Friction

Lately I’ve been looking for and trying to eliminate sources of friction in my day to day activities and thoughts.

Particularly I’ve been applying this notion to purchases, if something isn’t going to reduce friction of an existing activity I make myself question it more.

Approaching it the other way when I notice myself avoid something that either I should do (like dishes) or want to do (like paddle boarding) I question myself about why, is there something in the way, is there a change that will get me doing whatever the activity is?

With dishes (an ongoing problem for me) I noticed first that I really hated when the dishes were all piled in a heap in the sink, first I asked Husband to stop doing that, then I also started unheaping things when I noticed them, this is something I can do in less than 2 minutes so it doesn’t seem like A Big Deal(tm). Then I noticed I didn’t like using dish towels to put wet dishes on, sometimes i can’t find any, often it leaves water against the counter too long (butcher block counters) so i picked up some cheap ‘dish mats’ which are only used for drying dishes and which can be reused a lot, cleaned in the wash easily. I still avoid dishes sometimes, but I tackle whatever is waiting to be done a whole lot more often.

An added bonus of this approach is it’s pretty fun. I like solving problems and I like feeling less frustration so the whole experiment is pretty win-win.