🏷️ Categories: Time management, Mental models, Attention.
In 2009, a small Formula 1 team made history.
Brawn GP, practically newborn, didn’t have the budget of Ferrari, McLaren, or Mercedes. They didn’t have the most powerful engine or the highest-paid drivers.
What they had was an idea.
Ross Brawn and his team of engineers had discovered a revolutionary design for the rear diffuser, known as the double diffuser. This innovation allowed the car to generate more downforce without increasing drag. In practice, this meant the Brawn car could go faster through corners and preserve its tires better, without needing a superior engine (Plaza, 2012).
The result: Jenson Button won 6 of the first 7 races.
The team ended up taking both the drivers’ and constructors’ championships in its first and only season.
More speed. Less drag. More flow. Less friction.
Now: what does a car’s aerodynamics have to do with your pace of life?
Mental friction
Think of your mind as if it were the memory of a freshly reset phone.
Upon waking up, it’s almost empty, ready to operate at full capacity. But as soon as you start loading it with reminders, notifications, and half-finished tasks, that space starts to shrink.
A pending email is like an app running in the background.
The dry-cleaning errand adds another.
The message about Friday’s dinner, another active window.
And before you know it, by mid-morning your cognitive battery is no longer at 100%—you’re lucky if you have 50% left for what truly matters.
That’s mental friction: the invisible resistance that appears when we try to juggle too many things at once. In psychology, it’s called “working memory”: the limited space of what you can hold in mind at the same time. Overloading it drains your energy. It’s like a car that should be gliding smoothly but ends up fighting against every gust of wind. That’s why multitasking doesn’t work either—splitting attention doesn’t multiply productivity, it drastically reduces it.
The more task-switching, the more friction.
The more unfinished business, the more friction.
How much friction are you carrying?
Many of us are like a race car with poor aerodynamics.
If your mind is always full of these background processes, how much memory is left for truly creative work? 70%? 50%? Less? Trying to produce your best work with a scattered head is like trying to compete in Formula 1 with poor aerodynamics. No matter how much talent you have: friction will eventually slow you down and make you waste energy and time without results.
Good aerodynamics would let you move forward quickly and without tiring yourself out.
Brawn’s engineers didn’t add power: they removed resistance.
You can do the same with your mind. Here are some strategies:
1. Manage your energy, not your time
Most productivity strategies revolve around time, not energy.
Lists, timers, techniques to squeeze every minute—but time without energy is useless. My best time is the morning: that’s when my mind is clear, I write fluidly, and I make decisions. That’s why I wake up early and reserve the non-creative work for the afternoon.
The morning is my creative space, my crucial hour.
By finding that space and honoring it daily, magic happens. You enter flow and in just a few hours produce a large volume of work at an excellent level of quality.
Reflect on what your crucial hour might be.
2. Don’t open your email early
Starting the day checking email is falling into a black hole.
If I begin that way, my mind stops focusing on my priorities and reacts to other people’s. I become the secretary of other people’s urgencies and waste my best hours on secondary matters.
That’s why I have a rule: I don’t check email before 12:00 AM.
Impossible for you? No problem, start with 10:00. Or 9:00. Even 8:30. The exact hour doesn’t matter, what matters is having a block of time to work on what’s most important before the world barges into your head.
That’s why I love waking up early—the rest of the world is still silent when I write.
3. Keep your phone away
The first minutes of the morning set your daily rhythm.
Just like with email, if the first thing you see is your phone, you’ve already given away your attention before the day even begins. You’ve started filling your working memory and spending energy on things that may not matter to you.
I like to put my phone on airplane mode and leave it far away.
Sometimes I don’t touch it for hours. The effect is incredible: without notifications, my mind enters flow. The temptation to check disappears when the trigger isn’t present—you’ve eliminated an environmental trigger. Always remember: our attention is fragile, and a single notification is enough to derail it.
The key is to assign moments in the day for phone and email use.
4. Work in full screen
This seems like a minor detail, but it isn’t.
Every visible icon is an invitation to distraction. It’s just like having your phone within reach. Every open tab is a reminder of something pending. They’re all triggers in your line of sight that steal your focus.
That’s why I write and read in full screen. When I write, all I see is the article. When I read, all I see is the article.
Everything else is noise.
By removing visual cues, the urge to click disappears.
5. Prioritize what matters
Mornings have a unique value: urgencies haven’t arrived yet.
That moment is vital—you can reserve hours for the strategic task of the day, the one that will make the biggest difference long term. In my article on the Eisenhower Matrix I explain why having clear priorities is so effective. If you start early with what matters most, you prevent small urgencies from consuming your morning.
In this case, the order of operations does change the result.
6. Empty your mind
Ideas weigh less once you take them out of your head.
If you keep them floating in your mind, you overload your working memory. If you turn them into something tangible (a note, a sketch, a to-do list), friction disappears. That idea is vital, which is why it’s the first step in GTD and Zettelkasten.
Essentially, the method doesn’t matter, just remember: don’t store ideas in your head.
Turn them into something visible, usable, concrete.
Flow as much as possible
Friction never disappears completely.
Just like no car is 100% aerodynamic, our mind will always have some noise. The key is reducing it enough to flow without bumping into everything at every step. I’m talking about that point where you write without brakes, where ideas move on their own, where you’re not fighting against yourself.
You don’t need more willpower, or more motivation.
What you need is less friction.
Want to go deeper? Here are 3 key ideas:
✍️ Your turn: What changes could you make in your routine to reduce daily friction?
💭 Quote of the day: “The illusion of speed is the belief that it saves time. At first glance it seems simple: finish something in two hours instead of three, gain an hour. However, it is an abstract calculation, made as if every hour of the day were like an hour on the clock, absolutely identical.”
— Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
See you next time, cheers! 👋
References 📚
Plaza, D. (2012). La historia de BrawnGP: un lobo con piel de cordero (I). F1 Al Día. URL
Insightful