Friction As The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Super Flow & No Procrastination
Friction will make or break you! Procrastination causes inconsistency in our work and it makes us feel like we might not have what it takes to succeed.
In this article, we’re going to dive into the concept of friction—what it is and how to get rid of it, as well as how to use it as a beneficial tool to be more productive in every aspect of your life. How friction can cause us to procrastinate or to avoid bad habits. Let’s identify the three main types of friction in your life:
Friction as The Bad, The Good and The Ugly.
By doing so, you’ll free up more time, energy, and focus, making it easier for you to consistently get into the flow state and enjoy smoother, more productive days.
- The Real Key to Behavioral Change Is Automaticity
- Engineer Your Life to Be Your Own Master
- Defining Friction
- Friction as The Bad
- Be Smooth & Allow Yourself to Flow. Win At Life!
- Friction as The Good
- Friction as The Ugly
- Achieving Super Flow Powers
1. The Real Keys to Behavioral Change is Automaticity
Procrastination is often a lack of clarity. With no clear path we tend to over think and try to make the “perfect plan” in our mind before taking the first step.
If you want to change your life, you have to change your behavior. To change your behavior you have to proactively systemize your life. The key to building willpower and discipline and access it on call is to not rely on them. Because eventually the will power of your bad habits will win.
Your will power and discipline are last resource tools.
When you customize everything the discipline and will power come naturally. No more forcing things and hence no more need to be disciplined or the need to use your willpower.
Procrastination is a sign of areas needing improvement.
The mindset shift that we want to have is:
- Behavioral Engineering is superior to willpower.
- Environmental design is superior to discipline.
- Flow trumps brute force.
- Habit and automaticity trumps conscious effort.
Will power, discipline, brute force, conscious effort are our backups. We want to be pulled and not have to push through things.
The more automatic our life is, the more freedom we will gain. We will inevitably hit moments of fatigue, laziness, and often moments of desire to self sabotage.
Yet, even in our weakest moments our high systemized life still brings us something positive. Because we have trained our brain and behavior to automatically enter into a trance of automaticity based on our design environment that our conscious has come to understand very well.
Engineer Your Life To Be Your Own Master
We must create a life where we always desire and live a life of progress and results.
When we are centered, and we have created a life and environment of superflow and automaticity it allows our lower selves, our weaker selves who want to procrastinate or self sabotage to automatically enter into flow and let our higher self take over.
We are able to recognize the feelings, state of mind and emotions that lead us to an undesired path and we are able to almost automatically self correct.
When we understand ourselves we are able to use our higher self to design an environment in which our lower self can still perform optimally.
Ultimately, we’re becoming our own puppet masters. Designing life for ourselves from our higher self to protect our inevitable lower self.
And over time, what we can do is consciously engineer the results we want through architecting this environment and doing so in acknowledgement of the fact that we are creatures of habit.
Defining Friction
Friction is the resource we have to expand to execute an action.
Friction at least in most cases is the enemy
It’s easier to push a rock over a slippery surface than over sandpaper. Friction is that sandpaper and it shows up everywhere in your life.
Friction shows up in all aspects of your environment that slow down your ability to execute, to make decisions, to move forward and to progress.
Friction causes:
- Wasted energy
- It costs you time
- It slows you down
- It causes overwhelm
- Derails your highest priority work
- And on the whole, it just reduces our quality of life.
Ask yourself this:
Why does it have to be hard? If it could be easier, what would it look like?
Effort will always be there, but don’t confuse effort with struggle.
We want to ruthlessly eliminate friction everywhere we possibly can. Because you can either try to push harder or lubricate the surface upon which you’re pushing.
But, there is only so much we can push, or do. There is only so much discipline you can exert. After that certain threshold, you are at the mercy of your environment.
And again, why would you want your life to be harder when we already have so much to deal with in our daily lives.
Want to workout more:
Set out your workout clothes, your shoes, and water bottles ahead of time.
