by Serguey Shinder
Most of the approvals I give arrive as notifications. A purchase over a threshold, a supplier's revised terms, a change to a contract. Each one comes with a short summary written by the person asking and a button that says approve. For years I cleared them wherever I happened to be, which was often a corridor, a train or the five minutes before a call.
In March 2024 I approved our main carrier's annual rate review that way. The summary said rates were up three and a half per cent, in line with the market, and that buying had reviewed it. Both were true. The rate card itself was a spreadsheet attached to the request, and on its second tab was a new surcharge for deliveries to sites with no forklift on hand to unload. That described most of the building sites our customers send us to. Finance noticed in August, after about forty thousand pounds of surcharges had been paid.
I did not miss the surcharge because I was rushed. I missed it because I never saw it. A phone shows the summary beautifully and attachments badly. Opening that spreadsheet would have meant a viewer that showed one tab, at a size where I would have had to pinch and scroll to read a single row. I had not decided to skip it. The device had decided for me, and I had treated the summary as the thing I was approving.
So I counted. In that quarter I had given a hundred and forty approvals, and ninety four of them on my phone. The median time between opening a request and approving it was under a minute. For a purchase order for gloves, that was fine. For anything with an attachment, it meant I had approved somebody's description of a document rather than the document.
I took approvals off my phone. Not the notifications, the button. On the phone I can now only sort requests into two piles, routine and needs reading. Twice a day, at half past eight and at four, I sit at a desk with a proper screen for half an hour and decide everything in the second pile with the attachments open. And requests now carry a first line written by whoever asks, saying what has changed since last time, which is the sentence I was really looking for all along.
The carrier agreed to remove the surcharge for our account after a slightly uncomfortable meeting. Nothing has been approved faster since. A few things have been approved more slowly, and twice I have caught something I would have signed.
Where I read something decides how much of it I read.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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