The term side hustle has been popularized in the past few years. It basically means a second job or a way to make money outside of your regular employment. But there is another kind of side hustle that has been forced on all of us and is a significant source of stress and a major energy drain. That’s what I call the technology side hustle.
On any given day, we are all forced to navigate through endless screens on endless apps and websites to accomplish everyday tasks. At work, this might be building a slide deck, ordering supplies or balancing the books. At home, this might be ordering groceries, renewing a driver’s license or searching for a plumber. While all of these processes are similar, they vary widely in ease of navigation and logic. Some sites are seamless in how they deliver the information. Others confound us and we wonder whether the programmer put any thought into how visitors would use the site.
One of the most important principles I’ve learned about building and maintaining websites is that the intuitiveness of navigation beats appearance, function, speed of loading and everything else. If you’ve spent ten or fifteen seconds searching for a purchase button, for instance, you know what I mean.
Those trying to sell us something, have a mighty incentive to make their navigation as intuitive and friendly as possible. Think Amazon. Those without this incentive, such as government agencies, not so much. Think FAFSA the federal student loan website. But even then, how many websites have we all abandoned half-way into a purchase because we get tired of looking for what should be obvious?
All of this drains our energy and adds stress to our day. So in order to do our work and navigate the rest of our life, we not only need the skills to do that, but a separate set of technology skills to deal with all the software it takes to get these things accomplished.
So, enough ranting about what’s wrong. The question is, as an employee, consumer and citizen what can you do about it? After all, there are some sites and apps we have to use such as auto registration, utility bills and mortgage payments. Here are four simple strategies for doing so.
One, consider the time of day. Thinking, “I’ll take five minutes first thing and renew my registration can end up throwing your day off kilter when five minutes becomes half an hour if the site is hard to navigate or has been “helpfully” redesigned. Let’s face it, if you run the risk of getting frustrated with compliance tasks, you might as well do them toward the end of the day, when the more important tasks have been completed.
Two, combine certain tasks into one frustrating hour or two. Have to renew the registration, pay the water bill, complete a passport application? Do them all in the same block of time. Sure, that might stress you a bit. But that’s better than doing it three or four times in one day. As I mentioned above, some of these little technology tasks can screw with your mind for the rest of the day, especially if you can’t complete them because the website froze just as you were clicking “Submit” or some other such maddening glitch.
Three, don’t get emotionally involved with the lack of logic behind hard-to-use sites and apps. We are all confronted with sites that seem to lack logical navigation. Thinkers, like me, are tempted to start analyzing how we would have designed the site to make it seamless. The feelers, like my wife, can just get frustrated. (I realize this is an overgeneralization, but you get the idea.) But none of this is productive. Us thinkers won’t be able to fix the system. The feelers may devolve into a sense of helplessness when they just can’t figure it out. Stick to the task at hand and complain about the site over a beer when you’re finished. Better still, just accept that no matter who you are, we all have to deal with incompetence sometimes.
Four, give yourself permission to walk away. Think about the last time you spent considerable time on a website or app trying to accomplish a task and then go to a point where you got stuck because a link didn’t work or took you to the wrong information. If you’ve been working on it for a while, you may not want to lose the work you’re done. So you’re reluctant to give up. But if you’ve spent 20 minutes working on the site or app and then spend another 20 minutes trying to figure out what’s wrong, you’re just wasting 20 more minutes. Go to a competitor’s site or another alternative. Does that make sense? Now, I realize that in certain situations you can’t do that because you have to renew the registration, pay the tax or something like that. In this situation, give yourself permission to just walk away and come back. Why? Simply because stress has a narrowing effect on the way the brain perceives options and possible solutions. Break that spiral by stepping away rather than getting caught in that vortex.
Try these four simple strategies and let me know how they work in the comment section below.