AI will automate everything – but not just yet

We’re not quite at the stage of fully voice-activated, AI-driven computing. For now, we still rely on keyboards, screens, and buttons.

While MyDocSafe — along with many other innovators — is working toward speech-enabled interfaces, today we still depend on the mouse, hand-eye coordination, and sometimes clunky or confusing user experiences. As a result, we often click too much.

Once we learn a pathway from A to B, we tend to repeat it — call it muscle memory. But those extra clicks come at a cost:

• To your firm, in the form of lost time and productivity

• To the environment, through unnecessary energy usage

The good news? There’s a better way.

In this short guide, we explore all three aspects:

• The social cost

• The business cost

• And practical ideas to reduce both

Environmental Cost of an Unnecessary Click

⚡️ 1. Energy Use per Click

While a single click seems small, it typically triggers:

• A request sent over the internet

• A response from one or more servers (e.g., web hosting, databases, APIs)

• Rendering in your browser/device

Estimated energy per simple web request:

• ~0.02 to 0.5 Wh (watt-hours), depending on complexity and backend load (Sources: Sustainable Web Design, IEA reports)

That’s equivalent to:

• Boiling ~0.01 cups of water

• Running a LED light bulb for 1–10 seconds

🌱 2. CO₂ Emissions per Click

Based on average global energy mix (around 475g CO₂/kWh):

Estimated emissions per click:

• 0.01–0.25g CO₂ per click

Multiply that:

• 20 unnecessary clicks/day = 5g CO₂/day

• 250 working days/year = 1.25kg CO₂/year/person

That may sound small, but:

• For a team of 100: 125kg CO₂/year

• That’s equivalent to driving ~320 miles in an average petrol car

• Or producing 250 plastic bottles

🧩 3. Cumulative Impact at Scale

Now scale that globally:

• Billions of users online

• Trillions of unnecessary clicks, refreshes, and reloads

💡 Unoptimized websites, overly complex forms, or redundant processes collectively account for hundreds of thousands of tonnes of CO₂ emissions annually.

✅ Why It Matters for Professionals & Designers

• Reducing unnecessary clicks = Better UX + Lower emissions

• More efficient tools reduce cloud processing loads and bandwidth

• Streamlined workflows = Smaller carbon footprint per task

🎯 Bottom Line

One unnecessary click may emit only a fraction of a gram of CO₂ — but in high-traffic environments or repetitive workflows, it adds up to meaningful environmental waste. Designing for efficiency is not just good UX — it’s climate-conscious design.

Business Cost of Unnecessary Click

1. Time Lost per Click

• Average time lost per unnecessary click: 2–3 seconds

• Including mental context switching: up to 5–10 seconds

• In a workflow with 20 redundant clicks/day:
  ~3 minutes lost/day/person → ~15 hours/year

2. Wage-Based Cost

Assume:

• Tax advisor or admin earns £60/hour

• 15 hours/year lost to unnecessary clicks

👉 Cost per employee per year: ~£900

Multiply that across 5 employees:
👉 £4,500/year in lost productivity

3. Opportunity Cost

In billable environments (like accounting/tax):

• If an advisor bills at £150/hour

• 15 hours lost = £2,250 in missed billable time

Hidden Costs of Click Friction

• User frustration → Lower engagement

• Higher training/support overhead (more to explain)

• Reduced tool adoption

• Slower onboarding for staff or clients

• Increased error rate (clicking wrong fields or buttons)

A single unnecessary click may cost just seconds, but across a team and year, it adds up to hundreds or thousands of pounds in wasted time and missed revenue — and degrades the user experience along the way.

How to identify and remove unncessary clicks?

Bookmarks

• Start by making a list of web services you use most often.
• Order it by frequency of use
• Expose a bookmark menu in your browser.  In Chrome on iOS you can do that through the View / Always Show Bookmarks Bar
• Visit the login pages of your most frequently used services and bookmark them.  For example, to bookmark MyDocSafe portal login page go to app.mydocsafe.com or go to the white-labelled address you may have configured (such as ‘portal.mydomain.com’ or ‘mybusiness.mydocsafe.com’)
  
• Organize your bookmarks so that the services that are used most frequently are on top of the list or always visible in the Bookmarks Menu

This is just the beginning

A full audit of your clicks is not the best pastime, but perhaps there is no other way: especially if you feel frustrated or you simply know that “there must be a better way of doing things”.  Contact your service providers with questions.  It is very likely they might help and give you useful hints to shave off a few seconds here and there.   Good luck!