What I've Been Thinking About
🚧 Not all friction is bad
When we talk about friction, it's usually in a negative context. We're always trying to remove friction from our systems. But sometimes maintaining or adding friction to parts of a system help keep it in balance.
I'm reading Cal Newport's latest book A World Without Email in which he describes a workplace that ran an experiment, removing access to email for a week. Cal talked to one of the scientists about their experience.
Before the experiment, they were constantly bombarded by email requests from their boss. This put them into a constant state of reactiveness and stress. However, during the experiment, they didn't receive a single request. Their boss was just two doors down and could have simply walked over to field their usual requests. But just by adding that small amount of friction to each request, the true nature of the value of those requests was revealed. The value of fulfilling those requests didn't outweigh the physical inconvenience of making them.
We seem to be on a never-ending quest to remove friction from intra-company communication. Many of the tools that are ubiquitous within our organizations have us communicating at the speed of thought. This has many advantages, but the biggest downside is that we're often speaking before thinking. It's so easy to communicate that we're often communicating when it's not even necessary or even detrimental. How many extra tasks are we creating for ourselves by indulging in this hyperactive frictionless communication?
I would love to run an experiment where we add a bit of artificial friction back into our communication and measure the impact. Before every internal email or slack message a prompt would pop up and you would be required to answer a couple of questions before being able to write up and send your message: Are you sure you want to send a message? Will the recipient be better off having received this message?
We should think of friction as a feature, not a bug. Before we remove friction, we should ask what purpose is it serving? And we should look for places within our systems where adding some friction could be beneficial.
Product to Try
🍝 Cascatelli pasta by Sporkful
I haven't tried this yet since I hardly ever cook pasta, but I may have to go out of my way and try this cascatelli pasta.
For the past three years, Dan Pashman has been on a mission to invent a new pasta shape. Dan is the host of the Sporkful podcast, which has won a Best Food Podcast award.
He approached this challenge from first principles. He thought about the fundamental qualities of great pasta, which he boiled down to three:
Sauceability: how readily sauce adheres to the shape
Forkability: how easy it is to get the shape on your fork and keep it there
Toothsinkability: how satisfying it is to sink your teeth into it
With an objective to maximize these three qualities of his pasta, he came up with the overarching shape, texture, and structural details of this pasta.
I'm eager to try this pasta out and see how it compares to the classic pasta shapes.
You can read more about the process of inventing this pasta shape along with links to his 5-part series on his podcast here.