Seven seconds of detergent for two minutes of football.

I wanted the score. I got washing powder first.

Years ago, before I ran my own companies, I started every working day the same way as everyone else in the office: a coffee and the news. I know. We all do it. Five minutes with the headlines before the real work starts.

One morning the national team had played the night before, and all I wanted was the result. I clicked the headline. The page went grey, and a video for washing powder filled the middle of the screen. Somewhere in a corner there was a tiny X, too small for a finger and too pale to find quickly. Seven seconds of detergent before I could read two lines about football.

It wasn't one site. It was every site. A cookie banner first, then a newsletter pop-up, then a video that started playing by itself halfway down the page and followed me as I scrolled. Every piece of information online came with a toll, and you paid it before you got what you came for.

Then I started paying attention to the people around me. They weren't reading the news all day. They were working. They were looking up a supplier's price list, a technical data sheet, a regulation, a delivery address. And every one of those pages charged the same toll.

Every piece of information online comes with a toll, and you pay it before you get what you came for.

Do the arithmetic, the way you would for anything else you pay for. Say fifteen seconds lost per page: finding the X, waiting for the video, closing the banner. Say forty pages a day for anyone who does their job at a computer, which is modest. That's ten minutes a day. Over a working year, it's close to forty hours, a full working week per person, spent closing things nobody asked to see.

In a team of twenty, that's around eight hundred hours a year. Five months of someone's full-time work, paid at the same rate as the real work, spent clicking little X's.

And the seconds are only the visible part. An advert isn't there by accident. It's built by people whose whole job is to make you look. Every pop-up breaks a thought in half. You went to the supplier's page to check one figure, and you came back having forgotten which job you needed it for.

An advert is built by people whose whole job is to make you look. You're paying your people to be the audience.

Nobody puts this on a budget. You'd never pay a man to stand in the office and hand your staff leaflets every few minutes. But that's roughly what happens, all day, on every screen you've paid for, during hours you're paying for.

So wherever I've run things since, the answer has been the same: block it at the door. Not a policy, not a memo about "focus", not another report. One thing installed once, on every machine, so the page opens with what you came for and nothing else. Nobody has to remember anything. The toll simply stops being charged.

You pay for your people's time. Don't let someone else spend it on their advertising.