The painter doesn't do their work so they can spend an hour setting up the easel. The musician doesn't book studio time to troubleshoot cables. The setup is necessary—but it is not the work. And the brain that handles logistics is not the brain that makes art. Literally different parts firing.

Most people massively underestimate what context switching actually costs. It's taken for granted—as if it's totally fine to interrupt your flow to quickly fix a technical issue, answer an email, fiddle with a setting. But the cost is steep, and it's mostly invisible until it's too late.

the mansion problem

Imagine your headspace as a giant mansion. Creative tasks live in the west wing. Administrative tasks live in the east wing. A long corridor separates them.

Every time you switch between creative and administrative work, you're sprinting from one wing to the other. When your energy is high, you barely notice the cost. You jump up, run across, sit down, knock something out, run back. Feels productive. Feels invigorating, even.

But the fatigue is accumulating whether you feel it or not. After enough sprints, it hits all at once. Your brain starts to shut down—not gradually, but like hitting a wall. The longer you can stay in one wing, the higher the probability of doing your best work. Every crossing costs more than you think.

This is why attention doesn't parallelize. Your brain needs time to settle into a focused state. That's the whole premise behind techniques like Pomodoro—25 minutes of focus, short break, repeat. But the real leverage is in bundling those blocks into sustained creative sessions. Not scattered 25-minute sprints across different wings of the mansion. Dedicated, uninterrupted hours in one place.

Worth acknowledging: not all work needs to be deep work. I've been on both sides. On the product side, engineers are famous for needing focused blocks—they want fewer interruptions because context switching is genuinely destructive to their output. On the go-to-market side, it's almost the opposite. Reactivity and speed—the ability to respond to something almost immediately—is valued more than any single deep session. Bouncing from deal to deal, customer to customer, putting out fires. It's its own kind of distributed focus. Deals get done that way.

So maybe deep focus isn't the only kind. But what I'm talking about here is building things—creative output, systems, long-form projects. For tasks that require continuity, the deep focus approach is critical.

front-load the friction

Professional recording studios figured this out long ago. When a band books a multi-day session, half of the first day is dedicated to setup. Mic placement, sound checks, signal routing, room treatment. All of it, up front. So that when the musicians walk in the next morning, they can simply play.

That separation isn't accidental. It's architectural. It protects the creative space from logistical contamination.

If it's too rushed—if you try to do the setup and the creativity on the same day—you risk compromising the session. You can't say "all right, go play your best" when the engine is cold. You need to let it warm up. Let the mood emerge naturally.

The creative mind is not a light switch. It operates on curves—slowly ramping up, cruising at altitude, then gradually descending. You need warm-up time. You need room to breathe into the work. If you're constantly interrupted by technical problems, you never reach altitude. You spend the whole session taxiing on the runway.

Every day is its own bell curve. Your job is to give yourself as much room at the top as possible. That means front-loading the logistics. Segment your admin into dedicated blocks so the creative blocks stay clean. Change is expensive, momentum is free—and nothing kills momentum faster than a context switch you didn't budget for.

Of course, life doesn't fit neatly into platonic ideals. You need some flexibility—like a bridge that sways in an earthquake instead of rigid concrete that collapses. The principle isn't perfection. It's architecture. Front-load what you can, protect the creative space, and give yourself grace when reality doesn't cooperate.

friction is a product principle

This applies beyond personal workflow. When you're building something for other people, friction reduction is the product.

Think about taxis before Uber. You'd have to hope a cab was outside, or call ahead and wonder if they'd actually show. No brand recognition in a new town—every city had its own agencies, none known to you. Price uncertainty everywhere because of knowledge asymmetry: the driver could take you all around the city and rack up a fare, and you wouldn't know any better, especially before Google Maps. Then there's payment—cash only, fishing for bills, no receipts. A massive amount of logistical and psychological friction just to get from point A to point B.

Now contrast that with Uber. Full visibility into who's picking you up, what car, their ETA, how long the ride will take. Price locked in beforehand. A global brand you can trust almost anywhere. And if something goes wrong, there's a company behind it—a brand with something to lose. That accountability creates trust.

Trust is a friction reducer. Think about a friend who says "I'll pay you later." If you know they're good for it, there's zero friction. No logistics to sort out—it's just not a big deal. But if a stranger at a restaurant says the same thing? Total friction. Maybe the police get called. Trust eliminates the overhead. A brand simulates that trust at scale.

Every convenience in the Uber experience is a friction that was deliberately removed. The compounding effect of removing all of them is why people use it again and again. Friction is just another word for problem. When you eliminate problems for people, they pay. When you make it invisible—click a button, problem solved—that's entrepreneurship.

when friction drops, new things become possible

Here's what excites me most about where we are right now. When friction decreases, the set of things that are possible expands. Not theoretically possible—practically possible. Things that were previously infeasible because they took too much energy, too much setup, too much specialized knowledge are suddenly within reach.