Want to drink more water:
Keep a water bottle on your desk at all times.
Minimize your initial starting spark to cause a reaction and jump into action.
Friction As The Bad
Friction as The Bad. The higher the friction, the less likely we are to act.
The higher the friction in anything, the more activation energy required.
We want to look at all the high impact activities that we do in our daily life and we want to remove anything that causes friction.
We often question ourselves on why we lack the discipline to do what we want. We lack the discipline to go running, to go to the gym, to socialize.
But oftentimes is the friction in between each action that causes fatigue, procrastination and overwhelm before even taking the first step toward the action.
It’s about the small marginal adjustment of removing friction.
Want to go to the gym:
– Get a membership to the closest gym to you
– Have your gear ready by the door everyday
– Start by only going there for 30 minutes
– Stay consistent and improve based in what works for you
Each persona and mind is different but the small marginal adjustments combined with consistency will reward you with immense results faster than you thought possible.
Remember, remove friction between yourself and activities that you want to do more of.
Be Smooth and Allow Yourself To Flow. Win At Life!
We want to take inventory of our top winning behaviors and habits of our life. We want to improve and remove as much possible friction in these actions in order to achieve super flow.
Examples:
- Reading
Keep a book beside your bed at all times and keep the page you last finished reading marked easily and clearly. This way you can just pick up the book at any time, open it up and read.
Now, you can easily get to reading instead of having to go and pull out the book from the bookshelf, and have to find the page you last read, and have to find a comfortable place.
You want to make it as frictionless as possible.
- Working
We can reduce friction with work by having a nice work set up. A set up that’s open with a clear, clean desk and a desktop that stays on all the time so that we don’t have to pull the laptop out of a bag and set it up somewhere and try and get comfortable and then finally get onto work.
That activation energy, the friction between you and being well set up to type is going to just make you engage with your work less.
- Exercising
You want to make exercising as low friction as possible as you possibly can.
Buy home workout equipment or prep your gym gear the night before you want to wake up and go to the gym.
Make it so low friction that you sleepwalk your way into a workout.
- Hydrating
Get that bottle and keep it at your desk full at all times.
Friction as The Good
Now, friction could also be used as a tool when it comes to leveraging friction to stop negative behaviors. It’s actually remarkable how little friction is required to prevent unwanted behavior, and this is where having friction be present is actually a good thing.
Doing this action will help build long lasting habits and will help you avoid unwanted habits.
Setting up friction to stop yourself from doing things is super powerful.
For me, my biggest distractions that take away from my productivity is watching movies or scrolling social media.
After hard work and determination It now might not look like it because I don’t have any of the social media apps on my phone. And when I do, I usually uninstall the apps within 10-15 minutes of catching up on funny videos my brothers share with me. We usually watch them together and have a good time laughing about dumb random videos.
I know that I will waste time after and will just scroll for a long time with minimal benefit to me enjoying this wonderful life. If I’m not actually interacting with my friends there is no need and I rather interact with them in person and actually nurture the relationship by being truly present.
Find ways you can use friction as a good thing to change your habits, to improve your life in your finances, eating habits, T.V. and social media use.
Remember, put more friction between yourself and activities you want to avoid.
Friction as The Ugly
There are endless decisions and activities we have to tend to in our everyday life. It feels overwhelming and chaotic. One little thing after another stealing our time and attention.
Having to add to our to do list and we just don’t seem to catch a break. The spinning wheel and the rat race with no end goal just makes you question what is the point?
It’s the hustle of having to return the package from Amazon that was the wrong thing.
It’s the annoyance of having to repeatedly dig up an old file in your computer again and again and again.
It’s all of the annoying maintenance tasks that don’t actually move you forward or progress you in any real way. Doing dishes or cleaning or shopping or cooking.
It’s having to call up a customer service line and wait on hold for hours while you’re trying to interact with some painfully inefficient government agency.
It’s going back and forth over email to schedule a call across four different time zones.
