⏳ Read Time: Less than 4 minutes

Eight years into the bank, my manager pulled me aside after watching me work an eighty-hour week to ship something that wouldn’t matter past Friday. He said: “You’re confusing motion with progress.”

I told him I was just doing what needed to be done.

He asked me to list the three things I’d repeated most often that week. I did. All three were small, all three were “just being responsive”, and all three could have been killed by a single rule each.

I got two evenings back the next week. A full day the week after.

That conversation is what the Friction Audit grew out of.

✅ The Friction Audit — a 20-minute exercise that surfaces the three recurring tasks quietly eating a day a week of your time

✅ Three one-line “kill rules” that take the three most common executive time-thieves off your calendar on contact

✅ The principle behind why kill rules compound where productivity systems don’t

✅ AI tip: how to find your buried “circling back” loops in 60 seconds

✅ This week’s challenge: run the Audit before Friday and send me your rule #1

Let’s be honest. Most productivity systems add steps. The Friction Audit removes them. Twenty minutes, four 5-minute moves, three rules. Run it Monday morning; have a day a week back by Friday.

Step 1 — Calendar Scroll (5 min). Open your calendar from the last 14 days. Mark every recurring meeting or task you finished thinking why did I do that again? Don’t analyse. Just mark.

Step 2 — Sent-Folder Search (5 min). Search your sent emails for “circling back”, “any update”, “quick question”, “5 min”. Each hit is a friction signature — a loop you’re already running.

Step 3 — Three Names (5 min). From those two lists, pick the three tasks that show up most often. Not the worst. Not the most painful. The most frequent. Those are your three.

Step 4 — The Kill Rule (5 min). Write a single-sentence rule for each that, if applied automatically, would prevent the task from ever running again. The rule must work on autopilot — no judgement required in the moment of friction.

Here’s what the three most common executive time-thieves and their kill rules look like:

Time-thief 1 — Re-deciding the same small things. Which template, which file format, which reply line. You make 30+ tiny decisions a day you’ve already made before.

Kill rule: “If I’ve decided this before, I’m not deciding it again. Same input, same output.”

Time-thief 2 — Reading something twice without acting. Open an email, defer it, re-read it four hours later, defer again. By Friday some emails have been read five times.

Kill rule: “Two touches max. Read, decide, move. A third touch is a failure.”

Time-thief 3 — Meetings that should have been documents. Recurring syncs where 80% is status reporting and the decision that actually mattered needed four minutes.

Kill rule: “If there’s no decision on the agenda, there’s no meeting. Convert to a written brief.”

Three rules, on the wall above your monitor by Tuesday. By the following Friday you’ll have your hours back — and the cognitive drag of un-made decisions will have lifted.

If the Friction Audit gives you the hours back, the next question is where you spend them. The Complete Presenter Bundle (£99) is the toolkit I open weekly for the work that matters most — decks that land, Q&A under pressure, openers, closers, storytelling, the prompts. Seven products plus three bundle-only bonuses, worth over £190 separately. The bundle exists because the friction was always one piece short →

💡 Tip — Before your next “quick question” Slack DM, write your answer in a public channel instead. Same effort. The next ten people who’d have asked won’t, because the answer is already there.

📊 Stat — Microsoft’s research on workplace attention has consistently found knowledge workers face an interruption every ~2 minutes during the workday — roughly 275 disruptions in an average day. The Friction Audit targets the recurring ones you’re already running.

🎭 Power Move — At the start of any recurring meeting, ask one question: “What’s the decision we need from this conversation?” If nobody can answer in one sentence, cancel it. Reclaim 30 minutes.

📖 Read — Slow Productivity by Cal Newport (Portfolio, 2024 — still the sharpest book on the shelf in 2026). The frame: do fewer things, work at a natural pace, obsess over quality. The exact opposite of “productivity hacks”, and far more useful.

Here’s the truth about why most productivity systems quietly fail. The cost of a small task isn’t the task itself — it’s the decision-making surrounding it. Choosing which template, deciding when to reply, picking whether this email deserves attention now: each costs almost nothing on its own. But you make hundreds a week, and they compound into hours of cognitive drag.

A rule is a pre-made decision. You make it once, in calm, when you have judgement. From that moment on, the rule decides — not you. The cost of execution drops to near zero because the cognitive work has already been paid for.

Three principles for rules that hold:

1 — Rules must be unambiguous. “Reply quickly to important emails” isn’t a rule. “Reply within 2 hours, but only if the sender is on this list of eight people” is.

2 — Rules must fail safely. Decide what happens when the rule doesn’t fit before the moment arrives. (For my two-touches rule, touch 3 gets one line back: “I’m going to be unhelpful here unless I rebuild context. What’s the one thing you need from me?”)

3 — Rules are revisable, not violatable. The rule holds until you sit down and rewrite it. Breaking it mid-week defeats the point — the cognitive cost returns the second you start re-deciding.

Most productivity hacks add a system to manage your decisions. Kill rules remove the decisions. The first scales linearly with workload. The second compounds in the other direction — every applied rule saves time forever.

Find your buried time-thieves in 60 seconds with this prompt:

Search my email and meeting notes from the last 30 days. Find the 5 patterns where I’m restating context, re-deciding the same small thing, or repeating myself across people. For each, give me: 1. The pattern (in 10 words or fewer). 2. The estimated time it costs me per week. 3. One single-sentence rule that would eliminate it. Sort by time saved, descending.

The output is your Friction Audit in machine-assist form. Sense-check it — the model will guess, you decide — then promote the top three into actual rules.

Your weekly unfair advantage.

This week, Microsoft Copilot has one job: find the recurring meetings on your calendar where no decision is ever actually made. Open Copilot in Teams and paste:

Review my recurring meeting notes from the past 6 weeks. For each meeting series, tell me: the percentage of sessions that ended with a written decision or named action owner, and the percentage that ended with status updates only. Rank by lowest decision-rate first.

The bottom three meetings on that ranking are your candidates for kill rule #3: “If there’s no decision on the agenda, there’s no meeting.” Convert them to written briefs and reclaim the time.

This week’s challenge:

Run the Friction Audit before Friday. Twenty minutes. Four 5-minute steps. Find your three. Write your three rules.

Then reply and send me your rule #1. I read every reply, and I’m collecting the sharpest kill rules readers send — I’ll share a handful (anonymously) in a future edition. Sentence eight was the most-quoted line from last week’s challenge; this week we’re collecting sentence ones.

P.S. Next week we move into Executive Presence — and I’m giving you The 60-Second Authority Reset. It’s a three-part body-language sequence you run in the 60 seconds before walking into a high-stakes room. Senior people read posture, breath cadence, and where your hands settle within four seconds of you entering — and most people inherit those signals from how they felt 10 minutes earlier. The Reset hijacks them. You’ll have it Thursday.

🫶 Loved it | 👌 It was OK | 👎 Not for me

Thanks for reading!

Until next week,

Mary Beth

Keep building your edge — one conversation at a time.