Today’s issue of 3 Threads ended up being all about the value of friction. Far from being something to avoid, it acts as a filtering function to help us decide what is valuable to us.

Booking Time Should Require Friction

I’ve long thought that friction is a filtering force in all aspects of your life. It keeps the slightly interesting but ultimately irrelevant out. An analogue productivity system introduces friction so that you don’t bother with tasks that fall off your radar when you don’t copy them to the new page. When I’m reading a book with a notebook, it would be faster to take a note directly into Obsidian, but if the note isn’t worth writing down by hand then processing later to get into my digital notes, it’s not worth taking.

But until I read this I didn’t make the same mental connection with booking links.

The astute among you may notice that I stopped saying I do any form of coaching. I’m not helping people run freelance businesses like I did for years. I run no masterminds. I’m not helping anyone with their note system.

I do none of this because every time I had a meeting coming up I hated it. I’d look at the block of my time and think of all the other things I’d rather be doing than taking that meeting.

Thus no more coaching, no more booking links. That doesn’t mean I take no meetings, but someone has to work to get one and if it’s not worth their effort then the meeting isn’t worth it.

Journaling Friction

As I started to read this article on Journaling in Craft spurred by the author’s desire to be like one of the “greats” who mined their personal journal for ideas that became essays and books. Reading Breen’s piece I couldn’t help but wonder if he was looking not for a way to mine his notes but for a way to take the effort out of the process. He was looking to save effort instead of increase insight.

If only all my thoughts were part of my Zettelkasten, writing would come to me with less effort because I’d have all my ideas in one place that could be crosslinked and found easily.

Breen came to the same conclusion I figured he would. All his personal journal entries dumped in Craft (or any tool) didn’t help him, in fact it made it harder to wade through the copious amounts of irrelevant stuff to find the few gems that came out of his personal writing.

As I already said above, friction is a filtering force for good. If your personal writing for today doesn’t spark a bigger thought that won’t let your brain go until it’s written down somewhere else and expanded on, then don’t worry about it. If you don’t have the time to dig back through your notebooks for further insights, don’t worry about it let the ideas die where they are laying now.

Coherent writing is hard. Bringing ideas together is hard. If it was easy everyone would do it and we’d all be prize wining authors. More people want to have written than want to do the hard work of bringing a single idea together over the length of a book because the truth is, that’s damn hard work that requires sacrifice of your time and mental energy.

One Good Thing

Today’s culture seems to reward and celebrate the hustle. The neverending idea that one should always be productive, working, producing, shipping. – Just One Good Thing

and

In the last year, a mindset shift and approach appeared as a very simple idea: just do one thing, that I want to do today. – Just One Good Thing

The problem for many is that the one good thing they want to do doesn’t pay the bills. In Meditations for Mortals Oliver Burkeman looks at this as the need to prove your value to the world, you worth of existence daily. As if we have to be productive enough daily to justify our existence on the planet.

This is old school Protestant Work Ethic killing you slowly, and we let it. In fact we lionize those that have some crazy system and check off tasks faster than seems possible.

Lately I’ve been writing down in my notebook the things I wish I was able to do today. Not the tasks like change the furnace filter or write a bit more code, but the bigger things.

I wish I went for a bike ride.

I wish I spent more time reading.

I wish I baked with my children today instead of blowing them off for the sake of efficiency.

I wish I jumped on the trampoline instead of doing chores.

The next step is to figure out how to not have anything to write down most days.