A major theme for me this year is removing friction wherever I can. When I reflect on any average day, I can always think of small to medium tasks I know I should do but don’t start for one reason or another. What especially hurts is when the task ends up taking 5 minutes or less.

I don’t think procrastination is quite the right word here. I’m not lounging around. I’m doing other work. Coding, dev tasks at work. Plenty of Twitter scrolling too, if I’m being honest. The point is: I’m busy, just selectively avoiding the things with friction.

On my best days, the mental barrier completely dissolves. I get into this mode where I say “fuck it” and solve dozens of small issues. Basically anything that gets in my way, I fix immediately. Often it’s just 5 minutes of work.

This could be many things:

  • Some random dev failure or multi-step task that I can either remove or make single-step
  • Buying a household item on Amazon that solves a minor but annoying problem, like my dual-entry apartment bathroom door that didn’t come with a long enough stopper (and slowly but surely caused the handles to nearly come off due to loosening screws)
  • Cleaning or installing something that’s been in a box for a while
  • Running errands
  • Making an administrative phone call to some service
  • The dreaded run to USPS to mail something that can only be mailed (in 2026 🙄)

There’s friction everywhere you look. Terrible apps and interfaces for things you need to do. Mental burdens of thinking thoroughly about a problem and how you might solve it. Knowing that if you choose something, you might have to commit to it, so you can’t just spend a few minutes on it. And maybe you don’t even feel like thinking at that particular moment.

I’ve also had a lot of friction when it comes to driving. I’ve lived in major cities for a while. Traffic, parking, the ongoing construction blocking multiple major entry and exit points near where I live. The road rage I inevitably have because of the other idiots on the road.

All of these add up and cause me to just not do something, letting tasks stack up. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy because it creates even more friction and hesitation.

The major theme for me this year is to remove friction wherever I can. What do I minorly dread? I want to catch myself when I feel that hesitation. Take even starting this blog post. I thought for a few seconds about how I wanted to begin. Then a few seconds about how I wasn’t sure if I could communicate the “perfect” thoughts I had on this topic that’s been on my mind for a while. But I remembered: I made it really easy to spin up new, properly formatted and backlinked Obsidian notes with my blog structure. I recently had Claude write my own blogging software that’s exactly what I wanted (no more fighting terrible self-hosted Ghost servers). And for better or worse, AI-assisted cleanup after I’m done writing.

There’s been a ton of other stuff I’ve already done that has removed friction for the rest of the year:

  • Tesla with FSD: It’s gotten to the point where it does 95% of my driving. I actually enjoy going places and running errands now.
  • Optimized build system at work: Went from 15-20 minutes to 7-8 minutes, leading to faster iteration on features and bug fixes.
  • Internal knowledge base at work: Can reference all of our codebase whenever support issues or bugs come in, or for investigating new features.
  • Self-hosted video recording: Had a bug preventing the proprietary software I paid for from reliably saving videos. Cancelled that subscription and had Claude deploy and set up a self-hosted version AND fix some of its bugs.
  • And many more little things not even worth mentioning

I think with AI where it is today, we can remove all kinds of friction that gets in the way of doing whatever actual work we’re trying to accomplish. I don’t believe it’s a supplement to that work (though it can be in certain aspects like the actual writing of code for software engineering). What I’m talking about automating isn’t even the “hard” parts. It’s the parts that make me think about something that will suck, be time-consuming, or use mental energy for a task I find mundane in the first place.

I’m sure there are cases where you may not want to remove friction. Decisions you really need to think about for a long time. Thoughtful and intentional actions. These aren’t the friction tasks I’m talking about automating away or removing. Thinking is probably the most important meaningful thing we can do in this day and age. But dreading a phone call with the cell phone provider? Fixing some random annoying thing that frustrates you? These require no thinking at all. In fact, thinking is exactly what’s getting in the way of doing them.

As I work through this year removing friction wherever I can, I’ll be evaluating my own product, Maple AI, and all the times I reach for Claude or ChatGPT instead. Don’t get me wrong, I use Maple a lot, but it currently doesn’t handle most of my AI requests and I want to fix that.

Remove friction where you can. Or have AI do it. The point is: don’t let friction get in the way of the actual results or meaningful work you care about.