Friction Reduction Week
This week's Atomic Writer experiment is to find and eradicate any friction that might be a drag on total daily writing time.
When it comes building a strong and resilient habit like writing, Atomic Habits author James Clear suggests that reducing friction is must-have in your toolbox.
You probably know what this is but for what it’s worth here is an example of how friction can trip you up from taking advantage of an opportunity to get in some writing.
It’s a busy Tuesday. On the schedule is leaving the office with enough time to get to the elementary school so you can pick up one of your kids on time. A late meeting gets cancelled and, out of nowhere, you have an additional 30 minutes to do something with. You drive to the school and and park two blocks away and now it’s just a three-minute walk to picking up your kid.
Let me pause here to talk about smart-phone algorithm trap awaiting a parent who is a half hour or more early for pickup time. I see this every day in my town where I routinely pick up one or both kids (one at an elementary school and the other a middle school). Some picker-uppers arrive an hour early to get a prime parking spot so their pickup getaway is — well — without friction. Their kid comes out of the school, hops in the car, and they whoosh out, not having to for the parking lot to empty. The smart phone trap is this: While I don’t know exactly what the early parkers are looking at, I see almost all of them in the driver’s seats, engines idling, their eyes locked on their phones. I sense algorithms at work. Doom scrolling? Instagram rabbit holes? That’s my assumption.
Back to mining unclaimed time for writing: Putting in a simple system so that if a chunk of time pops up in your schedule you’re ready to put it to good use.
Being Ready to Write at a Moment’s Notice
Open Doc. In a writing app — as simple as the Notes app on an iPhone — have it open to your working draft. Have the draft “pinned” so it’s just a click away from being able to work on it. When the universe gives you a gift of time to burn, tap it open and chip away,
The 2-Minute Mindset. Clear’s two-minute rule is mostly about building a new habit. For example, someone new to writing, charged up with ambition, decides that she’s going to write for two hours every day. Maybe she makes it stick but most people (think of the New Year’s Resolution annual goal abandonment) give up the first week. Clear advises starting with an action that takes two minutes or less and make that the starting point of building a new daily habit. So maybe this is drafting one sentence. Doesn’t sound like much but what you’re doing is (in sync with Clear’s framework) building an identity. Not just chasing a long-term goal. Or maybe it’s two-minutes of brainstorming or editing. This goes beyond finding unused pockets of time — it’s lowering the so-called activation cost of getting real work done. And mostly, it’s a gateway. For those days you do have a large slot of time for writing but have trouble getting started, telling yourself just do the two minutes and then you can go goof off is a way to get started and, more often then not, once you’re in your in. You’ll be in the game and go well beyond the two minutes. You turn your objective of writing one sentence into 500 words or maybe a 1000 or more.
Make a note of where you left off. Reducing friction doesn’t end with just having your writing pad or phone or whatever ready-to-go. The friction that can hold you back from writing is also about re-orienting yourself to the place you left off. You were in the first section of the third chapter and immersed in the development of a character. Making a small but potent habit at the end of a writing session of leaving yourself a note about where you’re leaving off might help put a little WD40 on the gears in your brain to make it easy to get things flowing the next time.
I have a crazy schedule this week. My wife will be travelling for work so my executive function issues will be tested (future series of posts on this for my fellow EF-challenged writer friends!). I’m going to try some of this stuff out and see how well it works.
T.J. is the former editor of The Writer magazine with 30 years of writing-and-editing experience in the (now struggling) magazine world. His feature writing has also appeared in numerous publications, including Outside, Triathlete and Runner’s World. He writes about sustaining a writing practice in the age of AI — figuring it out publicly, one post at a time. He also coaches masters runners and publishes High-Mileage, a Substack on Lydiard-based training for busy athletes.