Why do I keep working around my broken tools instead of fixing them?

There is a particular motion you have learned without meaning to learn it — the extra click, the workaround folder, the way you brace before the program loads. You do it so often it no longer registers as a decision. It has become part of how you work, the way a person with a stiff door learns to lean into it rather than oil the hinge. This is not carelessness. Fixing the tool feels like leaving the work to attend to something beside the work — and there is always more work waiting. So the friction stays, forgiven a little each day, until the forgiving itself becomes invisible. What is worth noticing is not the tool. It is the tolerance. Somewhere along the way, enduring the friction became easier to imagine than the hour it would take to replace it — even though that hour has been paid, in small coins, many times over.