Speedbumps

Speedbumps are those tiny, seemingly insignificant friction points that create just enough resistance to derail your momentum before you even begin a task.

Speedbumps are the micro-aggressions in your daily work.

The small emotional hill you have to get over to begin. They are the task before the task. The thing that saps your energy before you even start!

We vastly underestimate the importance of focus and finding flow for achieving really meaningful and impactful work. You may already be avoiding major distractions like your phone, but are overlooking the friction points that are killing your motivation.

Examples of speedbumps:

• Finding your workout clothes / ear buds to go to the gym
• docker compose takes 2 minutes to start and be usable
• Starting your dev stack is a series of 4 commands
• Checking the mail involves finding the mailbox key
• You're ready to start, but you're in the wrong location
• You need to launch that program that takes forever to boot up
• CI tests that take half an hour to run
• First you need to send the email you don't want to write
• Any small friction in getting started or moving a task forward

#speedbumps

Related Posts:

I often write about how I've navigated around a little speedbump in my work day. Here are some of the most useful ones.

• Various ways I've customized my shell to reduce speedbumps
• /usr/bin/just do it - using the Just CLI tool to simplify command line tasks
• How writing "throw away" tools can be useful in projects
• Project / Task Specific tools are cheap and easy with AI now
• pulllog and pulldiff two handy Git related CLI aliases