How do I reduce meeting friction without offending colleagues?

Start by auditing which meetings you could skip (rather than declining all meetings). Propose async alternatives for status updates. Request agenda-first norms for recurring meetings you must attend. Frame changes around team effectiveness rather than personal preference.

What's the difference between friction and procrastination?

Friction is an external or structural obstacle to work. Procrastination is an internal avoidance behavior often driven by task anxiety, unclear starting point, or perfectionism. They can coexist — procrastination often increases on high-friction days — but they require different interventions.

Can friction ever be useful?

Yes. Strategic friction — adding steps to behaviors you want to reduce — is a behavioral design technique. Making unhealthy foods harder to access, removing social media apps from your phone's home screen, or requiring a deliberate confirmation to open email during focus time all use friction to reduce unwanted behaviors.

How do I convince my team to reduce friction collectively?

Aggregate data is most persuasive. If your team tracks friction sources for two weeks and the combined data shows 60% of friction is meeting-category, that's a team conversation starter. Individual anecdotes are easy to dismiss; collective patterns are harder to ignore.

Productivity friction: naming the obstacles that quietly drain your working day

Friction in productivity refers to the accumulated obstacles — meetings, interruptions, context switching — that reduce output quality and increase cognitive cost. Learn to identify and reduce it.

What is friction in the context of productivity?

In physics, friction is the force that opposes relative motion between surfaces. In productivity, friction describes any force that opposes the progress of good work: unnecessary meetings, communication overhead, unclear priorities, context switching, insufficient tools, missing information, bureaucratic processes, or environmental distractions. Unlike major blockers — a system outage, a critical dependency failure — friction is often invisible precisely because each individual instance seems minor. A Slack notification, a poorly scheduled meeting, an unclear requirement — each costs a small amount of time and attention. Cumulatively, they're the difference between a productive day and a day where you worked hard but accomplished little.

The five major categories of knowledge work friction

Five categories account for the majority of observable productivity friction. Meeting friction: too many meetings, meetings in prime focus time, meetings that could be emails. Context switching friction: rapid task switching, always-on communication tools, interrupt-driven work norms. Environmental friction: noisy or open-plan workspaces, notification-heavy devices, disorganized file systems. Information friction: unclear requirements, missing documentation, slow approval chains, dependency on others for basic information. Motivational friction: misalignment between work and values, unclear priorities, low-energy periods mismatched to high-demand tasks. Each category has different interventions — recognizing which category your friction falls into is the first step to addressing it effectively.

The compound cost of small friction

Individual friction events are easy to dismiss as minor: 'it was just a 5-minute interruption.' But Gloria Mark's research shows that the real cost of a 5-minute interruption is 23+ minutes of total recovery time — the interruption itself plus the context recovery needed to return to depth. If a knowledge worker experiences 4 such interruptions in a morning, they've lost 90 minutes of productive time from 20 minutes of actual interruptions. The compound cost is what makes friction so damaging and so hard to see: you experience many small disruptions and end the day feeling like the time went somewhere, but you can't account for exactly where.

Using friction data to make targeted improvements

Naming friction daily transforms it from a vague feeling into an improvable metric. When you consistently log 'meetings' as your primary daily friction source for two weeks, you have specific, actionable data: something about your meeting structure needs to change. That data is more persuasive to a manager or team than 'I need more focus time.' It's also more precise for self-directed changes: which meetings are the problem? Which meeting days are highest-friction? Today's friction log — selecting from meetings, context switching, low energy, interruptions, or other — is a minimal version of systematic friction tracking. Two weeks of data typically produces clear enough patterns to drive a targeted intervention.

Frequently asked questions