The Art of Deliberate Friction-Building

Sometimes, the best way to improve your life is by making it a bit harder.

Ever notice how easy it is to get sucked into your phone? It's like a black hole of endless scrolling and notifications. Before facial recognition or fingerprints, you had to punch in a code to unlock your phone: that tiny bit of effort was enough to make you think twice.

But what if you could break free from this cycle and regain control over your mental health and relationship with your tools? Adding a little friction, like a human connection filter or slowing down animations, is a way to be more mindful about your tech use, challenging The Tyranny of Defaults: Why the Worst Monopolies Are in Your Mind.

There is "good" friction and "bad" friction.

Good friction means enough effort before using a tool so that you have pockets of focus and intentionality when you can think about how (or if) you must use it. Bad friction is poor UX and design--for example, a TV or a dishwasher needing a firmware update before you can use them again.

We want, of course, to leverage good friction because it's about reclaiming your time and mental health from the clutches of endless digital distractions.

Maybe change your phone's display to black and white or move apps to a different screen, or buy only celery sticks and guac as a snack to keep in the fridge. Sure, some of us will still drive at 2AM to get some bright blue bubblegum-flavored ice cream from a pharmacy. But it's an annoying small change that makes you slow down and think before diving in. It's like setting up mental (or fridge) speed bumps.

By making things a bit more challenging, you force yourself to be more deliberate, breaking the autopilot mode that tech often puts us in.

Notifications, as I discussed in How to Stare at Your Phone Without Losing Your Soul, are like tiny digital puppeteers, pulling your brain's strings throughout the day. What if you cut those strings? There are a few practical actions with technology that are easy to apply right away:

• Leave the phone outside the bedroom and use a standalone alarm clock.
• Forget grayscale filters: make animations slower using Android's Developer Settings. In that way, the multitasking gestures will take long enough to make you think (and frustrated.)
• Use the human connection filter: A simple rule of thumb is to only permit notifications that come directly from another human being.
• Drop the illusion of urgency: From weather alerts to traffic updates, our phones bombard us with a constant stream of supposedly urgent information. It's just part of The Market's Digestive System: How Radical Ideas Become Marketing Gimmicks. Does learning about somebody with a scimitar roaming two miles away via the Citizen app make any difference in your life?

In a world engineered to be frictionless, adding a bit of resistance can be revolutionary. Embrace a little slow down, and take back control: Your mind will thank you.