Friction vs. Features

Posted by Cyganet
Mar 17, 2023 at 12:47 PM

I agree with Satis that frictionless means making it easy to quickly get things down. For me, the most frictionless app for capturing ideas is Freemind (on Windows). Even its fork Freeplane has more friction (although I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why). Freemind has the perfect combination of keyboard shortcuts and responsiveness to be able to write things down at my speed of thought.

Another frictionless app (on mobile) is Logseq, which I use for journaling. Just open it and write at the bullet. I don’t try to do lots of organising afterwards, although Logseq does have that power I haven’t climbed the learning curve there yet. I previously used Simplenote in that way, but found its tag-only organisation of notes cumbersome and it lacks the features that are the second half of Steve’s question.

At the other end of the spectrum: Notion. Great features, extremely slow and too many clicks to get anything down. So I use it sparingly for specific use cases only.

Then there is your familiarity with the application as a source of friction reduction. I tried out My Life Organized and found it very difficult to navigate. I’m used to InfoQube, and it’s less friction for me because I know how to use InfoQube. That won’t apply if your familiarity is the other way around.