Avni Patel Thompson

Well, Milo can just connect directly to your inbox and suck every last one up so you never have to see another one again.

As we fleshed these features out, though, something just didn't feel right.

But I couldn't figure out what it was.

After all, I was looking for friction and finding ways to eliminate it.

But something just didn't feel right.

What was it?

That question nagged me for weeks, until one evening, my daughter Saya ran into the kitchen to show me something she had made in art class.

And as I ran my fingers over those tiny clay pieces, it hit me.

Not all friction is bad.

You might know, to connect two of these clay pieces together, you actually have to score each side haphazardly so that they have something to grip onto.

Otherwise, the smooth sides just slide past one another.

This resistance is called productive friction, and it's valuable because it creates connection.

And where people are involved, there's lots of productive friction, meaningful interactions disguised as inefficiencies.

I didn't need a perfectly solid force field.

I needed a permeable one instead, one that shielded me from the things that I found unproductive but let in the fewer, messier, more meaningful ones for me to handle.

Milo could find three times that worked for the play date, but I could text Carrie, which would give me a chance to ask her about her mother.

Or Milo could comb through every last detail of that school newsletter, picking out details that my eyes might miss, but leave for me on top Miss V's note about how our daughter Aria's creative writing has really been blossoming.

You might draw your line in a different place, and that's okay, and I might draw mine differently under different circumstances.

In a week when my husband is traveling and our nanny is sick, the girls have tennis tryouts and I have a product launch, I want Milo to build me a force field you could see from space.

But I guess the point is, we finally have the kind of technology that can tell the difference between load that we need help lightening and work that is hard, but that is mine to do.