254: Friction: The Secret to ADHD-Friendly Home Habits

Add Friction, Remove Friction: The Home Organizing Trick That Beats Willpower

Our brains have a stubborn, well-documented ability to resist anything that involves the slightest bit of friction, no matter how good our intentions are. Once you see that pattern, you can stop trying to change who you are and start changing the friction instead — add it where you want a habit to stop, remove it where you want a habit to happen.

A mudroom built without me in mind

The house I’ve lived in for the last decade was a spec home, sitting empty for a year before we bought it during a cross-country move. Beautiful house — but I had zero say in how the mudroom was designed, and it shows.

It has three lockers for four kids (solved that one by adding extra hooks so two lockers get shared). But the real problem was the closed doors across the bottom, exactly where shoes were supposed to go. Picture kids rushing off the bus with ten minutes to change and get back in the car — nobody was ever going to stop, bend down, open two little doors, put shoes away, and close them again. That’s not a discipline problem. That’s friction in the wrong place, full stop.

There was also nowhere flat to drop keys, a purse, or the mail, so everything sailed straight past the mudroom and landed on the kitchen island instead — the first flat surface it hit.

What I actually changed

I didn’t get to redesign the mudroom, but I found workarounds:

• Added extra hooks to two lockers so each one serves two kids instead of one
• Had my handy father-in-law drill holes for adjustable shelf pegs and cut a board to fit, giving me a spot to set a tray for keys, wallets, and mail
• Left the shoe doors alone and just let shoes pile on the floor inside — it’s a mudroom, and fighting that battle wasn’t worth it

Mail still doesn’t have a perfect system. But I’m married to a “monkey brain” who handles it the instant he walks in the door — junk mail tossed, important stuff carried straight to his office. Different brains solve different frictions.

More real examples of the same idea

• The island catch-all. If things keep landing on your counter, stop fighting it — give it a shallow tray with short sides. It corrals the mess into one liftable unit (grab it, sit down, sort it, wipe the counter, done in one motion instead of twenty). The short sides matter: things will eventually start sliding off, which is exactly enough friction to nag you into addressing the pile before it becomes invisible clutter.
• A lidded basket, by contrast, is the wrong move here — hiding the mess behind a lid makes it too easy to ignore, and it can pile up for weeks. Less friction isn’t always the goal; sometimes you want just enough friction to force a decision.
• The clothes-on-the-floor drawer. I used to drop not-dirty-enough-for-the-hamper, not-clean-enough-to-put-away clothes straight on my closet floor. I built in a small, always-empty drawer instead — one extra step, but it stopped the floor pile, and because the drawer is small, it forces me to actually cycle clothes back through instead of shoving in more.
• Hooks over hangers. Anywhere a coat closet has a bar and hangers that nobody actually uses, pull the bar and line it with hooks instead. Hanging a coat properly is three steps — pull a hanger, put the coat on it, hang it back up. A hook is one step. That difference is enormous for brains that resist multi-step tasks. Try a few command hooks first to see if it works before you commit to drilling anything in.
• The bright paper sign. During the height of the pandemic, with six of us eating three meals a day in one kitchen, I dropped a bright orange piece of paper in the sink that said “no dishes here.” It wasn’t subtle — that was the point. It was just jarring enough to snap us out of autopilot and into the dishwasher instead. (I made sure the dishwasher ran nightly and got emptied every morning so there was never an excuse.) Paper, not laminated — if it survived getting wet, it would stop working.

Your practical, actionable step

Walk through your house and notice your hotspots — the places where clutter or unfinished habits keep collecting. For each one, ask: do I need to add friction here to make myself stop, or remove friction here to make myself follow through? The fix rarely requires reinventing the space. Sometimes it’s a tray, a drawer, a few hooks, or a piece of paper.

If this kind of thinking has been useful, I’m running a free week in my community group called Get Your Tools Ready Week — Zoom body-doubling sessions to get your home’s “tools” organized first, the way a mechanic keeps their tools ready before a job. Join at bit.ly/joylovinghomecommunity, starting Monday at 10 a.m.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.