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One of the paradoxes of modern workplaces is that the more technology tries to remove friction, the more inefficient it becomes.
Take email for example, the technology that’s arguably most changed how we work. When it first arrived, the premise of email was to make communicating with others more efficient. Instead of writing a letter, picking up the phone, or meeting someone in person, we could instantly message anyone in the world.
It didn’t take long for the trickle of emails to become a tsunami, which then necessitated more technology to help us handle it all. Now AI suggests automatic responses in an attempt to deal with the deluge.
You could repeat this evolution for every technology we use. From drafting reports to designing slides, scheduling appointments to meeting colleagues, technology has been so relentless at removing friction from our lives that they’ve ended up also removing all the natural pauses we need at work to stop, assess and think.
Don’t get me wrong here, there is workplace technology that saves hours of boring work. Do you remember how laborious it was to reimburse expenses before they had an app for that? Or track timesheets manually?
The idea of deliberately choosing to do a task the hard way may seem counter-intuitive, but there are tangible benefits.
But there’s a backlash brewing to smoothing out every single aspect of our work. ‘Friction-maxxing’ is a very 2026 trend that consciously fights against the desire to remove friction to intentionally add it back in.
The ‘maxxing’ term originated in the dark corners of the internet to refer to maximising your status, and gained some problematic popularity with Gen Zs on social media to describe optimising areas of your life from your appearance (looksmaxxing) to your body (gymmaxxing) and even how long you sleep (sleepmaxxing). It makes sense that it would eventually reach older workers now via friction-maxxing.
In the workplace this means intentionally choosing to do certain things yourself because you still get value from it. It might be reading a full report instead of asking for AI summaries, drafting your resume, or spending time fiddling around with Excel cells so you understand every input and output of financial data.
I regularly interview people around the world for my books, newsletter and columns. For most of my career I would record and manually transcribe every interview by listening back to them, one painstaking word at a time.
Automatic transcription saved me hours a week, but even today I find myself purposefully ‘friction-maxxing’ at times. After a critical interview, if I want to savour and process each word, I sometimes revert to transcribing it myself. This gives me precious time to pause and think after every few sentences, ensuring I understand every nuance.
Now, I know that on the surface the idea of deliberately choosing to do a task the hard way may seem counter-intuitive, but there are tangible benefits to adding challenge and inconvenience to your work.
The very process of ‘doing’ slows you down to increase your retention, and improve your critical thinking and decision-making abilities. It’s not about reflexively resisting AI, but being active with your choices on when you do and don’t engage it.
So, here’s a “friction-maxx” challenge for you this week. I want you to look at your to-do list, and choose one task that you would normally outsource to your computer for convenience.
It could be reviewing some material, crafting a first draft of a strategy document, or refining a new process. Block out some time, take out a pen and do it manually first to maximise the friction.
Yes, I know, it won’t be a pretty or as perfect as a computers’ first draft, but it will be imperfectly human and that’s the entire point.
Tim Duggan is author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com
Tim Duggan is the author of Work Backwards, Cult Status and Killer Thinking. He co-founded Junkee Media and writes a monthly newsletter called OUTLET.From our partners
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