On Friction

Last updated on 2023-07-24

Most productivity/time management theories and systems talk about how they're striving to reduce friction. But it's friction that makes things work. If your system is frictionless, you wind up with a bunch of junk in it. You capture everything. You track everything. You think you have to do everything. A system that embraces friction, however, isn't weighed down by everything you think you can or should do. You don't write down or type up every dumb idea you have. (Let's be honest, most of the thousand ideas we have over the course of a day are pretty dumb.) More importantly though, you don't wind up carrying around all those ideas. Capturing an idea is easy, but eventually, you wind up with a task list that could fill a dictionary-sized book and you think you should do every thing contained within.