The Tiny Relief of Not Repeating Yourself

There’s a special kind of fatigue that doesn’t show up in time logs. It’s not caused by big projects or deep thinking, but by small loops you live inside every day: opening the same three tabs, clicking the same filter, typing the same boilerplate sentence. None of these actions are difficult, and that’s exactly why we rarely question them.

I began to notice that my energy dipped not during “hard” work, but before it. I’d sit down, open my browser, and already feel slightly tired at the idea of getting the environment ready. That’s when I started to treat one-click simplification as a quiet experiment. I wasn’t trying to “10x my productivity.” I just wanted a morning where I didn’t have to rebuild the same setup manually.

So I created tiny one-click helpers: a bookmark that opens my daily tabs, a shortcut that launches my note template for the day, a script that tags and renames files in the background. The time savings are modest—seconds, not hours—but the mental effect is disproportionate. My brain has fewer reasons to complain before I even begin.

Tip:
For one week, write down every moment you think, “Didn’t I just do this yesterday?” At the end, pick one task and compress it into a single click (bookmark, macro, extension, or simple automation). Don’t start with everything—start with the one that annoys you most.