You’re Not Bad at Transitions—You’re Using the Wrong Friction

Do you work from home and hate starting work each day? Does it feel like you have to push yourself way too hard to get to your desk and it's burning you out? You're not lazy, you just need a new strategy. Today we're going to talk about how reducing or even adding friction to your routines can help you overcome procrastination and resistance without having to push yourself.

Watch the video below, or read on for the full transcript.

Hi, I'm Cas Winter. I'm a productivity and self care expert for those who are neurodivergent, chronically ill and disabled. In my online program, The Action Navigator, I help people just like you master a toolset for self care and taking action so they can spend their precious time and energy the way they want and need to. Click the link in the description box below to learn more. Here's the plan for today. First, we're going to talk about mindset, why task initiation tips may not have worked for you in the past, and what to do about it.

Next, we're going to talk about context, what is friction and why should we care? Three, how to: the three steps you can take today to make getting work tomorrow easier, and four, a bonus: what to do when you're stuck in the moment of a transition. There are two reasons why task initiation tips may not have worked for you in the past. Most tips, tricks, hacks, systems and information you'll find online is by neurotypical able bodied people made for neurotypical able bodied people and they all tend to be high achievers.

So if you're in any way neurodivergent, chronically ill or disabled, those things are very unlikely to work for you without some form of adaptation or accommodation. And furthermore, if you treat yourself poorly while implementing any tip or tool, it will likely not work at all or will stop working sooner rather than later. By the way, if your biggest hurdle right now is figuring out what supposed to be working on, click the link in the description box below to get my free Anytime Reset. A thinking aid that does the executive function for you so you can plan your day and get to work knowing you're focusing on what's actually important.

So what is friction? In this context, friction refers to the amount of time, energy or difficulty it takes to transition from one task or activity to another. Often it's helpful to reduce friction, but in certain situations it can be more helpful to add friction. Here are two examples of what reducing friction can look like. One of my clients was struggling with an overwhelming time at work and one of the strategies that helped her the most was reducing friction by eating her breakfast at her desk and not putting her dishes away until after she had completed some work.

Here's another example. Establishing a closing duties routine that you do at the end of each workday to make getting started the next day easier. This can include clearing off your desk, checking your to do list so it's up to date and accurate, and choosing what you're going to work on first the next day. That way you don't have to do any decision making first thing the next day.

You can simply get to work and here are two examples of Adding strategic Friction Put your timer on top of your laptop so you have to physically interact with the timer to turn on your computer, making it more likely you will use your timer. Charge your phone overnight in your home office so you're less likely to use it before bed and so you have to physically go to your office to get your phone in the morning.

By the way, if you struggle to remember to take your medications in the morning, strategic friction can be helpful for that too. You can put your morning meds on top of your phone before you go to bed, so you have to physically interact with them in order to get your phone in the morning. Just make sure you have your water bottle next to your phone too. Have you ever considered adding strategic friction before?

Let me know in the comments. Now that you know the difference between reducing friction and strategically adding friction, it's time for some brainstorming so you can figure out what would work best for you and how to implement it. Step 1 Choose the brainstorming method that works best for you. Some examples of brainstorming methods include Brain Dump, Mind Map, Lists, Anytime Pages Journaling, which is a favorite of mine and many of my clients, and you can learn more about it by watching this video next and another great brainstorming option is verbally processing while having a friend or partner take notes.

Once you've chosen a brainstorming method, here are the questions to ask yourself. "What tasks or activities do I struggle to transition to?" "Why do I struggle to transition to them?" If you clicked on this video because you're struggling to start work in the morning or get back to work after lunch while working from home, make sure to focus on those scenarios. "Why is transitioning to work while at home hard?"

Bonus. You can use the 3 Gas Tanks framework to be more specific answering this question. You can learn more about that by watching this video and the question you ask yourself is "which of my three gas tanks do I spend from in order to transition to this activity, and why?" STEP 2 Now that you have a good idea of what transitions you're struggling with and why, you can move on to brainstorming how best to address them.

As with before, choose the brainstorming method that works best for you and ask yourself these questions for each transition. What would be more helpful, going to the activity or bringing the activity to me? For example, if you struggle to brush your teeth, would it be more helpful to get yourself to the bathroom to brush your teeth? Or have your toothbrush and toothpaste (or a single use disposable one) in a location other than the bathroom?

If you're a student in my Action Navigator program, could the Spoon Hunting cheat sheet help you decide between reducing friction or adding strategic friction? If you want to learn more about that because you're not an Action Navigator student, here's a blog post about that. Accommodations make things easier in part because they either reduce friction, for example mobility aids, or add strategic friction, for example timers. Therefore, being purposeful with your friction choices is an accommodation.

"Are distractions making this transition difficult?" If so, it's often helpful to add strategic friction. "Am I struggling to simply remember to do this activity?" A successful reminder one interrupts what you're doing sufficiently enough so you stop whatever you are doing and sufficiently reminds you why the reminder is important. This is why timers and alarms can stop working, because at some point for some people, they no longer sufficiently interrupt you or remind you of why it's important.

And the last question is, "is this activity a habit that I'm trying to break?" If so, adding strategic friction can be very, very helpful. Step 3 Finally, it's time to brainstorm the how. Continue with your brainstorming method of choice and answer these questions. "If I want to reduce friction, what are some ways I can do that?" "If I want to add strategic friction, what are some ways I can do that?"

