Seth Godin has an interesting post today about stress. His perspective is as a marketer, but his point is universal: people are stressed out almost all the time.

For us system administrators, do we ever just ask ourselves if something we’re doing, a system we’re building, even a tool we’re implementing for ourselves will create or reduce stress?

Why not?

I know some of the tools I use cause more stress than if I didn’t have them, to save very small amounts of time, gather almost useless information, or achieve some political goal. What if we could plot user stress versus time saved? Would we choose our tools, our applications, our systems differently?