It’s ultimately all of these random crappy distractions and slightly suboptimal processes that show up constantly everywhere in our life.
We Want To:
Take a super inventory of our life. We want to smooth out all the ruff edges, eliminate and fix our environment in every aspect of our life so that we can easily engage in winning behavior.
The friction that exists in all of the invisible systems and processes that are running in your life at any given time.
Ultimately we want to make our life sacred, fulfilling and peaceful by making our environment sacred. It will not always be perfect as our life changes or evolves and we adapt. But, it will bring enormous benefits to how we decide to live our life. It affects how we react and handle unexpected situations.
We eliminate, delegate or optimize our environment to have not the most minimalist life but to have the life we want to live.
We assign a certain time to an activity and we make it sacred by deciding it is.
We assign a place for our shoes, keys, water bottle and so on and make those spots a sacred discipline.
We do it everyday at the same time as consistently as possible until it no longer serves our purpose and we either achieve our desired goal or we have found a better, more optimized way.
It’s less about influencing a specific positive or negative behavior, and it’s more about the general functioning of your life.
All these habits and activities that we have unconsciously picked up damage our focus, flow and consistency. It causes you to do things that are not the highest and best use of your time that are suboptimal.
It damages your precious leverage. It reduces your output, and it causes you these little microbursts of stress and hassle and angst throughout the day.
Those little tiny things that we almost think of as too trivial to care about, those things add up.
When you add two or three or four of those things per hour across a day, it changes the flavor and feeling of a day from being fluid and effortless and frictionless to a day having all of these little micro hassles and micro frustrations.
Having to search for things, losing things, not keeping the same things in your pockets that you use everyday and having to spend more time than necessary gathering all your gear up every morning.
So, to solve this we want to aggressively, ruthlessly, incessantly eliminate these little micro inefficiencies from throughout our day and throughout our life.
The Benefit of Sacred Discipline
When life gets hard is when we tend to ignore all these little activities that take so much time and cause stress while reducing flow. But, these hard times are when we have to step back, center ourselves and take advantage of the little wins.
These little wins add up and help you see the light when unexpected hard times show up.
We want to torque every gear in our lives, lubricating all these little systems and processes to remove the friction and reach that state of flow and create a state of superfluidity in our life overall because this systemic friction impedes progress, it agitates us, frustrates us, it irritates us, it hassles us, it distracts us.
So we want to lube up the microprocesses in our lives. We want to lubricate it all across the board. We want to let no inefficiency escape and you want to allow yourself to feel okay optimizing these little things.
All these little things are okay to care about and optimize and improve because it does make a difference when you look at the cumulative effect.
Keep your gym bag pact at all times so that you can just pick up and go.
Have your clothes ready for the next morning
The small things matter because you can go and don’t have to worry about all these little micro hassles and enjoy as your overall day and life begins to feel more fluid as you begin to achieve this state of superfluidity where you don’t have to have all these little micro things dragging you down, spiking cortisol throughout the day.
Let’s achieve that frictionless way of being.
Achieving Superfluidity
Now, an action you can take to reduce friction and lubricate your life is to:
- Identify three ways you can use friction as a catalyst
By removing the activation energy between you and the positive exercise that you want to do.
- Identify three ways you can use friction as a deterrent
By using friction between and the negative things you don’t want to do.
- Identify five places you can eliminate systemic friction
Make up your life of little daily rituals where everything is automatic. Eliminate decision fatigue.
Freedom
This doesn’t mean we live a life of oppression, it’s actually the complete opposite. We can use these ideas and action steps to create a life we know gives us purpose and fulfillment.
You can start designing a life where you assign set time to pursue dreams you have been leaving off for later.
You can now organize your life and make the decisions that need to be made to spend more time with your loved ones
You get to decide what is important and what must be let go off in order to truly live and not just be alive.
You get to be your own master and creator of your own destiny.
Remember, put more friction between yourself and activities you want to avoid, and remove friction from activities that bring value to your life.
