"A computer shall not waste your time or require you to do more work than is strictly necessary"
About this Quote
A bracing little heresy in an industry that routinely treats user time as an all-you-can-eat buffet. Jef Raskin’s line reads like a commandment, but it’s really an indictment: the default posture of “computer people” has been to offload complexity onto the human and call it empowerment. The phrasing is telling. “Shall not” borrows the moral clarity of law and religion, implying that wasted attention isn’t a minor bug; it’s a kind of ethical breach. And “your time” centers the user as the scarce resource, not CPU cycles, feature checklists, or managerial roadmaps.
The second clause cuts deeper. “Require you to do more work than is strictly necessary” isn’t just about convenience. It’s about the quiet, normalized labor of modern computing: memorizing arcane file structures, babysitting updates, reconciling inconsistent UI patterns, clicking through confirmations designed more for liability than clarity. Raskin frames that labor as theft by design. If the machine is truly a tool, it should absorb the drudgery, not invent it.
Context matters: Raskin helped birth the Macintosh and spent his career arguing for “humane interfaces,” skeptical of the cult of complexity that equates difficulty with professionalism. This quote arrives as a counter-program to the feature race and the macho ideal of the power user. Its subtext is radical: computers should respect human cognition, minimize interruption, and treat attention like dignity. In 2026, that lands as a rebuke not only to clunky software, but to engagement-driven products that profit precisely by wasting your time.
The second clause cuts deeper. “Require you to do more work than is strictly necessary” isn’t just about convenience. It’s about the quiet, normalized labor of modern computing: memorizing arcane file structures, babysitting updates, reconciling inconsistent UI patterns, clicking through confirmations designed more for liability than clarity. Raskin frames that labor as theft by design. If the machine is truly a tool, it should absorb the drudgery, not invent it.
Context matters: Raskin helped birth the Macintosh and spent his career arguing for “humane interfaces,” skeptical of the cult of complexity that equates difficulty with professionalism. This quote arrives as a counter-program to the feature race and the macho ideal of the power user. Its subtext is radical: computers should respect human cognition, minimize interruption, and treat attention like dignity. In 2026, that lands as a rebuke not only to clunky software, but to engagement-driven products that profit precisely by wasting your time.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
|---|---|
| Source | Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface (2000). Principle commonly cited as “A computer shall not waste your time or require you to do more work than is strictly necessary.” |
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