On friction
I remember learning about friction in high school physics. It’s measured as a ratio. The normal force pushes two surfaces together, and the frictional force slows them down.
You hear people talk about friction a lot in the tech industry. Product managers and product designers, especially. "How can we reduce friction? How can we make this more seamless?"
Sometimes, reducing friction is great! By using clearer words or designing smoother interactions, removing friction can make people's lives easier. Like when you’re buying groceries, and you accidentally forget something. It’s incredibly easy to add items up until the last second. “Your last order had oat milk. Do you want to add it to this one?” Yes, great catch, thank you, piece of software! I would like to add oat milk to this grocery order!
But a lot of the time, adding friction is good. A lot of the time, it’s necessary. Too little friction, and you have angry customers who don't understand what they signed up for, or who sign up for something by accident.
Too little friction, and we’d all be slipping and sliding around.
In my last post, I wrote about my anxiety, the never-ending game of Whac-A-Mole, and how I needed to make a concerted effort to incorporate wellness into my life. My solution has been introducing friction. Some people might say that this is just “slowing down”, but I think it’s more than that. You need something to slow you down if you’re not intrinsically inclined to do it on your own.
It's been healthier for me to introduce digital and physical boundaries that help me move through life’s daily tasks with less urgency. This is counterintuitive in a culture that rewards and prioritizes more, faster, better, immediately, now. So if we go back to the “friction-as-ratio” concept, the two forces at play are the external productivity #grindset, and our very human need for rest. Wellness, slowness, and patience it is.
Here’s one example of how I’ve added friction into my life: I don’t keep my phone in my bedroom at night anymore.
If you’ve ever lain awake at night and Googled “ways to fall asleep fast”, the first thing you’ll see is to get off of your phone (you know, the beaming box of blue light that you’re currently holding 6 inches away from your face, desperately clutching in search of a solution). Now, if I'm having trouble falling asleep, I won't grab my phone and scroll mindlessly. I'll toss and turn and fall asleep eventually. Maybe I'll wake up tired. But I’ll deal with it. Introducing that barrier — a physical wall between my phone and me at night — that’s good friction.
Another example: I delete the Instagram app from my phone every single day. When I want to check it, I need to reinstall the app, dismiss two modals asking me about 1) enabling push notifications and 2) App Tracking Transparency, catch up on messages, look at a few posts, close the app, then delete it. Adding these steps makes using Instagram inconvenient, so I'm less inclined to waste time on it.
I've been reading more books, too. Actual books, printed on paper, that you can hold in your hands. You don’t need a progress bar to see how much you’ve read. One side of the book has more pages than the other. That’s how you track your progress.
Physical books are a slow medium. There's no highlighting functionality, and the only comments you can leave are annotations in the marginalia. You can dog-ear a page to come back to it later, or use sticky tabs if you’re dedicated. But all of that stuff is optional, because reading a book does not ask us to produce. Books are for understanding, digesting, transporting, or learning. Sometimes it's nice to just sit there with the text and enjoy a good story, and never revisit it ever again. Not everything needs to be stored for later use. Experiences can just be experienced, and that’s got to be good enough.
Productivity tools and efficiency software are not for living life: they are for tracking and monitoring life’s outputs. Which is helpful and necessary! But my life doesn't have to be productive, at least not right now. It just needs to be lived.
