Sludge: What Stops Us from Getting Things Done and What to Do about It, by Cass Sunstein
DMV forms. Job applications that require detailed description of every job you’ve held since babysitting as a teenager. E-commerce sites that force you to create an account + password to order anything. All of these are forms of sludge, “frictions that prevent you doing what you want to do or from going where you want to go.” Sludge is unnecessary overhead, admin, paperwork, red tape - which have surprisingly high costs as Sunstein shows.
Sludge is expensive as it:
Wastes our time: Americans spend 11+ billion hours on federal paperwork per year
Reduces our dignity: think about how you feel after being on the phone for 2 hours to dispute a medical bill, where you’ve had to repeat the same information to multiple people
Makes our economy and government more inefficient: Sludge makes it harder for us to allocate resources properly: if a job application is too onerous, it might dissuade the best applicants. And many government programs such as SNAP (food stamps) don’t work optimally, says Sunstein, as applying for the benefits results in far too few people actually receiving them
There are legitimate reasons for sludge, including:
We need to ensure people qualify for programs (e.g., we need students to provide documentation proving that they need financial aid, otherwise it could go to people who won’t need it)
Sludge also can act as a filtering mechanism: if I make a job application harder to fill out, I might weed out less serious applications
Finally, some organizations cynically use sludge as a profit strategy, by making it hard to cancel a magazine subscription or qualify for an advertised rebate
As solutions, Sunstein proposes “sludge audits” where organizations identify and try to eliminate some of their accumulated sludge. He also points to programs which have worked well: Social Security, which requires very little on the part of consumers.
I enjoyed the book, if you can call it that ( at 100-ish small pages, it’s the non-fiction equivalent of a novella). Viewing the world through the framework of sludge can be a helpful framework, and it prompted me to think about where I could remove sludge from my life and where I might be creating sludge for others. A few additional thoughts:
A lot of sludge is not really anybody’s specific fault, but the result of multiple kludges: over time, many people might add a small requirement to a process or form. Standalone, none of these things take that much time, but in aggregate become very time consuming and painful.
Some sludge is also due to risk aversion. Much of sludge comes from having to give people information. If you are requesting information, it’s very easy to ask for irrelevant pieces of data that will be relevant 0.1% of the time. In a way, sludge is created by asymmetry between the person asking for the information (who doesn’t think about) and the person who must actually fill it out. But the sludge-creator is likely responding to sludge that is being thrown at them!
I wish he spoke more about sludge within organizations and companies (much of the book is focused on government programs, which is still interesting). Sludge slows companies down and makes it harder to make decisions and execute. Sometimes this is intentional, if a company wants to avoid change. But often it’s not and it’s a reason people leave large or bureaucratic organizations. Sludge within companies is particularly hard to eradicate for a few reasons:
The people in positions of power are often insulated from the sludge or have people to handle it for them (though this also applies to government, as most congresspeople are not applying for food stamps or international student visas)
Relatedly, if you are optimizing for career success, it’s probably better to save your boss 60 minutes a week than save 1,000 people 5 minutes a week
It’s often deeply embedded as a result of kludgey processes and genuinely hard to replace (e.g., legacy IT systems that don’t talk to each other)
General risk aversion and more comfort adding requirements v. removing them. Companies also do have legitimate risks they need to mitigate (e.g., you can’t let people download any software they want in this age of cybersecurity concerns and hacking).
That being said, companies capture tremendous value in general by eliminating sludge and being easy to work with. Amazon makes it easy to buy anything and do it quickly. Carbon Health allow you to schedule a doctor’s appointments instantly without waiting a month to see a new primary care doctor. Consumers hate sludge and reward companies which eliminate it. This skill - which I’d broadly define as being easy to work with - also has benefits in your personal life and on your reputation as a professional. It was captured really nicely in a podcast I listened to:
The skill that’s been really top of mind for me right now is the ability to save other people time. Basically, what I mean is there’s certain people that go about their lives, I try to be like this, but they just operate in a way that requires less of everybody else for the equivalent amount of success in that relationship, right?
I enjoyed the book, but don’t expect anything particularly meaty or involved. Would love to read a version of this more focused on private organizations and that was more in-depth: “How to get things done.”