The blank page is unpleasant. That is not a design flaw of writing, it is the mechanism.
You stare at it because you don't yet know what you think. The staring isn't wasted time before the work. It is the work. What comes out the other side is not just a document, it is a person who now holds a view they did not hold an hour ago.
We have built a tool that removes that discomfort entirely, and I use it constantly, and I think we should be honest about what that costs.
What friction was doing
Friction has a bad reputation in technology. The whole industry is organized around removing it, and mostly that's good. Nobody needs the friction of a fax machine.
But not all friction is waste. Some of it is load-bearing.
The effort of writing something forces you to find out whether you actually understand it. The awkwardness of a hard conversation is what makes you choose your words. The difficulty of building a thing is what teaches you how the thing works.
Remove the friction and you keep the output. You lose the formation.
For a lot of tasks that trade is obviously correct. I don't need to be formed by manually copying numbers out of a PDF. Take that entirely.
For others it isn't obvious at all, and the danger is that the tool does not distinguish. It will remove the friction from the tasks that were making you and the tasks that were wasting you with exactly the same enthusiasm.
The muscle metaphor, honestly
If you never stare at the blank page, you lose creative muscle. I believe that, and I want to be careful not to overclaim it, because I cannot point you to a study and I'm not going to invent one.
What I can tell you is what I have observed in myself.
There are pieces of work I have handed to AI that I should have sat with. Not because the output was bad. It was fine. But I noticed afterward that I didn't know the material. I had a document and no understanding, and later, when someone asked me a question about it, I had nothing underneath the answer.
That is a small failure and an instructive one. The artifact and the understanding used to arrive together. Now they can be separated, and you can end up holding the wrong one.
Which struggles are worth keeping
This is the actual question, and it does not have a general answer. It has your answer, which you have to work out for your own work.
A rough test I use: would I want to be better at this in a year?
If yes, do it myself, at least sometimes. That is a skill I'm claiming to have, and skills decay when they aren't exercised.
If no, automate it without guilt. I don't aspire to be better at reformatting spreadsheets. There is no version of me that's more useful to anyone because I got faster at that.
The trap is that the two categories feel identical in the moment. Both are just tasks in front of you on a Tuesday. The difference only shows up over years, which is exactly the timescale on which nobody is paying attention.
Not an argument for doing things the hard way
I want to be clear, because this can curdle into nostalgia and nostalgia is useless.
I am not saying use fewer tools. I am not saying there's virtue in slowness for its own sake. Most of the friction that existed in work five years ago was pure waste and I'm glad to be rid of it.
I am saying the removal should be a decision rather than a default. Every time something gets easier, someone should ask what that ease is costing and whether it's worth it. Usually it is. Sometimes it isn't. The problem isn't the answer, it is that the question mostly doesn't get asked.
The part I keep relearning
The struggle is where the growth happens is the kind of sentence that sounds like a motivational poster, and I resisted using it for a while for exactly that reason.
But I keep running into it as a plain description of how I've learned anything. The things I actually know, I know because at some point I didn't know them and had to sit in that until it resolved.
There is now a button that skips that part. It is a genuinely good button and I press it many times a day.
Worth knowing which door it is skipping, though. Some of them you wanted to walk through.