Designing Friction: Where to Add It, Where to Remove It

We'd entered a new stage with our youngest where responsible screen use wasn't quite working, so I went into the iPad settings and set up app limits, a hard one-hour cap, plus downtime blocking screens between certain hours. I felt accomplished. Then in the middle of the night he got up, grabbed the iPad, and still played three games. I'd missed the button that ties a passcode to the screen settings, so he'd just been pressing ignore. I fought it for about an hour, forcing syncs, toggling things, restarting, until I gave up and left it overnight. The settings refreshed on their own and finally took effect. The next morning the kids asked why this iPad was so restrictive when the other one let them press ignore. I thought they had the same settings. They didn't.Digital agency was never about trusting yourself or your kids to have perfect willpower, that's not realistic. It's about building a system that forces a pause, a moment to ask do I actually want this. The win isn't the rule, it's the friction itself. That same week, I was doing the opposite everywhere else, removing friction from grant research, a sourdough side income idea, and a messy database, to make it easier to move toward the things I actually wanted to grow. This week's Tessera: Add friction to one thing you're doing too much of, and remove friction from one thing you want to do more of.Read the companion article at https://tesseros.com/tessory-e5-where-to-add-remove-itTimestamps:00:45 Friction and the iPad permissions fight03:15 Opening up creativity in the kitchen05:35 Using AI for grant research and a Notion database08:35 This week's friction audit challenge