Christmas came early for me this year, in the form of a 1930’s Singer Featherweight, beautifully embellished with gilded scrolls. Gorgeous, no? I seriously squealed like a schoolgirl when I saw it. But the best thing about this gift is not its beauty, but its ability to reduce friction in my life.

I love vintage, all-metal sewing machines, and I generally rely on my beloved 1960’s Singer Rocketeer to do the heavy lifting for my sewing projects. But even though the Rocketeer is a fantastic, gloriously retro workhorse, it is also a beast, and sometimes it’s a little too heavy and cumbersome for me to set up on the kitchen table. (I don’t currently have a dedicated sewing room, which means the sewing has to be taken out and put away again every evening, unless we want to eat all our meals on the sofa, which we don’t.)

Enter the Featherweight: it weighs just 10 lbs, takes 30 nanoseconds to thread, purrs as softly as a kitten, and is easy to put away. There’s no friction involved, nothing to deter me from working on a few blocks for my nephew’s quilt, whenever I have a half-hour to spare.

I’ve been thinking a lot about friction lately, because reducing friction is one of the most important things we can do to form better habits and make progress toward our goals.

After my friend Solveig died, I found myself in a state of paralysis for several weeks, unable to return to my normal routine. I knew I was stuck, but I couldn’t see my way forward. It took me a while to realize that even though my life would never be the same, the paralysis, at least, could be overcome by creating new habits.

So I went to work on reducing friction. I signed up for a three-week sewing class and paid for it in advance, which made it very hard not to sew something at least once a week. I cleaned up the desktop on my Mac, so that the novel I’m revising is now the only thing I see when I open my computer.

I also began brushing up on my Norwegian skills over at DuoLingo. DuoLingo’s free website is quite simple to use, which makes it easy to learn new phrases and memorize vocabulary. It’s never too hard to get started each day, because the next lesson is always just a few clicks away.

I’m sure I’ve wandered off-topic here, but all of this is a rambling way of saying that I’m finally moving forward again: relearning Norwegian, making a quilt, revising a novel. None of these things are happening solely because I have a new sewing machine, an uncluttered laptop, or a usable website, but good tools–especially those that reduce friction–are a big help. If you want to make progress toward a goal, it never hurts to clear a few obstacles out of your way.