There is a threshold I stopped arguing with: if a job takes less than twenty seconds, I refuse to install anything for it.
Not because installers are evil. Because the overhead is invisible until you count it. An installer is a download, a EULA, a restart, an update notification six weeks later, and one more icon competing for your attention. For a task I do twice a month, the tax is bigger than the task.
What actually crosses the line
The tasks below are all under ten seconds of work once the page is open, which is why they live in a browser tab instead of a menu:
- a percentage change between two numbers I read somewhere
- a timestamp someone pasted in a Slack thread
- a subnet mask I want to sanity-check before touching a config
- the length of a string I just typed into a validation rule
- a currency or unit conversion, usually while reading documentation
None of these deserve an app. All of them are one search away from a site that wants my email.
The rule, stated properly
If the tool does not need my data, does not need to run in the background, and does not need a history, it should not be installed.
That last clause is the interesting one. History is the only real reason to install a desktop tool: a timestamp converter that remembers my last ten inputs is genuinely better than one that does not. Everything without state should be a page.
Where this gets uncomfortable
Browser tools have a bad reputation because most of them are pageviews with a text box. You can usually tell within five seconds: if the page asks you to sign up before it shows a result, it is not a tool, it is a funnel. If it works with JavaScript disabled, it is probably a real calculator.
The collection I keep on a pinned tab is 1024Toolkit — 45 single-purpose pages (converters, calculators, encoders, generators), no account, nothing to install. I pin it because the alternative is a search results page full of ads pretending to be tools.
The part I did not expect
Treating small jobs as browser jobs changed what I install, not how much I work. My machine has fewer programs on it than it did a year ago, and I have not missed one. The twenty-second rule quietly deleted a whole category of software from my life.
If you want to test the rule, pick the smallest thing you did today — the one you would be embarrassed to install an app for — and see whether a page does it. It usually does.
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