One of my coaching clients is an entrepreneur who travels and lives full-time in a van.
He’s managing a company launch, a potential real estate deal, and some significant personal circumstances — all while living out of a vehicle and bouncing between cities. He’s also one of the more disciplined, self-aware people I’ve coached.
And he was struggling to get to the gym consistently.
Not because he lacked motivation. Not because he didn’t value health — it was actually at the top of his priority list. The problem was structural: on gym mornings, he had a 9 am call with his company team, and the drive to the gym and back left no margin. One thing ran into the next, and the gym got skipped.
He told me his solution in the middle of our session, almost as an aside: the night before a gym day, he drives to the gym parking lot and sleeps there.
He wakes up. He’s already there. No commute, no time pressure, no negotiation with himself.
My response: “That’s the key insight right there.”
The Problem With Willpower as a Strategy
Most productivity advice implicitly relies on you making a good decision when you’re tired, stressed, or already behind.
Push through the resistance. Just do it anyway. Get up earlier. Try harder.
That advice works sometimes, for some people, in some conditions. But it has a fundamental flaw: it treats motivation and willpower as the variable to optimize, when the real variable is friction.
Friction is structural. It’s the gap between where you are and where the behavior needs to happen. The drive to the gym. The extra steps before you can start a task. The password you have to look up before you can open the tool. These are small things, but they’re surprisingly powerful because they give you something to negotiate with at 6am when your reasoning faculties aren’t fully online.
“I’ll do it tomorrow.” “It’s already tight on time.” “I’ll make up for it this weekend.”
The friction is the raw material for the excuse. Remove the friction, and you remove the excuse.
What Removing Friction Actually Looks Like
The van-in-the-parking-lot solution sounds extreme, but it’s just an unusually literal version of the same principle that works in every context.
The classic examples: laying out your gym clothes the night before. Putting running shoes next to the door. Prepping coffee the night before so your morning routine starts one step earlier. Setting the alarm in the other room so you have to physically get up to turn it off.
These all work because they eliminate a decision — or eliminate the opportunity to talk yourself out of something — before you arrive at the moment when you’d make that choice. You’re not trusting future-you to make the right call. You’re engineering the situation so future-you doesn’t have a choice to make.
A former coaching client of mine called this “setting an elaborate trap for yourself.” Which is exactly right. The goal isn’t to become more motivated. It’s to make the behavior so easy and frictionless that motivation barely enters into it.
The Less Obvious Places to Apply This
Everyone understands it for exercise. Fewer people apply it to cognitive work.
If there’s a project you’ve been procrastinating on, the question to ask isn’t “how do I get more motivated to work on this?” The question is: “what’s the friction that’s actually stopping me?”
Sometimes it’s a missing piece of information you need to gather before you can start. Handle that first, then close the loop.
Sometimes it’s that the task lives on a platform you find annoying to open. Find a way to make it easier to access, or move the work somewhere more natural.
Sometimes it’s that the task is vague — “work on the project” — which creates cognitive friction because your brain doesn’t know what to do first. Breaking it down to a first physical step removes that friction.
The principle generalizes everywhere: find the friction, eliminate it before the moment of truth, and the behavior becomes easier almost automatically.
The Bigger Idea Here
My client’s van solution struck me because it was so specific. He didn’t say “I’m going to try harder to get to the gym.” He looked at the actual structural obstacle — the commute was too much margin on a tight morning — and solved that specific problem in the most direct way available to him.
That’s the mindset shift. When a behavior isn’t happening, your first question shouldn’t be “how do I increase willpower?” It should be “what’s in the way?”
Most of the time, something is literally in the way. A decision you’d rather not make. An extra step that’s just annoying enough to skip. A mismatch between where the behavior needs to happen and where you already are.
Fix that first. Everything else gets easier.
For more on how to design your week around your actual priorities, the 25X Productivity System includes the tools for identifying where the real friction is in your work and life — and what to do about it.
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