A healthy dose of friction.

Recently, I’ve been running reverse pilots on myself.

Along with Joe Badman, we shared the what, why and how, here.

In a nutshell, reverse pilots are the act of removing non-essential activities and seeing if it has any negative consequences. Originally conceived by Dan Shapero at LinkedIn, but I read about them in the book Essentialism by Greg Mckeown.

I’m 2 months in and overwhelmingly seeing huge benefits.

I am seeing more of my time back in my pocket to do things I like. I’m feeling healthier both physically and mentally.

Generally, I’m feeling more balanced.

In the past, I would try to achieve these things with fads like specific diets, gadgets or software. In the past, I failed too often for my liking. Ultimately — I’d been either been totally eliminating from the ‘get go’ or actually adding a thing. It was very ‘this or that.’

This time around, I’ve had less of a boom or bust mentality to achieve success.

I could obviously ramble on about iterative and incremental approaches and they would hold true within the overall picture. But a secret spice in the ingredients has been, friction.

With activities that I want to reduce — I create friction

With the activities that I want to increase — I reduce friction

Let me explain.

One of my reverse pilots was to check email less so that I could focus on work better. I had pop-up notifications on no less than 4 devices. My laptop, iPad, phone, watch! So ultimately, I didn’t check email — it checked me. A ping would totally disrupt my concentration and like Pavlov's dog — I’d go running.

This was actually causing me huge cognitive overload. If I checked emails on Monday morning — Monday could be so unproductive overall. Worse was Friday afternoons (when my Accountant had a habit of emailing) resulting in me working into the weekend or stressing throughout.

So… I deleted emails from my phone, tablet and watch. This was obvious, but it didn’t help. The ping was still on my laptop. In fact, it was in the main notifications and in the browser bookmarks bar.

I rationalised that I need to be reachable somehow — what if. Then it dawned on me. One, no I don’t need to be reachable all the time and two, I’m really not that critical and so important that I need to be on call.

So the friction I caused was this — I stopped notifications from the laptop and logged out of my emails totally. This means that in order to check emails I have to actually log in each and every time, username, password and 2-step verification. This causes huge friction — it’s an effort to do, it’s a hassle and much like anyone else — I avoid the hassle if possible.

The result is that I now only check email once a day (logging out each time). Email doesn’t rule my day or my diary. Also, I’m more able to get shit done without distraction.

And here’s the clincher. No. One. Noticed. No. One. Cares.

Honestly. Not one person asked or challenged.

Now with the activities that I want to increase — I reduce friction, I make it easier to do before it needs doing. For example, I am trying to learn to surf. The act of getting ready and going can be a hassle. It can easily turn into an internal conversation and rationalise that, nah, maybe tomorrow.

To reduce this friction and to make it easier to go (harder to say no) I now keep all my gear (wetsuit, leash, towel etc) in a bag by the door of my office — next to the surfboard. By having this all in one place — and ready to go, I’ve dramatically reduced the hassle and therefore the excuses. So I’ve gone more in the past month than ever.

I’ve also combined creating and reducing friction in one acitivity! For example, the keys for my bicycle lock is hanging on the front door and my car keys are kept in a room 2 storeys upstairs, in a box. This means that if I’m just popping out to the store or such, it’s easier and less hassle to just grab the bicycle lock key and go as by then — I’m already with shoes on by the door!

These tweaks to my day to day life, either adding or removing friction has benefitted me so, so very much. I’d encourage you to think about — where you can add or remove friction to the things you want less or more of.

I was inspired by the books Indistracable and Hooked — both by Nir Eyal on this subject but there’s loads of literature out there to reference — I guess Nudge is an obvious one? Let me know if you know of any more, I’m keen to read.