The Burden Budget
Preventing “hidden work” in digital transformation
Happy Tuesday. This week’s note focuses on a common failure mode: digital tools that help quality but quietly increase burden until adoption collapses.
The idea in 30 seconds
Every team has a burden budget. If you exceed it—through clicks, cognitive load, coordination complexity, or after-hours work—adoption will erode.
The framework
Four burdens to manage deliberately:
Click burden (extra steps/screens)
Cognitive burden (alerts/ambiguity)
Coordination burden (handoffs/routing confusion)
After-hours burden (inbox spillover/rework)
A quick example
A “small documentation step” was added for compliance, landing at the wrong moment and creating rework. Auto-populating the field kept compliance and reduced burden—adoption recovered.
How to measure it
Choose 2–3 and trend monthly:
time-on-task (or clicks per workflow)
alert volume per shift
inbox/after-hours proxy
time to close the loop on routed tasks
One action for this week
Before go-live, write: “This removes ___ steps/minutes and adds ___.” If you can’t quantify both, pause.
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