A structured way to see where your operational drag is coming from
The Friction Audit is a self-directed diagnostic tool. It helps you identify which areas of your operation are generating the most drag, and begins to surface the specific patterns worth examining more closely.
How the audit works
Below you'll find a set of diagnostic questions organized by operational area. These aren't scored. There's no rubric that converts your answers into a number. The purpose is to slow down and look carefully at each area of your working week. The friction often becomes visible simply through the act of considering these questions honestly.
Read each question. Take time with the ones that produce discomfort or resistance. That's where the information usually is.
Time and Calendar
When you look at your calendar at the start of a week, what proportion of it reflects choices you made versus defaults that accumulated?
On an average day, how much uninterrupted time do you have for focused work? Is that number what you'd choose if you were designing the day from scratch?
Which recurring meetings have you questioned in the last month? Which ones persist because it's easier to keep them than to have the conversation about stopping them?
How many times per week do you switch from deep work to reactive work and back? What initiates each switch?
Decisions and Approvals
Which decisions recur in your week that you or your team have made before in essentially the same form? What's preventing them from being resolved permanently?
How many things are waiting for your approval or sign-off right now? How many of them could proceed without it, if there were a clear enough standard?
When a team member brings you a question, is it more often because they don't know the answer or because they're not sure they have permission to act on what they know?
Communication Patterns
How many different channels do messages reach you through each day? Which of those channels have you deliberately chosen versus ones that just accumulated?
How often do you find yourself involved in a communication thread because you were added to it, rather than because your input is actually needed?
What's the average length of a message thread before a decision is reached? Is that length determined by the complexity of the decision or by how communication happens in your team?
How much time do you spend each week generating status updates or reports that could be automated or replaced with real-time visibility?
Delegation and Handoffs
Which tasks do you do personally that you've considered delegating but haven't? For each one: what specifically is the reason it hasn't been delegated?
When you hand work off to someone, how often does it come back requiring significant rework or clarification? What part of the handoff created that?
How do you currently know whether delegated work is on track without having to ask? If the answer involves asking, is that working?
Tool and System Overhead
List the tools you open every working day. For each one: is the value you get from it proportional to the attention it requires?
How many tools in your stack require manual entry of information that exists elsewhere? What's the cumulative time cost of that duplication each week?
When did you last remove a tool from your operation? What prompted that? What's preventing similar decisions about tools that aren't pulling their weight now?
What to do with what you found
If working through these questions surfaced specific friction points, the next step is a conversation about what addressing them might look like. Not all friction is equally tractable. The mapping phase of the program exists precisely to help determine which points are most worth addressing and in what order.
If the questions raised more uncertainty than clarity, that's also useful information. It often indicates that the friction is more diffuse and structural, which is something the program is designed to handle.