Saving on everyday clicks

July 13, 2025

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

💡 Unoptimised 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 BarExpose bookmarks menu in your browser to find mydocsafe easier
  • 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’)
    Bookmark mydocsafe portal login address
  • Organise your bookmarks so that the services that are used most frequently are on top of the list or always visible in the Bookmarks Menu

Make sure mydocsafe portal login page is visible at all times

 

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!