What is friction-maxxing and is it the productivity hack we all need?
“Tech companies are succeeding in making us think of life itself as inconvenient and something to be continuously escaping from,” she wrote. “Reading is boring; talking is awkward; moving is tiring… thinking is hard… Speaking at all — overrated. These are all frictions that we can now eliminate easily, and we do.”
She suggests taking simple steps, such as chatting to strangers and reading a book, instead of scrolling through social media and letting your kids go to the shops for you, in order to build up tolerance for what we loosely term “inconveniences” but are in fact “just the vagaries of being a living person”.
Some kind of revolt against this apparent tsunami of incessant and lightning-quick technological change has long been on the cards.
“It was inevitable there would be pushback against all of this convenience and automation,” says Professor Mike Quayle from the Department of Psychology at the University of Limerick. “Many of these things often claim to enhance satisfaction or productivity, but in reality, they’re made to extract resources from us, whether that’s time, attention, or money. And in the end, the objective is commercial.”
Quayle sees one area in particular where we need to be cautious: AI. It’s the new frontier in almost every aspect of life, whether that’s work, academia or culture.
“You can’t build expertise if you’re offloading all the hard work to the AI immediately,” he says. “Just like if you’re going to the gym because you want to build muscle, you wouldn’t get a robot to lift weights for you. Mental growth is the same as muscle growth — you need to do the work. But just like muscle work, our brains don’t crave it. We have to push ourselves into it. And if we take the shortcuts, we don’t get the growth in skills and expertise that we’re looking for or that we need.”
He points to those involved in creative work, like writing. “For many writers, writing is the thinking. So you short-circuit that, particularly if you use AI too early. You don’t think in the same way if you’re using AI because it’s in the process of struggling with the blank page, struggling with the structure of the piece or how to turn your thoughts into words that you’re doing the thinking.”
In Quayle’s opinion, companies that overutilise automation and AI are at risk of losing “the social capital that makes things happen”, and if that affects innovation and invention, then that will ultimately hit bottom lines.
“We don’t encourage friction for its own sake,” says the organisational psychologist from Dublin. “It’s about being intentional as an organisation and finding those points of friction that actually help us to learn, to enhance our judgement or do better sense-making together. Those are areas we would be encouraging organisations to protect or improve as needed and not just automate or make life easy for the sake of it.”
For Keane, organisations need to be careful where AI or automation is used.
“If you deploy AI everywhere, you’re risking unintended consequences,” she says. “So people end up losing skills or the opportunity to learn them, skills that help you make better judgements or decisions in the longer term.”
Often, as part of their work with executive teams, Keane and her colleagues will ask clients to think about where AI can help generate efficiencies, and where human judgement and labour need to be protected.
“So we’d do things like getting a team in a room and getting them to stay with a thorny complex problem without outsourcing it to an AI to solve it,” she explains. “Because a lot of the complex problems that organisations face don’t have a right answer. They’re ambiguous, uncertain, so they require teams to go through the discomfort of figuring things out together, of experimenting, trying something out and seeing if it works and trying something different if it doesn’t. And it’s those moments of challenge where the learning happens and where organisations and people, in fact, grow.”
It isn’t about friction maxxing but more “friction targeting”, she says, adding: “Where do we want to target friction deliberately so we get better outcomes rather than just maxxing across the board?”
According to child psychotherapist Joanna Fortune, parents have become more concerned with their children’s ability to stay focused and complete tasks.
“I’m coming across a lot of parents who want to introduce friction for their kids,” she says. “They want to consciously break this dependence on technology and ease and get them back to basics, so they know what it is to master tension, overcome challenges and just be able to say, it’s difficult, but I’m doing it’.”
Smartphone and social media distractions have been compounded by the recent introduction of tools like ChatGPT.
“Attention span is a big concern,” she says. “Also, children’s ability for critical thinking is being affected, because the answer to everything is at the click of a button. They don’t have to work things out, whereas with exams, for example, that come later in life, you very much do.”
Offloading our study and learning to ChatGPT is affecting how our brains actually work. A recent study conducted at Cornell University split a group of students into three groups and asked them to write a series of short essays on the same topic.
One group was told to use ChatGPT, another was asked to use Google with the AI summaries turned off, and the last was instructed to work unaided. During the task, their brainwaves were monitored. Those who used their own minds showed widespread activity across many parts of the brain. Those using just the search engine also showed strong activity in the visual parts of the brain, but the ChatGPT group showed notably less brain activity, and in some cases it was reduced by up to 55%.
Research backs Fortune’s views on critical thinking. A recently published Swiss paper found that out of a dataset of 666 people, younger participants (17–25) exhibited higher AI tool usage and cognitive offloading, but lower critical thinking scores. In contrast, older participants (46 and above) showed lower AI tool usage and cognitive offloading, with higher critical thinking scores.
“When you have a good attention span and critical thinking capabilities, it helps support your overall holistic intelligence — social, emotional, as well as your memory and recall,” says Fortune. “When you don’t have to figure things out or wait for TV shows because everything is so instant and convenient, then you have a lower capacity to cope with tension, boredom, distress, and disappointment.”
At one point in our conversation, I offer Fortune an example of my own attempt at friction maxxing — though I had no idea it was called that when I started. Every Thursday, I take my son to karate, and every week, rain, hail or shine, we walk. That’s mainly down to my desire to go for a pint but it’s also so close to our house that it seems too easy to drive. According to Fortune, not only does this help build our resilience to the changeable Irish weather but it’s also good for us socially.
“That’s where you get the social interaction and find out about their day, which you wouldn’t get if you were in the car because he might be on a device,” she says. “It also supports empathy because there’s that art of conversation, the serve and return, the listening to you, and it’s all supporting their social engagement system, and that isn’t going to happen through technology, but will happen in the context of a person-to-person conversation.”
It seems introducing some friction maxxing into our lives might just lead to a longer, happier, and more satisfying life.
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