This is maybe the most important aspect of the AI revolution. Large language models can handle non-deterministic decision trees that used to require either human judgment or rigid programmatic scripts. The friction required to build applications has dropped so dramatically that whole new categories of tools can exist—and not just for engineers. Pretty much anybody with a vibe coding tool can build their own personal applications. A restaurant recommender, a travel blog, a workout app. The barrier is nearly gone.

My entire way of traveling has changed. I used to collect friends' recommendations in scattered Google Docs that were impossible to reference with bad reception abroad. Now I can paste everything into an LLM, get summaries, craft itineraries, even spin up a web page to share and reference later. When I forget the name of a place, I just check the page. When I travel somewhere new, the whole process repeats in minutes.

I built a system with AI tools that takes my raw travel videos, randomly slices them together with fades and captions, and generates narrations in my own voice. A single video used to take me one to two hours to edit—assuming I could even get the editing software to cooperate. Now a script produces 20 videos in 15 minutes of processing time and zero cognitive effort.

Here's a hot take: not all learning is good. If I had all the time in the world, I'd go to Harvard Business School, get a PhD in philosophy from Stanford, study economics at Oxford. I'd do all of it. But life is short, energy is limited, and time is precious. It doesn't make sense for me to learn professional video editing software—a tool for full-time editors—just to make a little travel montage twice a year. The friction of learning it, forgetting it, relearning it, dealing with software updates, troubleshooting some new incompatibility. None of that is worth the time. But the projects themselves? Those are worth doing. That's the gap these tools fill.

These aren't earth-shattering projects. They're personal, maybe even silly. But that's exactly the point. They were previously infeasible—not because the technology didn't exist, but because the friction made them not worth the time. Those barriers are gone now.

The common criticism—"AI shouldn't replace us"—misses the point entirely. The winners aren't replacing themselves. They're augmenting themselves. Human direction, AI power. Like wearing a mech suit. The amount of friction these tools eliminate is still almost unfathomable to most people.

not all friction is bad

But here's the important distinction: I'm not saying make everything easy. I actually value the relationship between humans and struggle. Besides it being inevitable, struggle is a key part of the human experience. It is a vehicle for growth. When a body stops moving, muscles melt away. When it stops straining, it atrophies. It is actually unhealthy for the body not to exert itself—whether through cardio, lifting, running, whatever the mechanism. Challenge is not the enemy.

Unnecessary friction is the enemy. There's a critical difference.

A better life isn't defined by fewer problems—it's defined by better problems. You may start out in poverty with nothing to eat. That is a problem, a suffering. When you are rich, perhaps you can eat any meal you want—no friction at all. But you'll have new problems. Maybe you're getting fat from abundance. To flatten that and say "everybody has problems, so everyone's suffering is equal" is naive. The problem of having too much food is a far better problem than not being able to afford a meal. Much better to have an elevated set of problems.

When you eliminate unnecessary friction, you don't arrive at ease. You arrive at a higher tier of challenges worth solving. You trade the friction of figuring out video editing software for the friction of deciding what story to tell. You trade the friction of managing logistics for the friction of deepening your craft.

If you can eliminate an unnecessary friction for somebody else, you have a product. If you can eliminate it for yourself, you have momentum. Either way, you've leveled up.

the entry point

I'm dictating this post while walking through Battersea Power Station. Many writers would say this isn't writing. And maybe they're right—it's not the craft of writing. But it might be authorship. Original thought, captured on the move, shaped into form.

I'm not claiming to be a writer in the craftsman sense. But I know what it's like to be an artist—I've been a musician all my life, trained at a conservatory level, put in my time. I deeply understand the experience of becoming a craftsperson who values their work and their integrity. With writing, though, I'm not claiming the craft. I'm claiming the authorship. And my philosophy is that the original thought matters more than the medium it arrives through.

Authors have always had intermediaries. Barack Obama is an author, not necessarily a writer—but I can almost guarantee The Audacity of Hope had ghostwriters. Hans Zimmer, one of the most famous composers alive, has writers for his scores. Business leaders on Instagram and TikTok aren't learning to be influencers—they have teams that take a quick video and polish it for the medium. For all of them, what matters is the original thought. The craft is the vehicle, not the destination.

Bahá'u'lláh, the prophet of the Bahá'í faith, dictated to an amanuensis who captured his words. We call them his writings, not his dictations. His authorship is still valid. Still powerful.

That doesn't mean the craft shouldn't be the end for some artisans. But if writing isn't your primary craft—if your objective is sharing original thought—then perhaps it doesn't need to take a certain form or require a certain process to be valid.

This post is its own proof of concept. The friction of sitting down, opening a laptop, and writing from scratch used to be the only entry point. Now there are others. And the more entry points that exist, the more people create. The more people create, the more original thought enters the world.

Change your relationship to friction. It will always be there—but we live in an age where so much of it can be reduced or removed. Your task is to identify it, resolve it, and gain momentum. Solve the friction of others, and you have something worth building. Solve it for yourself, and you're free to do the work that actually matters.