How friction enables more mindfulness

Like every other productivity-app geek out there, I’m always watching the space for new developments. What are the hot new tools that everyone talks about? Which application is revolutionizing the space right now?

Over the past few years, there has been a development towards tools that do more for you – automagically. Note-taking apps are now summarizing articles for you and tagging and connecting them as they see fit. Calendar apps automatically time-block your day, so you always know what to do next. And these to-dos get split by your task manager into manageable chunks without you even having to think about it.

Occasionally, I still think about what the seemingly “perfect” productivity tool might be. A dashboard, that gives you all the data you need at any given moment. That always tells you, what you need to have on top of your mind. And that adapts to events like traffic jams in real-time and adjusts your departure date accordingly.

A tool, that essentially does all the organizational thinking for you, so you can be more creative and focus on what truly matters.

But…

…would you actually be able to know what truly matters, if this shiny new tool always decided what you should do next? If you never paused and pondered about what is truly necessary, and what might not even need to be on your to-do list? Because being efficient does not mean that you are being effective. It’s way more important to work on the right things, not to just do more.

Because of that, over the past few years as well, I’ve seen myself being drawn to simpler productivity systems. Systems, that not only try to make you more efficient, but that also introduce a tiny bit of friction just in the right places.

The best example that comes to mind for this philosophy is the Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll. If you hear about BuJos, you might think about those fancy illustrated spreads that artists post online. But the original implementation is actually quite simple.

Ryder calls his invention a “mindfulness practice, disguised as a productivity system”. Because it’s a very manual system, it relies heavily on recurring rituals, such as migrations: Every month (or even every week), you sit down, flip through the previous days and migrate all the tasks over to the next period, that still seem relevant.

I also follow this practice regularly, and it’s fascinating, how many things we deem urgent and important are actually neither. The simple act of having to copy and paste over something you have already written down before, makes you pause: “Do I really need to carry this task with me?”. If you copy over the same task week after week, month after month while never finishing it, it might not be significant at all. And if you can’t even bother to migrate the task the first time around, why should it be worth your time for completing it anyway?

A tiny bit of friction and a system that forces you to engage with your to-do list and reevaluate it occasionally makes your life better than any automated system ever could. Friction is used as a tool for mindfulness. As a force to keep you in the driver’s seat of your life.

I think it’s worth it.

This is my entry for the IndieWeb Carnival of January 2025 about the importance of friction (hosted by V.H. Belvadi). If you have a blog, consider writing an entry yourself.