So I'm trying to extend my girlfriend's tourist visa here in South Africa. Should be straightforward, right?

Step 1: check the website. No information on how to extend a South African visa while in South Africa. It just tells you to book an appointment and go to the visa place.

Step 2: call them. The phone number on the site connects to the Dubai visa department. And the person in the Dubai department couldn’t even give us the phone number of the South African visa department, even though it’s the same company!

Already beautiful.

Step 3: just go in person. We drive 40 minutes into Cape Town, walk into the building, and get told they’re now only doing international visas and the South African visa department moved. Where? 20 minutes further out. How do we know? A piece of paper taped to the wall with the address written on it.

Not on the website. Not in any system anywhere. Not even on Google Maps! Just a piece of paper on a wall in a building you have to physically visit to discover that you're in the wrong place.

So we drive to the new location, which doesn't show up on Google Maps either, eventually find the building, and walk in to find two receptionists doing nothing, a security guard who's clearly just running out the clock, and a queue of people waiting to be helped (so nothing out of the ordinary for South African government systems).

Eventually one guy came in and started helping the queue because clearly no one else was going to. We get to the front. Explain everything. And he hands us a physical piece of paper with a screenshot of a form on a website and a URL of the website we need to go to for extending the visa.

Not even a QR code lol. Just a printed URL on a piece of paper.

So to summarize: we spent 4 hours, driving across Cape Town, visiting 2 visa centres, waited in a queue, all to receive a piece of paper with a website address on it. For something that should've been a single link click on the website.

4h of my life gone, for something that could be fixed in 5min.

Now, as a South African, you learn to laugh at stuff like this because it’s the only way to stay sane in the midst of the chaos.

But as a Systemizer, I can’t help but problem solve this entire situation.

None of this required a complex system. No custom software, no AI automations, not even Notion.

It needed a Google Maps pin, a working phone number, a button on the website, and at the very least a QR code on that piece of paper instead of a 47-character URL.

That's it. The most basic systems imaginable.

And this is what I think about when people tell me "systems are complicated" or "I wouldn't even know where to start." Because the biggest Chaos Tax isn't always about missing some advanced automation. It's about the simple stuff nobody ever set up.

Every day you don't have a basic system in place — a documented process, a single source of truth, a way for someone to find the right information without driving across the city — you're making someone pay that tax. Maybe it's your customers. Maybe it's your team. Maybe it's yourself, every single morning when you sit down and try to figure out what to work on.

The systems that change your life aren't complicated. They're the ones that save you time and does your work without you.

Start simple. Start with the equivalent of putting your address on Google Maps.

No fluff. Just systems.
Chris "The Systemizer" Punt