How to use friction: for & against you
The benefit of learning how to reduce friction, and take advantage of its positive aspects to use it in your favor
If you’ve ever tried to implement a habit or lifestyle change in your daily life, friction might be the reason it’s not happening, but it can also be something you can use to your advantage and achieve your goals.
To put it simply, when we want to change something or start doing a habit more often, we need to make it feel as easy as possible to get started. For example, if you want to start studying consistently every day, have your study materials somewhere easy to access and start using. Putting your books on high-to-reach shelves or inconvenient places can reduce how easy it is to get started, which can make you end up studying for only a fraction of the time you had set as a goal.
The other day I was having dinner with my family, and we started talking about how the prayer rug that we put downstairs is convenient and makes it much easier to pray after eating than going upstairs. I realized it was because of one main thing: it reduces friction. Essentially, the act of putting the prayer rug downstairs instead of only on the second floor makes it easy to access and helps us pray more.
James Clear in his book, ‘Atomic Habits’ has a section about reducing friction to ‘make the habit easier’, which makes total sense and is an actionable takeaway. When we think about something we want to implement into our lives but are faced with the difficulty of starting it or initiating it, oftentimes we shift slowly away from that goal. I touched on the notion of ‘starting being the hardest part’ in one of my blog posts which you can read here, where I mention a couple of tips to reduce tension around ‘starting’ - a pretty common struggle.
The key to achieving anything is to make it as simple as possible and make it as easy to access so that it increases how ‘automatic’ and natural it feels.
actionable takeaway:
Think about something you want to start doing right now. Working out in the morning? getting a daily stretch after school? learning more about a specific topic? find something you want to work on implementing as a habit, whether it be to achieve a certain goal or just for the daily benefits of that habit, and find ways to reduce friction around getting into it.
For example, wanting to learn more about something like studying a subject or language every day can include the following steps to make the habit ‘easier’:
download the apps with notifications as reminders that can help you get started
designate a space and/or time where you know you’ll work on it every time. This can include: researching new case studies on a certain topic you care about or going over 10 new phrases in Spanish while waiting for your dinner to be ready every night.
find a way to record progress so you can look back on how far you’ve got in the future. An analogy for this is like taking a ‘before’ picture when you clean your room. When you have access to a side-by-side comparison, you have a clear representation of how much you cleaned (which can even be enough motivation to do it again and become consistent).
If you want to start stretching every night, you can start by having a yoga mat ready somewhere so that when you pass by frequently, so you already have it waiting for you. Set a goal to stretch for one minute a day. That’s what I did until I was able to build a habit of doing it every day, and now I’m able to build up on that any time.
The same applies to increasing friction when you want to break a habit:
When I wanted to stop using social media after realizing how much of my time it was consuming, the first thing I did was delete Instagram and TikTok. At first, it was tempting to redownload them all the time since I would occasionally feel like checking up on my friends or what was happening. But then I realized I can still use the online versions - and while they’re still functional and get the job done, they give significantly less satisfaction which means I stick to time limits I set and don’t feel drawn into spending hours scrolling. Now, if I open Instagram giving myself 10 minutes, I’ll usually end up closing it less than that anyway, because that’s the time I’ve developed as ‘the perfect amount’, and realized that for the most part, I don’t actually need more than that
There’s also more friction when it comes to opening the app itself because it involves first opening Safari, then entering ‘Instagram.com’, then waiting for it to load, which is clearly more time-consuming than if I had the app. It automatically gives me time to process whether I actually need to open it or not, usually allowing me to close out before it opens in the case where I opened it mindlessly.
You can apply this to almost anything, as long as you start off by targeting what exactly it is that you want to change.
bonus takeaway:
Your habits are in your hands, so you have the ability to start doing or stop doing whatever it is you think of. Manipulate the friction around the process of doing that action to shift you in the direction of your goals with less effort.
that’s it for today, see you next week ;)