are bad, too. Now I have to play back audio, in real time, to pull out thirty seconds of information I could have read in five. Unless you have automatic transcriptions, audio is way less efficient and less flexible for me, even if it’s less effort for you, because you traded the effort of typing for the effort of me listening.

Of course, there’s a time for an unprompted phone call during the day, especially if it’s highly time-sensitive or particularly urgent. But often such an interruption doesn’t carry that kind of weight.

Consider when you need to sign a contract. If you’re emailed a PDF, you can trivially search it, store it, and hand it to an AI to pull out the key terms in seconds. But when you’re handed a piece of paper instead, all of that is gone. You’d have to scan it back in, likely in an inferior format, just to get to where you started. We’re living through the most powerful era of digital leverage ever, and a sheet of paper pretends we’re in a world from 30 years ago.

Transactional vs. Meaningful

Don’t get me wrong: physical things absolutely matter. Some examples can include a handwritten letter from someone you love, most collectibles worth collecting, a printed photo on the wall, or a signed first edition of your favorite book. The physicality is the whole point there, because the object carries meaning beyond merely the information it holds.

The rule of thumb is this: does the physical form serve a purpose the digital one can’t? If yes, go physical (with my blessing, not that you asked for it). If the only thing being moved around is information, money, or a schedule, the physical version is just unneeded friction.

Inertia LARPing as Best Practice

So why do smart people keep making the high-friction choices at everyone’s expense? Usually it’s not a reasoned decision; it usually just comes down to “I’ve always done it this way” (which is not a valid reason). You could argue we have way too many choices to make during the day, and questioning your own processes constantly might either be overwhelming or actively slow you down - but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be open to process improvement at all.

You might point at the analog revival as a counterexample. People are doing things like buying dumbphones, using vintage cameras to take photos, and journaling on paper. Those people are choosing physical on purpose, to gain focus, presence, or the simple joy of the thing. It’s intentional and deliberate, rather than a habit with no purpose behind it at all.

It’s the same mistake folks who struggle to use digital productivity tools make. Some people insist they need paper to focus, when the real issue is they never even tried to build the boundaries to focus digitally. They blame the medium for a discipline problem. The polaroid photographer likely made a deliberate choice and accepted the limitations of the medium. The person who can’t put his or her phone down and retreats to paper is just avoiding putting in the process development work!

Take someone who runs his life out of a paper planner that lives at home. When he’s out, he has no idea what his schedule is and can’t add anything until he gets home and hopefully remembers. Maybe he’s gotten a taste of how nice it is to have it with him, so he emails himself reminders, but that means he’s now keeping it in two places as an alleged safety net. That’s entirely backwards! Having two calendars is actually a liability, because it’s in effect two competing sources of truth, which never works. One synced calendar you actually carry beats two copies that can contradict or are doomed to be out of date.

Passwords are a similar problem. Insecure methods of storing them, like texting one to a loved one or sticking a note next to the monitor, aren’t necessary when a shared password manager lets you and your spouse share access securely and update it once. The frictionless option already exists, the habit just hasn’t caught up to it, since most people likely started creating passwords before they even considered needing a manager for them.

Play the Long Game

The medium you choose signals whose time you value, and being considerate to the people on the other end is a great reason on its own - but that’s only half of it.

In practice, the lower-friction choice almost always pays you back too, especially over the long haul. In many cases, a digital-first habit compounds: your transactions are instantaneous, your schedule travels with you, and your archives are ready the moment you (or an AI) need to dig through them. The person clinging to paper isn’t just inconveniencing everyone around them: that person is actually robbing his or her own future self of all that leverage.

Rather than thinking “what’s the fastest, most expedient option for me in this exact moment?” for something transactional, especially one you will do repeatedly in the future, maybe think: “am I inconveniencing the other person, and is there a more efficient path that serves both of us in the long term?”

Once you get that part figured out, the rest takes care of itself. Pick the medium that still makes sense years from now, not just the expedient option that sounds appealing today.