Happy Sunday friends, I hope everyone has been enjoying the World Cup! ⚽
📣 Quick announcement before we get started: I recently released my first ever digital product, The Emergency Medicine Resident Starter Kit 🚑! I created this product to help EM residents succeed in residency ✅, and you can read all about it (and receive a special discount!) here.
Now let's get to rounding 🩺.
Recently on my way home from shift I was listening to a podcast 📻 (as I usually do) when I heard a term that was brand new to me: Frictionmaxxing.
I don't care for most of the "-maxxing" terms being thrown around nowadays 🙄, but this one left an impression.
Frictionmaxxing is the intentional practice of choosing inconvenience or friction in our work rather than hyper-efficient processes.
People opt for frictionmaxxing to regain control over their work 🧭, their attention span ⏳, and the sheer satisfaction of doing things "the old way" 💾.
If you've been reading my content for a while, you know I'm a big fan of productivity and optimization ⚡. Sometimes though, it's nice to be yanked out of that 🫨. I had a similar experience when I read the book Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman and had all my thoughts on productivity upended 🙃. You can check out some of my insights from that in my book notes 📚.
Frictionmaxxing offers us a different path to reach the same destination 🛣️. Here are some examples of frictionmaxxing:
- A medical student taking handwritten notes instead of typing them up ✏️
- Cooking a meal using a physical cookbook rather than the internet 🍲
- Parking at the back of the hospital parking lot to walk further 🚗
Not everything can (or should) be optimized. Some students love the joy they get out of creating personalized, aesthetic notes in medical school ✨. Parking further away from the hospital might seem tedious, but it also means getting more steps in and more time to mentally prepare for shift 🚶♂️.
If you read one of those examples and cringed a little bit, I get it 🙋🏽♂️. Like me, you might also be the type of person who is always searching for optimization with the hope that it will make a process better and your life easier ☑️. But what might happen if you just...didn't? What happens if you find one small task and decide to add some friction to it? 🤔
While the term frictionmaxxing was a new one for me, I've quickly realized it's something I already do 💡. Although I do listen to many audiobooks, I always make it a point that I have a physical book to read 📕. I love feeling the book in my hands and the almost "retro" idea of literally curling up with a good book. I guess I was frictionmaxxing before it was cool 😎.
I plan on trying out frictionmaxxing in other facets of my life in the coming weeks and I hope you consider it too. Who knows what hidden wonders we might discover out of a little bit of inconvenience!
🩷 Something I love: I've been really into Saint James Iced Tea lately as a low sugar, low calorie coffee substitution for energy!
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