This is my blog post for this month’s IndieWeb Carnival hosted by V.H. Belvadi, the topic for which is on the importance of friction. More specifically, this post was inspired by Manuel Morale’s post on the topic.
Over the past few days, I have been thinking about how friction affects my creative work and the nature of said friction. The thought I arrived at is that friction is not intrinsically positive or negative. The nature of the friction in question depends on your goals for the task you are doing.
For example, one of my long term creative goals is to write more blog posts for this blog. Anything that gets in the way, i.e anything that adds friction to this particular goal is at best neutral or at worst counter productive to achieving that goal.
To expand on this – I use WordPress and I write 99% of my blog posts in the WordPress web editor. I am writing this very post in that editor. Would it be positive friction to write this blog post first in a separate dedicated writing focused tool like iA Writer and then once I have finished my blog post, copy and paste it into the text editor here?
My goal is to write and publish more of said writing. Does adding friction to the process meaningfully improve the experience? In my personal experience: no, it is in fact detrimental to my creative goals. I purchased a license for iA Writer a few months ago and ended up not using the tool because it added friction that did not make a positive contribution to my goals.
Now in this experience I have described there is also other friction that is present that I consider positive or at least neutral. I always write my blog posts on a “desktop” operating system with a decent keyboard attached, whether that is my Windows desktop at home or my MacBook Air. I don’t write blog posts on my phone or tablet. This adds friction if I want to write a blog post and do not have access to either my desktop computer or my laptop.
The friction of having to type my blog posts out on a proper keyboard is positive to me as I dislike typing long bits of text on touch screen keyboards. If I have to draft a blog post while I’m away from a keyboard, I record a voice memo on my phone instead of typing into the WordPress iOS app. So this particular bit of friction is not detrimental to my goals.
As a counterpoint, you may find that adding the use of a dedicated writing tool like iA Writer adds joy to the creative process and helps you focus and helps you write more. In that case, the friction is positive and something that should remain in the process.
So, think about what your goals are and think about the friction in the process of achieving those goals. Is the friction having a positive or negative effect?