"If I want to add reminders, how can I create reminders that will sufficiently interrupt me and remind me why the reminder is important?" If you have done the first two parts of this exercise, answering these last few questions should be much more straightforward. Because in order to come up with ideas for reducing friction or adding friction, we need to understand the problem in the first place. Specifically with the example of getting yourself to work in the morning,

when you work from home, it's often a matter of physically getting your body from point A, wherever you happen to be in your home, to point B, the location in your home where you do work, whether that's your home office, a stationary location, or it's wherever your laptop happens to be. It's about getting yourself physically, literally to your place of work. And we often want to reduce friction moving towards work.

And then we can add strategic friction to help us move away from activities that may be preventing us from doing work. The example I shared earlier about my client who ate breakfast at her desk at home and then shifted to work without putting her dishes away, that was a powerful form of reducing friction to help her get to her desk in the morning. And that isn't a tool she had to implement for the rest of her life.

It was something that helped her get through a particularly overwhelming period at work. So that's an example of reducing friction to help you move towards work. An example of adding strategic friction to help you move away from other things. So let's say you have a morning routine that ends with you reading from a book, which is an awesome thing. Doesn't matter if it's fiction or nonfiction, it's something that fills your gas tanks, is important to you.

I don't want to take that away from you. Some examples of adding strategic friction to that. If you are reading a physical book, you can put a piece of paper or a different bookmark, something like really obvious in a page where you in theory want to stop for the day. So if you only want to read chapter, you would put that at the end of the chapter you want to read.

So at the point when you get there, it's a physical reminder. You have to physically interact with it in order to either stop reading or to move on. If you are reading something digitally, a timer can be really helpful for that. A really fancy thing if you also have to change locations is you put the timer in your office. So you have to go to your office to turn off the timer and then you're already there so you can start work.

These are just examples. They're not necessarily going to work for everybody. But this is the kind of granularity we want to get into when we're trying to brainstorm friction accommodations for ourselves, be that reducing friction or adding strategic friction, or some combination of the two to help us with the transitions that are difficult for us. So I promised you a bonus, and here we are troubleshooting after the fact in order to do better in the future.

What we've been doing this whole video is all well and good, but what do you do when you're stuck in the moment of a transition when that happens? Because it will happen. Ask yourself these questions: "what needs to happen next?" "If I can't do that, why can't I?" "Is there something I can do to accommodate myself?" "What's standing in my way?" "Am I missing information that I need in order to move forward?"

And if so, "what information am I missing?" "How can I get that information?" "Am I missing a tool that I need to move forward?" If so, "what is that tool and where can I get that tool?" If you are someone who doesn't struggle with executive dysfunction, your brain works the way it's supposed to. These questions kind of happen naturally in order to problem solve and help you move forward and and take action.

If you struggle with executive dysfunction, however, which I'm guessing most of you do, since you're still with me towards the end of this video, that means you don't naturally come up with these questions. So having them written out and easily accessible so in the moment you're struggling, you can walk yourself through them one by one that will supplement your executive dysfunction and help you move forward. A really simple example of what this can look like is if you are struggling to make a phone call.

Doesn't matter what phone call it is. Sometimes the thing that's preventing us from making a phone call is we don't know what number we're supposed to call. So our next action is actually to figure out what phone number we need to call. That's a separate distinct task. And if we do not discover that that's what needs to happen next and then do that, we literally can't make the phone call.

So that's like a really simple example of how executive dysfunction can get us stuck in a transition. And we're procrastinating, but we don't really realize why we're procrastinating. Different example is, let's say you have the phone number and you have the time, but you're not making the call. A lot of the times there's anxiety going on, right? And we get in this loop where what we see is we're procrastinating, we're anxious about it, and that kind of like spirals, right?

But we're not leaving that spiral to care for our anxiety. The experience of anxiety is something that warrants self care and compassion. And if we get caught in the loop of just beating ourselves up for procrastinating and being anxious about it, we're not caring for ourselves. And when you notice that, that's not another reason to beat yourself up. Very important. It's just a signpost to tell you you have an opportunity to offer yourself genuine self care and compassion in that moment.

What is something that you can do to soothe your anxiety. You don't have to cure your anxiety. That's what therapy is for. They will help you reduce your overall anxiety load over time. That's what therapy is for. But in the moment when you need to make a phone call, you're allowed to do something to soothe yourself. So if you need to curl yourself up in a blanket, sit by the heating register in your home, have a mug of your favorite drink, whether it be a hot cocoa or like maybe it's a glass of cold lemonade, like it's okay to soothe your senses in order to help bolster the part of you that's anxious.

It's okay to do that. That's an example of accommodation and reducing friction in order to help you make the phone call that you're anxious about. And it's also okay to ask a friend or family member or a trusted third party to to just be with you while you make a phone call. That's another way to soothe yourself and help support you as you're dealing with anxiety. There's a reason I have self compassion and boundaries on the compass needle in the Navigator's compass for my program, The Action Navigator.

Because they are fundamental to every single point in the cycle. They are always, always valid and important. There you have it. You were not lazy. You just needed a new strategy. And now you know the difference between reducing friction and adding strategic friction. And more importantly, how to take advantage of those powerful tools. If you like this video, you'll love my program, the Action Navigator. Click here link to learn more.

I'll be back soon with another video. See you then. Bye.