Why Tolerating Friction is Self-Destructive
There's a hidden message in everyday noise. If you pay attention, you can grab the smallest opportunities to make a big difference in your day-to-day. Here's how.
We are surrounded by distractions. This article is probably one of them too, if you took the time to click through during your standard LinkedIn s[t/c]roll. Those distractions can sometimes be welcome breaks from the day-to-day, but a lot of the time, they divert our energy and resource in a way that's completely counterproductive.
Instead of coasting along and letting these micro-diversions compound into severe bottlenecks, we can and should eliminate friction at source at the first opportunity.
How?
Go Where the Noise Is
I love noise. It’s always got a good story to tell.
What do I classify as ‘noise’?
Noise = Distraction = Un-enjoyable stuff that I have to do that takes me away from the fun stuff.
For example: the washing up, putting the laundry away, comparing car insurance quotes, booking the MOT, grocery shopping, redlining ‘standard’ terms, filling in RFPs, reviewing invoices, sharing the VAT registration number for the nth time, frequently re-explaining what the returns procedure are under the product terms, setting out the company’s security certifications on a loop.
Why I Love Noise
The reason I love noise is because it generally tells me there is an opportunity for friction elimination there. So, instead of blocking it out, I turn my full attention to it and look for optimization opportunities.
Top tip for starters: Make a list of things you hate doing, then get working on automating, delegating or eliminating them out of your life. Of course this won’t work for everything. Another caveat, try to make sure you have clarity on the things you actually love doing, otherwise you might be left with a void of nothingness to look into, setting off an existential crisis which no doubt warrants an article of its own.
The Cost and Opportunity of Automation
In the pursuit of optimization, I’ve come to realize that there is both a cost and an opportunity to automation. The opportunity is obvious, you rid yourself of unpleasant tasks and you maximize productivity.
The cost, however, is more subtle:
- your under-exercised muscle for performing particular tasks weakens with time and gradually becomes redundant;
- conversely, everyone else suddenly thinks they’ve become an expert in a lot of things because of on-demand access to a service;
- you develop an aversion to tasks that you used to do manually only last month, simply because you know there’s a simpler way,
to name a few.
Mitigating the Cost
This cost can be mitigated though, and it all starts with awareness of the above. If a skill becomes less relevant in your day to day, find a substitute way to add value that still lets you exercise the essence of that skill but by a different method of execution. For example, writing a full report from start to finish turns into tailoring a report to suit the audience - leveraging the right communication style, content and tone etc. This takes away some of the manual drafting but lets you hone the skill and judgment needed to write compelling material. The brain then gets trained to review and perfect more quickly, with a lesser focus on assembling, but you do it in such a way that you still know what good writing looks like and can write well when needed.
Embracing Automation
Where everybody thinks they’re now an expert, that’s when real expertise matters. Expert teams have a unique advantage to control and guide their influence and impact in an organisation. By taking ownership of automation in their fields and dictating the appropriate guardrails, expert teams can effectively grant autonomy and freedom to their organisations in such a way that is steerable and audit able. It reduces noisiness significantly without adversely increasing risk.
We are creatures of habit. Our brains become habituated to things we do (and also eliminates joy out of them as an energy preservation mechanism), which is why repetitive tasks feel so tedious and taxing on the mind and the spirit. If you are able to let go of some of these types of tasks and entrust them to an AI, why wouldn’t you do it? The way I see it is that this only frees us up to discover more of our untapped potential.
Conclusion
On a daily basis, whether in the personal or the professional, there are countless opportunities to shed some weight in the form of burdening noise (aka friction) that takes us away from what we really want to be doing or who we want to be spending time with. This post is to encourage anyone reading to reflect and act on that realization because life is way too short to be spent on things we don’t want/have to do.
More on this topic here.
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