Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The tech timewasters

I have just spent a weekend planning a family trip to Chennai and Hyderabad. Since some of the flights are booked with reward points and some are not, our flights are under three separate booking numbers, each of which requires a separate login. I also had to print out booking confirmations from three different hotels, four boarding cards for the internal flights from Madras to Hyderabad, and a separate docket for my airport parking. That doesn’t include the two hours my wife spent applying for online visas, or the 90 minutes I spent getting approval to use a British credit card on an Indian airline website. Or the time I spent inputting my family’s passport details into another airline website, while also pre-ordering vegetarian meals for my pinko daughter.

Wouldn’t it be easier if there were someone to do this for you? Oh, there is — they’re called a travel agent.

Thinking about it, I probably could have saved two days of my life by using a good old intermediary. Yet somehow the web seduces us into thinking that what we are doing is efficient when it is anything but. With the telephone call centre, companies grasped the opportunity to outsource service jobs to people in low-wage economies; with the internet they went one better — they outsourced work to their own customers.

In return for a feeling of control and some notional cost-savings, people now willingly spend hours performing mundane data-entry chores which were previously the responsibility of the service provider.

I do wonder sometimes whether it is time to properly analyse where technology saves time and where it wastes it.

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