The form asks for your address before your name. You know this because you’ve already typed three characters into the first field before your eyes catch the label. Now you delete, tab back, reorient. Five seconds. Nobody notices. You do it forty times a day across forty different surfaces, and by 2 PM you’re cooked. Not tired. Depleted. The tank that lets you sequence, prioritize, switch between contexts: empty. And nobody saw it drain because nobody was counting those five-second taxes.

I spent years paying that cost before I understood what it was. Not the big moments. Not the meeting where you lose the thread because someone changed topics without signaling. Those you can name. It’s the accumulation underneath. The open-plan office where you rebuild your mental workspace every time someone walks past your desk. The Slack channel where eight conversations run in parallel and you have to hold all eight models at once or lose context on three of them. The weekly planning meeting that takes forty-five minutes but costs you the next two hours, because the switching between discussion topics burned through whatever focus you had left for the afternoon.

These aren’t complaints. They’re design observations. Every one of those is a system asking more of the person than it needs to.

The morning system I run at home exists because I learned this the hard way. Four family members, twelve active IEPs at work, code and design and writing and household logistics. If I try to context-switch between all of that on demand, I’m useless by noon. So I batch. I sequence. I build structure around the switching points so the transitions cost less. The batch cooking system exists for the same reason. Some days the tank is low before breakfast. On those days, the system needs to carry more weight so the person carries less.

This is where the design principle comes from. Not from a framework. From the experience of navigating systems that were built without considering what they cost the person using them.

When I look at Encore, the twelve-year engagement where I watched a platform drift and rebuilt it twice, I see the same dynamic from the other side. Engineers were being asked for judgment calls the system should have absorbed. “Is this the right template? Does this match the brand?” Every one of those questions is a five-second tax on someone who should be building, not guessing. The system was asking too much of the person. So I redesigned it to ask less.

That principle runs through everything I build. The governance protocols, the processing tools, the coordination systems. All of them start from the same place: I know what it costs when the system doesn’t see you. I know because I pay it. The cost is invisible to everyone except the person absorbing it, and it compounds. By the time it shows up as burnout or error rates or attrition, the cause is buried under months of five-second taxes that nobody was counting.