I keep my phone next to my bed for when I wake up with ideas. Except I don't actually capture them.
Because when I unlock my phone to open the notes app, I see notifications. Email. Messages. Twitter. By the time I've scrolled through everything, I've forgotten what I wanted to write down.
Or I do remember, but opening the notes app means scrolling through hundreds of random notes trying to find where this idea should go. So I just don't write it down.
Last month I put a notes widget on my lock screen. Now I can write ideas without unlocking my phone. No notifications. No distractions. Just tap and type.
That's a stupid small change. But it's the difference between capturing dozens of ideas and losing all of them.
This is what I mean by friction.
You're Not Fighting Yourself
Most productivity advice assumes your problem is willpower. Just try harder. Be more disciplined. Wake up at 5am and attack the day.
That's nonsense.
I've watched people spend thousands of dollars on courses about discipline and habits and mindset. Then they go back to environments designed to make them fail.
You can't willpower your way out of a high-friction environment. It doesn't work. I know because I tried for years.
Here's what actually works: designing your life so the things you want to do are easy, and the things you don't want to do are hard.
This isn't a new idea. Behavioral economists have been studying it since the 1970s. They call it choice architecture.
But almost nobody applies it to their own life.
Choice Architecture (Without the Academic Nonsense)
Choice architecture is just a fancy way of saying: your environment shapes your decisions more than you think.
Companies know this. That's why the healthy food is on the top shelf at eye level in corporate cafeterias, and the cookies are in the back. That's why your email inbox has a red notification badge that makes your brain itch until you check it.
They're designing environments that make certain choices easier and others harder.
You can do the same thing for yourself.
Example: I used to waste 15 minutes every morning deciding what to wear. Not because I care about fashion. Because I'd stand there looking at my closet thinking "Is this too casual? Too formal? Did I wear this yesterday?"
So I bought five identical black t-shirts and three pairs of identical jeans. Now I don't decide. I just grab whatever's clean.
Saved me 90 hours a year. That's more than two full work weeks.
The problem isn't that you lack discipline. The problem is that you're using discipline to fight friction that shouldn't exist in the first place.
What Is Friction, Actually?
Let me define this clearly: friction is anything that makes it harder to do what you want to do.
Physical friction: The gym is 30 minutes away, so you don't go as often.
Time friction: Setting up your development environment takes 20 minutes, so you put off starting projects.
Decision friction: You have 47 browser tabs open and can't remember which one has the document you need.
Mental friction: Your desk faces a window and you spend half your work time staring outside instead of focusing.
All of these drain energy. And the insidious part is you don't notice them until you fix them.
I had a client who wanted me to automate their invoice process. Took me an hour to build. Saves them 3 hours a week. That's 156 hours a year they were losing to a problem that took 60 minutes to solve.
But they lived with it for two years because "it's not that bad."
That's friction. It's not catastrophic. It's just there, slowly making everything harder.
How I Actually Do This
Every few months I do what I call a friction audit. It's embarrassingly simple.
I spend an hour listing every annoying thing in my life. Then I fix as many as possible, starting with the easiest ones first.
The framework comes from rationalist blogs and behavioral economics, but I'm going to give you the practical version without the theory.
Here's how it works:
Step 1: Spend 30 minutes listing friction points in your life. Just brain dump everything that annoys you, slows you down, or makes you avoid things you want to do.
Step 2: Put these in a spreadsheet. Add a "difficulty" column and rate each one from 1-10. (1 = could fix right now, 10 = requires months of work or tons of money)
Step 3: Sort by difficulty and start fixing things, easiest first.
That's it. No complicated system. No app required.
The key insight is that solving easy friction makes the hard friction easier to solve. If you're spending zero energy on small annoyances, you have more energy for big problems.
Why This Actually Works
The magic isn't in any individual fix. It's cumulative.
Each small friction point you remove gives you back a little bit of energy and time. Remove 20 of them and suddenly you have hours of time and tons of mental space you didn't have before.
I tracked this. Before my last friction audit, I spent roughly 90 minutes per day on annoying small tasks and decisions. After fixing the easy stuff, it's down to about 30 minutes.
That's 7 hours per week. That's 365 hours per year. That's nine full work weeks I got back by spending one afternoon making a list.
The other thing is momentum. Once you start fixing friction, you notice more friction. And you get better at solving it quickly.
Do This Today
You don't need to do a full audit right now. Just fix one thing.
Pick the most annoying small problem in your life and solve it today. Shouldn't take more than 20 minutes or $50.
Then tomorrow, fix another one.
In a month you'll have fixed 30 problems. In three months, 90.
Your life will be dramatically different.
Not because you developed incredible willpower or discipline. Because you designed an environment where doing the right thing is easy.
That's it. That's the whole thing.