Finding a balance between offline friction and convenience

If two things result in approximately the same outcome, there is a one hundred percent chance that ninety nine percent of people will choose the more convenient one. People prefer convenience over friction, because the benefits of convenience are apparent right now, but the benefits of friction are not obvious in the short term, and often not at all.

At home, we have a collection of vinyls and cds belonging to my parents. Whenever i put one on, my mother can talk in depth about the period of her life when the album came out, because the music triggers the memories, because she would buy one album and listen to it almost non-stop until she bought the next one. Now, it is more convenient to use a streaming service, and to make playlists from our favourite songs across albums, so we have much less of this anchoring that a single or an album could give us.

One thing that has provided a lot of convenience is the internet, and most people always have a web browser open, which results in us using a web browser even if there are other ways of doing a task that may be better, or faster. This is an example of the supposedly more convenient solution perhaps not being so convenient.

On my computer, i have krunner, which i can access with a keyboard shortcut. Similar to spotlight on macos, it allows me to perform calculations, currency conversions, search for files, and so on. I’ve been making an attempt to use this feature more, rather than relying on my browser for that.

These aren’t even things that benefit from being done in a browser; the browser is always there, but so is krunner, and it doesn’t have to make any round trips. I have a dictionary in emacs, and i still head to the browser to define a word. Why? It’s become an engrained habit.