Just add a little friction

One thing about modern life that’s a given is that we try to make things as efficient as possible. We are all busy and we all want to do as much as we can in the limited time we have.

It’s clearly a worthy pursuit. Managers at work will praise you. Friends at dinner will boast about their latest hacks. Our social feeds are filled with influencers and marketers pushing the newest product that will help you save time, especially at the start of a new year.

Everything around us reinforces the idea of becoming more efficient.

Just for a moment though, step off the treadmill, and ask yourself: why do you want to be more efficient? What is the point of this efficiency? What do you want to do with the time you save if you achieve it?

I was surprised by some of the answers I got, and I bet you will be too. On reflection, there are still plenty of things in life I’d like to be more efficient at. But what I quickly realized is that on the most meaningful things efficiency comes in the way of real progress.

Let me share one concrete example where I’ve found that adding more friction is bringing me better results: better writing (and thus better thinking).

I came of age writing on the internet, starting with blogging. So all writing was squiggly lines on a screen that appear with thuds on a keyboard. Last year, I started writing long hand… with paper and pen. First it was journaling, then letters and eventually first drafts of some stories. This post, too, started on paper.

The result: I’ve found myself becoming a calmer thinker and a better writer.

The act forces you to think a little more before committing pen to paper. Every word matters just a little more and every paragraph is a bigger decision. (Of course, I can always scratch things out. Most of the paper will go unseen by another person. But there is such pleasure in a neat written page.)

Much of writing is about asking questions. Too often, thanks to AI and superfast internet, I’m tempted to try to find those answers by searching right at the instant the question appears in my mind. I can’t do that on pen and paper, so I have a notes section where I jot down questions for later and I persist with the writing.

That little bit of friction, which is irritating at first and gets more annoying the longer I stay away from the screen, is also producing better results. I am able to sit longer in the discomfort of a bad sentence, in the inadequateness of being unable to find the right word or statistic, in the temptation that reading something will help me break through.

The fact that the paper cannot talk back to me or reveal new facts about the world means I have to look deeper in my mind to find what I need. That, in turn, forces me to spend my time reading, listening, interviewing with the goal of preparing my mind for my next writing session.

Try adding a little friction in the pursuits you find most meaningful.