Dancing With Friction

Raise your hand if decision fatigue is a real thing for you.

For me, some days things just click and flow beautifully — in my work, with family, with personal and professional goals, in community, and in relationship with the Earth. I remember to stop and eat, hydrate, put down devices, and get outside.

Other days, distractions creep in, my focus isn’t great, and I'm left wondering what I got done that day (which often ratchets up my nervous system; a mindset thing I’m working on. Also reminds me to cultivate a practice of being present and with what is. But I digress).

There are many things constantly vying for our attention that impact our lives, work, and bodies. To do our best work we need to be in right relationship with time (h/t Ixchel Lunar ), including how we stack our days, set our routines, etc.

Having a strong connection with Purpose and clear goals are a good foundation for navigating the gauntlet of choices on a given day. Friction can both help and stall you in your daily decision tree. The Flow Research Collective often talks about Friction as both helpful and disruptive.

Two Types of Friction

There's good friction that supports ease and Flow-activating behaviors, like laying out your workout clothes the night before going to the gym. And then there's disruptive friction—behaviors that block you from living your ideal life, like decision fatigue or having too many big goals at once.

Befriending Friction includes habit-building, automating, and eliminating unhelpful things from your daily routines. FRC offers these strategies:

Turn Variables into Constants

Every day we're confronted by trivial choices that sap brain energy away from meaningful projects and disrupt your ability to access Flow consistently.

Identify things you can put on autopilot, turning variable decisions into constants. This is helpful for those doing freelance/independent work or working remotely, where the edges of work and non-work can get blurry.

Some constants I've built into my routines include:

• A specific morning routine: wake, take dogs out, coffee alchemy, meditation, review the day, play with dogs, and then blast off into the day.
• Limiting meetings to afternoons to protect mornings for deep, creative work. I usually don't do Monday meetings.
• Answering email and Slack messages at specific times (I'm too often really bad about letting both creep into all corners of my day).
• Keeping the phone on silent and face down when doing project or creative work. I also turned off badge notifications in apps a long time ago.
• Scheduling and prioritizing mini-recovery breaks throughout the day and ~15 minutes of meditation for that transition time between the work day and evening family time/routines.
• Setting the next day's plan in my BuJo at the end of each day. Setting my desk and desktop to jump into the first focused task immediately after my morning practice.
• Saturdays as an intentional (mostly) non-tech/devices day of rest and recovery.

I'm working on using AI to automate some of my daily workflows. Poco a poco.

Delegating and Outsourcing

If you can, look at things in your life or work that either don't excite you or aren't your genius zone, and delegate them to someone.

In your personal life, that might mean getting meal service or hiring a cleaning service. In your professional work, it might mean hiring a VA or deal-making with a colleague to offload frequent disruptors.

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Try mixing these ideas and adjustments into your routine and see if you're able to reduce the number of non-productive decisions you make each day.

Track your progress and notes—the habits and routines that set you up for more consistent Flow and the times you get frozen up by little decisions that you could adjust, automate, or offload.

The more awareness about your habits and behaviors you generate, the easier you can spot the things that need fine-tuning or automating, clearing the way for you to build the remote work life of your dreams.

Let me know in the comments below if this was helpful for you! Getting this out of my brain has inspired a companion piece or two I’d like to write soon — one around my minimum daily practice, one about approaching our day-to-day through a practice of surrender. LMK whatcha think!