Friction is every small obstacle between you and a finished task: the medication in the kitchen when you rest in the living room, the laundry three rooms away, the charger that lives upstairs. Individurally trivial, frictions are paid dozens of times a day, every day — which makes them the most expensive invisible cost in the home (see Capacity & Demand for the demand-side view).

The test for friction is simple: for any recurring task, how many steps and how many trips does it take? Each one is a chance to stumble, to be caught mid-task by fog, or to spend what you didn't need to spend. A friction audit — walking one task from intention to finish and counting — reliably turns up several removable steps.

Reducing friction is not laziness disguised as design. The body was always the point, not the tidiness of the storage.

Repeated effort is the same work done many times: filling one glass many times a day, walking to the same cupboard, gathering the same things for the same routine. Duplication is the fix — a spare of the cheap essentials in each place you spend time, so the trip disappears from the routine rather than repeating forever.

The one-hand reach standard: where possible, the things you use while resting should be reachable from lying down without sitting up — water, phone, medication, a snack, a blanket, earplugs. A rest station in each room you use costs one deliberate setup and removes hundreds of small exertions per month.

This is also, quietly, a safety matter: a day spent unable to reach water is a worse day than it needed to be. Rest stations are not clutter; they are infrastructure.

Every routine has a full version and a floor version, and knowing the floor version in advance is a low-energy skill. Washing: shower, or basin wash, or the parts that matter. Dressing: the comfortable set kept together and within reach, rather than assembled from four drawers each morning. Food: the five-meal rotation that needs almost nothing, for the days when anything more is too much.

The floor version is not a failure version — it is the version that keeps the task happening. A routine that collapses when capacity drops was always too long; a shortened routine keeps its place in the day and expands again when capacity allows.

Choosing the version in advance matters: deciding 'today is a basin-wash day' when rested is one decision, whereas discovering it mid-shower when it's already too late is a small crisis and a real cost.

Conventional organising optimises for looks: things hidden away in 'proper' places. Visible organisation optimises for capacity — the basket in open reach, the medication where it is taken, the frequently-used things on top rather than filed. Visual clutter does cost some people (sensory load is real), so the balance is personal: open where the item is used constantly, hidden where it is not, with the deliberate choice made once rather than the trade-off paid daily.

Accessible storage is the physical version of the same idea: the heavy things at waist height, no daily item at the back of the lowest cupboard, nothing that requires kneeling to reach kept in daily use. Where bending and reaching cost, rearranging once is cheaper than paying that cost indefinitely.

Transitions are the uncounted exertion between places and positions: getting up, crossing rooms, changing floor levels, moving from bed to chair. Reducing them — clustering what a room offers, keeping a set-up per floor, combining trips into one — removes a whole category of cost that never appears on any list.

Food access is where low-capacity days usually fail first: when eating depends on standing, chopping and washing up, the day comes where it is skipped — and skipped meals make everything else worse. A low-energy food setup is built in layers: things that can be eaten as-is within reach of the bed; a small set of near-zero-effort meals with their ingredients grouped together in one place; and batch or delivered options for the days above that.

Hydration is the same problem in miniature: if water is not within one-hand reach, it is under-drank all day, quietly. A large bottle at each rest station, refilled once when someone is up anyway, solves it more reliably than any reminder.

Medication organisation here means organisation only — a system for where medication lives and when it is visible (a dosette box by the bed, a written list), not advice about what to take. Decisions about medicines belong with prescribers; the part this collection covers is making sure the system doesn't add cost or lost doses.

Admin has a way of living everywhere — the letter on the counter, the form in a bag, the email in the pile — so every piece follows you around mentally (see Capacity & Demand on open loops). The fix is a single landing place: one physical folder and one folder on the phone, where anything administrative goes immediately, and a standing weekly minute to look rather than a constant half-attention all week.

A one-folder system works precisely because it refuses subcategories. With ME/CFS, sorting into systems is often the step that kills the task; one folder is findable when fog is heavy, and 'findable in fog' is the only filing standard that matters.

The same principle gives you a launch pad by the door: keys, charger, sunglasses, earplugs, the bag that goes with you — so leaving the house is one pickup rather than a house-wide search on a bad morning.

Two small principles carry a surprising amount of weight. One-touch: where possible, a thing is handled once — the coat on the hook by the door rather than the chair that needs clearing later, the post opened over the recycling bin so the envelope never lands. Each second touch is a second task, and second tasks are how a tidy room becomes an overwhelming one.

Leave-it-ready: finish a task at the step that makes the next start easy — the washer emptied but not the line, the pan soaking but not washed, the table laid for tomorrow's easy breakfast. The cost of finishing the last 20% is often paid from an empty budget, while the benefit of a ready start is collected on the next day's full one.

Combined, these two keep a home from sliding: not by adding effort, but by moving small bits of effort to where they cost least.

Low-energy cleaning is zone-based and permission-based: a small area done well beats a whole house started and abandoned, and the rest is allowed to wait without commentary. The lowest-cost tools matter here — a long-handled duster, wipes that live in the bathroom, a robot vacuum if that is ever possible — because they buy cleanliness with less body.

Laundry simplifies to the version that survives bad weeks: a basket within reach of where clothes come off, washing at the moment it is full rather than on a schedule, and drying at the lowest-effort setting available. Folding is the most skippable step in the home — a basket of clean clothes is a solved problem.

Partial completion is the principle underneath all of it: a task done in instalments is done, and the standard is capacity, not completeness. Half the washing-up finished with a rest in the middle is a working kitchen. The version of a task that exists is always worth more than the version that was supposed to exist.

Visitors without hosting means the visit happens on the house's real terms: you do not host, you receive. The no-hosting rule is a boundary worth having explicitly — no food preparation, no tidying in advance, no serving; the guest brings what they want or accepts what is there, and the kettle can be operated by anyone. (Scripts for saying this kindly are in Communication & Boundaries.)

Household standards are yours to set, not inherited. Many people keep standards that were set by a body they no longer have and a household that may no longer exist. Re-deciding them deliberately — what actually matters, what is only habit — is one of the larger capacity gains available in this collection.

Living alone changes the maths: there is no one to catch the second half of a task, so systems matter more (duplication, rest stations, delivered everything), and support has to be brought in deliberately rather than being ambient (see Support, Asking for Help & Being Understood). For supporters, the principle is autonomy: they can carry the task while the choices stay with you — asked, not assumed, and not redone differently once your back is turned. Practical support that removes your say costs more than it saves.