Reminders typed by hand

At a clinic in Ras Al Khaimah, the receptionist spends the last hour of each day sending appointment reminders. She opens the booking screen, copies each name and time, and types a message to every patient, one at a time.

The booking system the clinic already pays for can send those reminders by itself. The setting has been there for years, two menus deep. Nobody ever switched it on, because nobody ever had the spare afternoon it would take to find out what the system could do.

This is more common than it sounds. The tools on an ordinary desk, or in an ordinary pocket, are far more capable than the way most of us use them. We learn the first handful of things a piece of software does and then spend a decade working around the rest.

The reason is not stupidity. It is busyness. Learning a tool properly costs a few quiet hours up front, and quiet hours are exactly what a busy person never has. So the work keeps being done by hand, which keeps everyone too busy to stop doing it by hand.

Very little of the growth in what one person can produce has come from people pushing harder. Almost all of it has come from someone changing what was in their hands.

At this desk the change is small and close. One afternoon with the manual, or with whoever set the system up, gives back an hour a day for as long as she sits there.

Effort feels virtuous, and everyone can see it. A better tool is quieter. It simply makes the effort unnecessary.