Learning to use a password manager to improve your productivity is the "optimal" path, so I'd disagree with this. It is optimal if the time spent learning it is saved by using what you've learned, which is almost certainly the case over the span of even a moderate amount of time.
The irrational thing to do would be to refuse to learn about a password manager. Your argument works if you focus narrowly, but when you see a fuller picture, your argument falls apart.
Very little about work is universally optimal. Work is made out countless compromises so that people can function together. “Optimizing time and energy” is not the same as doing the universally optimal thing.
Optimizing for time and energy has to do with how one uses their waking/working hours.
At some point in my career I worked at a private Catholic college where many of the professors were 60 to 80 year-old nuns.
They were very smart people but their predisposition to learning computer technology was minimal. Something that might take me hours to learn might take them weeks of frustrating, unintuitive trial and error. Frequently, they couldn’t pick up certain new computer skills at all.
I could not imagine teaching the nuns how to use a password manager. It would be a disaster.
This is an extreme example, but somewhere in every skill there’s an inflection point where it becomes impractical to learn that skill if it’s not part of your core competency as a worker.
Many, if not most, users who would benefit from a password manager simply can’t develop that skill if they are expected to finish the normal duties of their work. They are optimally using their limited time and energy because learning a new skill would impact their functionality in their primary responsibilities too much.
If you can’t imagine users from your work-life that would have this problem... I feel like you just don’t know very many users.
I understand your point, I just think you're letting those nuns off the hook too easily! "Can't" is getting thrown around here in ways I don't think is totally accurate.
Let's say you're part of the marketing team and need to sign up to some ad platform or do a one-off order for branded goods. They will most likely not support SSO, and even if they do you won't have the necessary privileges to actually set it up.
The irrational thing to do would be to refuse to learn about a password manager. Your argument works if you focus narrowly, but when you see a fuller picture, your argument falls apart.