I could have bought a machine that makes espresso at the push of one button.

Instead, I bought a grinder, a scale, and a little tool that looks like a miniature rake.

Every morning I weigh the beans, grind them, rake the grounds flat, tamp, and watch the shot pull. Four minutes of fiddling for a coffee I could have had in fifteen seconds.

The fiddling is the point.

Apparently this has a name now, and the name is friction-maxxing.

I know. It started as a parenting idea, from writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton, who described it as building a tolerance for inconvenience and then reaching toward enjoyment.

Then it escaped into interiors.

There's nowhere in the house left to switch off

Walk through your rooms and count the screens with a job. A TV in the living room. A tablet propped against the splashback with a recipe on it. A phone on the nightstand. Lights that come on when you ask them to.

We’re constantly ‘online,’ and there's nowhere left where your brain fully clocks off.

Effort is what makes you decide. Take the effort away, and the thing just happens on its own.

That's how an evening disappears into the TV (or doomscrolling) without you ever choosing to watch anything in particular.

Putting effort back sounds counterintuitive. In practice, it makes a room calmer and more deliberate.

The bedroom is where that costs you the most, because it's the room you were supposed to be switching off in.

Most bedrooms have a TV on one wall and a phone charging on the nightstand, doubling as the alarm clock. It's the last thing you look at before sleep and the first thing you reach for in the morning.

Take the TV out. Charge the phone in the kitchen. Buy a cheap analogue alarm clock (a sentence I did not expect to write in 2026).

Leave the nightstand free of devices and fall asleep with a book (or music) instead.

Photo by Timothy Kaye

None of that is a willpower problem. Where the power points sit and whether the bed faces a screen are layout decisions.

If you're doing it by hand, make the hand part good

Take the screens and the voice commands out, and you get your hands back on things. Switches you flick. Taps you turn. A door you open twenty times a day.

That's when the quality of the thing starts to matter. A brass switch plate has a small, satisfying click to it. A solid timber handle has weight. Good tapware turns smoothly and stops exactly where it should.

Put the money where your hands go. It's also the cheapest way to improve a home you can't renovate.

Swapping switch plates and handles takes an afternoon and no trade, and a cheap handle feels cheap every time you use it, which is a strange thing to pay for when the better one costs forty dollars more.

Some people are coating their bedroom walls in EMF-blocking paint and lining the place with copper mesh to keep the wifi out.

You don't need to go that far. Choosing to make the coffee. Choosing to pick up the book. Getting something out of those minutes instead of letting the day run on autopilot.

What you get back is a room where you can be bored. Where you can finish a thought. Where a conversation isn't competing with a screen on the wall.

None of it is dramatic, and it doesn't need to be. Most good days are built out of small things you actually noticed.

Cheers,

Reynard