Embracing friction

A couple of months ago, I changed the way I handle email. I moved all my accounts into Notion’s new email tool. A mundane change that came with an unexpected positive outcome, based on a simple design decision: Notion doesn’t offer a unified inbox. Each address lives in its own, separate space.

For years, I had grown used to having everything flow into one stream. Personal, work, projects, all collapsing into a single feed. It was convenient. Seamless. Efficient. But it was also, in hindsight, overly distractive.

When I first realised I would have to check each inbox separately, I thought it simply wouldn’t work for me. It felt clunky, unnecessarily slow compared to my unified inbox. Yet over time, something clicked. The friction I had wanted to eliminate soon began to feel grounding. It forced me to approach each part of my life with clearer boundaries and a more deliberate kind of attention.

By shifting between spaces, whether I’m at work or on personal projects, I’m actually pushing myself to be present for them. Each context now requires a small, conscious transition, a pause before entering. The separation that had first felt like a burden has become a quiet invitation to focus.

This made me realise how quickly we’ve come to equate friction with inefficiency, as though every rough edge in life were a problem to be optimised away. Yet friction, when embraced consciously, is not a flaw, but an educating choice.

And as it often happens, once you see it, it begins to appear everywhere.

The first clear manifestation came while listening to Eugene Healey talk about the role of friction in culture. How, in an age obsessed with smoothness, friction might be the very thing that keeps us awake and true. When everything is eased down, nothing truly touches us. Friction, by contrast, creates depth. It asks for engagement. It gives shape to experience. It unearths authenticity. Often, it’s what makes meaning possible.

Eugene even suggests that perhaps we should design for friction, intentionally creating moments that slow us down, that demand attention, that remind us we are participants, not just users. I found that idea not only strategically wise, but beautiful, resonating deeply with our own journey at Mure. Because friction, in its best form, is not about difficulty for its own sake. It’s about connection, focus, and depth. It’s about making us notice.

A few days later, my fellow strategist Alex Smith wrote about the interplay between comfort and beauty. The way he described it stopped me for a moment: comfort, he said, is what requires nothing of us; beauty, on the other hand, almost always asks for effort, presence, or courage. The two are not companions, but opposites. The search for comfort soothes us; the search for beauty expands us. And between the two lies the necessary passage of friction.

The more I paid attention, the more I began to notice how friction shapes other parts of life too. When you think about it, most of what we cherish, the most rewarding endeavours, whether writing, cooking, hiking, learning, or building something, all demand a certain resistance. They ask something of us. Beauty and meaning come from showing up, staying with something, not rushing past the difficulty.

Maybe that’s what this small experiment with email has taught me: that friction can be a form of presence. That slowing down, even slightly, and no matter how small the task at hand, can return a sense of intention to what we do. There’s a discipline in choosing not the most comfortable thing, but the most beautiful and meaningful one; the one that requires care, and doesn’t let us disappear into the current of mindless ease.

Friction reminds us to touch the moment, rather than swipe past it.

So now, when I find myself reaching for the easy option, I try to pause for a moment. In some areas, I still choose comfort, of course. But sometimes, I choose the slower, harder way. And more often than not, that’s where the beauty lives.