Friction

I keep telling myself: if only there was zero friction in the act of writing — if thinking and writing were somehow almost the same, say — I’d write more frequently, and people in general would as well. I’d like to have better input methods than the ones we have available, in particular when I’m on my phone. I find writing on the phone awkward and at times frustrating to the point I want to give up. Perhaps this is because I’m not young enough to have grown up with touch interfaces around me, or perhaps it’s because I know how pleasant it is to touch type on a “proper” keyboard, to which extent the keyboard can almost disappear when you get into a groove.

Friction is also the reason why I spent some time choosing the “right” blogging engine and writing scripts to make writing and publishing posts “easier” (for my definition of easier). In a sense this is part of my personality; I try to automate or polish away any friction because I find it annoying, and I want things to be simple and regular in the day to day. This is how I ended up with a job in IT; it was part of wanting to know how computers and networks work, part being lazy and having the impulse to automate away friction. It turns out these are assets and enough to land you a job. But it can also become yet another form of procrastination. In programming lingo, yak shaving.