Friction is why your good intentions don't stick
On a finished journal, an over-engineered system, and the thing that's quietly killing your consistency
I just finished my third journal. Front to back. 250ish pages per book.
Seven months. One Leuchtturm A5. Almost no missed days. When I held the finished book, I noticed something I hadn’t let myself fully acknowledge before: many previous journals didn’t make it to the last page. They trailed off somewhere in the middle, sometimes only a few pages in, casualties of a system that had gotten too complicated to maintain.
This latest one was different. Not because I tried harder. Because I stopped trying to do it right.
In previous journals I drew out sections on every page with a ruler. I had layouts, templates, trackers. It looked impressive. It was genuinely useful for a while. But every time I sat down to write I had to set things up before I could begin. And that setup, small as it sounds, was enough friction to make skipping feel easier than starting.
This time I kept it to two things: a couple of top-level tasks for the day and then whatever I wanted to write about. No rulers. No sections. No pressure to make it clean. Just show up to the page and write.
Seven months later another journal is full.
I’ve been thinking about friction a lot since then, not just in journaling but everywhere. Friction is the silent killer of good intentions. Not lack of motivation. Not lack of discipline. The extra step. The setup required before you can begin. The bar that has to be cleared just to get started.
The cruel irony is that the people most likely to introduce friction are the ones who care most about doing something well. A few years ago I built what I’d genuinely call a second brain in Notion. A custom CRM for my entire life, both personal and business. There’s nothing like it available anywhere. It was sophisticated, comprehensive, and actually remarkable in what it could do.
It also required too much time to keep updated. I’d have to parse things from memory later and enter them manually. That gap between the moment something happened and when I could record it introduced enough friction that I’d end up not recording it at all. A system I’d spent months building sat mostly unused because maintaining it cost more than using it was worth.
The system became the work instead of supporting the work.
I can see what would finally solve it. AI that lets me speak notes into an app and have them stored and organized automatically. But I’m not ready to build that yet because I know myself well enough to know I’d go down the rabbit hole of adding functionality until it was too complicated again. So I’m waiting. Choosing the simpler version that actually gets used over the impressive version that doesn’t.
That’s a hard thing to choose when you’re capable of building something better. But consistency almost always beats sophistication in the long run. The journal that gets written in every day is more valuable than the perfect journaling system that sits unused.
The question I keep coming back to isn’t how do I get more motivated or more disciplined. It’s simpler and more uncomfortable than that.
What am I making harder than it needs to be?
Is there something in your life right now that you keep abandoning, not because you don’t care about it, but because you’ve made it too complicated to sustain?
Reply and tell me what it is. One sentence is enough.