Minutes Concerning Password Reset Fatigue
The password reset has been requested. The task associated with it has been formally abandoned.
The original task was minor. A reimbursement form. A portal that stored expenses for the kind of tool nobody uses daily. The portal asked for a password. The password had not been used since November. The portal sent a reset link.
The reset link required a new tab. The new tab opened. The password requirements appeared. Minimum twelve characters. One uppercase. One number. One symbol. The new password was created. Then the portal asked for the original task again. The reimbursement form was on page three of a multi-step process. By page two, something else had arrived that was more urgent.
The tab was closed. The reimbursement form was not submitted.
This happened twice. The third time, the task was moved to a list of things to do later. It remains there.
Password reset fatigue is a precise phenomenon with an imprecise location. It is not quite a technology problem and not quite a motivation problem. It is a calibration problem: the effort required to access a system does not match the importance of the thing the system contains. When the mismatch is large enough, the task loses. When the task loses twice, it gets classified as lower priority. When it stays lower priority long enough, it gets removed.
The digital tool was bought because it was supposed to reduce friction. The friction it reduced was replaced by a different kind of friction, smaller and more distributed, which now accumulates across dozens of similar systems. Each individual instance is trivial. Collectively they produce a low-grade tax on all digital participation, the kind that does not show up in productivity metrics because each abandoned task was minor.
By February 2022 the average person had somewhere between 80 and 100 online accounts, according to estimates that varied widely and were all probably underestimates. Not all of them were active. Not all of them knew they were being kept. Some were being kept precisely because logging in to cancel required a password reset, and the calculation came out the same way every time.
The tab closes. The task waits. The account persists.
Nothing has been resolved. That is the preliminary finding.