Time & Distraction downfalls

Timestamps 

00:00:00: Introduction 00:01:06: Doing what we know we should do 00:02:47: Distraction vs traction 00:04:48: Techniques to combat distraction 00:05:35: The 10-minute rule 00:06:38: Distracted vs indistractable people 00:07:41: The to-do list 00:08:35: Schedule syncing 00:10:55: "The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought" 00:00:00: Final thoughts   

Interview Transcription 

Helen Tupper: Welcome to the Squiggly Careers podcast.  I'm Helen, one of your hosts, and this episode is part of a special series that Sarah and I have created to bring to life some of the ideas and insights in our new book, You Coach You.  In this series of six episodes, all coming out in January, we'll be talking to experts to get their thoughts on how we can help ourselves through some of the knottier moments in a Squiggly Career.  That might be coping with a challenging relationship at work, or when you feel like your progress has stalled, or maybe how you figure out how to find more meaning in your job.  Every episode relates to a chapter in You Coach You, and today we're going to focus on our time chapter, and specifically the distractions that can be our downfalls.  You'll hear me talking to Nir Eyal, author of Indistractable, about how we can manage our attention and ensure that we find our focus at work.  So, here's what Nir had to say about why this is such an important area to coach yourself on in work today.  Nir Eyal: This is the defining skill of the century, because there's no area of your life that is not affected by your ability to decide how you want to spend you time and how you want to spend your attention.  So, whether it's your physical health, whether it's your mental health, whether it's your relationships; and of course, when it comes to your work and your career, all of these domains of life require us to be able to decide what we want to do and carry out that goal.  Because, it doesn't matter what kinds of ambitions we have, whether it's to read more books or to exercise or spend more time with our family or to be more productive in our careers, if we can't follow through, if we don't do what we say we're going to do, we're not going to live the kind of life we know we deserve.  That's why this is really the skill of the century, because in this day and age, it's no longer about knowing what to do.  We all basically know what to do.  Who doesn't know how to lose weight and eat right?  We know, everybody knows basically that chocolate cake isn't as healthy as a salad.  Who doesn't know that if we want better relationships, we have to spend time with the people we love and give them our full attention without distraction?  Who doesn't know that if we want to accelerate our careers, we have to do the hard work, especially the hard stuff that other people don't want to do?  We all know this.  The question is, why don't we do the things we know that we should?  And so, that's really why I wrote this book for myself more than anyone else.  I had struggled with distraction for many, many years.  I was probably one of the most distracted people you've ever met.  But I wrote this book, because I realised that I was constantly in my own way, that I wasn't able to be the kind of person I wanted to be, be the kind of father I wanted to be, be the kind of author I wanted to be, unless I could work without distraction, to truly be "indistractable".   Helen Tupper: Is it more about managing your motivation than it is about resisting the allure of distraction, because if you've not got the motivation, then everything else is just tips and tools that you're never going to put into action?  Nir Eyal: That's a really good point.  So, I think maybe it's a good place to talk about what is distraction really.  The best way to understand whether you really get what distraction is about is to know the opposite of distraction, what distraction is not.  So, most people think the opposite of distraction is focus, but that's not exactly true.  The opposite of distraction is not focus, the opposite of distraction is traction.  They're both words that come from the same Latin route, trahere, that means "to pull".  And you'll notice that both words end in the same six letters, spelling "action".    So, traction is any action that pulls you towards what you say you're going to do, things that you do with intent, things that move you closer to your goals and help you live out your values.  The opposite of traction is distraction.  Distraction is any action that pulls you further away from what you said you were going to do, further away from your goals and your values.  So, this is not just semantics, this is super important, because anything can be a distraction if it's not what you planned to do.    So, one of the biggest things we see happening with low performers in their careers is that they prioritise the urgent and the easy work at the expense of the hard and important work that moves their careers forward.  What does this look like?  This used to happen to me every single day.  I would sit down at work and I would say, "Oh, you know what, I've got that really big project I have to work on, it's super important, I'm not going to get distracted, I'm not going to procrastinate, I'm going to work on that thing right now, here I go, I'm going to get started, but first let me check some email.  Let me work on those easy projects on my to-do list, just to get started, right, just to get going, because I've got to do that stuff anyway.  Isn't checking email a productive task?  I'm doing work-y type stuff".  What I didn't realise is that that is the most dangerous form of distraction, the kind that tricks you, because you don't even realise that you're distracted; because, if what you intended to do with your time was not check email and you're doing all this other stuff, that therefore is, by definition, a distraction.  So, what can you start doing right now?  The most important step is mastering the internal triggers, is understanding why you get distracted so you can do something about it.  So, what I want to arm people with are arrows in their quiver that they can use whenever they feel that discomfort, different techniques that you can use so that when you feel stressed, anxious, bored, lonely, whatever the case might be, you know what to do with it so that you use that discomfort as rocket fuel.  What we see is that high performers, it's not that they don't feel bad, it's not that they don't feel lonely and stressed and anxious; they feel the same things everybody feels.  What's different about high performers is that they take that discomfort and they use it like rocket fuel to move them towards traction, rather than what most people do is they try and escape that discomfort with distraction.  So, what do you do?  Here's one technique that anybody can start using today.  This is one of dozens of different techniques in my book, Indistractable, but this is one that I use all the time.  It's called The 10-Minute Rule.  The 10-minute rule says that you can give in to any distraction, whether it's checking email when you want to work on that big project, whether it's eating that chocolate cake if you're on a diet, whether it's smoking that cigarette that you're trying to quit, whatever the case might be, you can give in to the distraction, but not right now.  You can give in to that distraction in just 10 minutes, just 10 minutes.  So, by not telling yourself "no", you're telling yourself "not yet", and it turns out that that's a much healthier approach, just setting the timer and saying, "Okay, I can do that thing, I can give in to the distraction, but in a few minutes".  What you're doing is you're essentially teaching yourself, you're giving yourself the self-efficacy that, "Yeah, I can resist a little bit longer".  Then the 10-minute rule becomes the 11-minute rule, becomes the 12-minute rule, becomes the 15-minute rule.  And what you're doing is teaching yourself, "I don't have to give in to every urge as soon as I feel it.  So, here's the big different difference between distracted people and indistractable people.  An indistractable person knows why they got distracted and they do something about it.  So, Paulo Coelho has a wonderful quote; he says, "A mistake repeated is a decision".  So, if you constantly get distracted by the same thing again and again and again, you are deciding to be distractable.  How many times do you get distracted by something before you say, "Enough!  I'm going to do something about it"?  An indistractable person says, "Okay, you got me once, I see why I got distracted.  Now, I'm going to take steps today to prevent getting distracted tomorrow", and what do they do?  They look at the distraction, they say, "Okay, was it an internal trigger?  Was it a sensation that I was trying to escape from?  What was that sensation?  How can I put tools in place so that next time I feel it, I don't try and escape that sensation, I deal with that, I work with it?  If not an internal trigger, was it an external trigger.  Was it a ring that interrupted me at the wrong time?  What can I do now to shut down that external trigger that doesn't serve me, so that I don't serve it?"    Then finally, was it a planning problem?  Did I properly say to myself, "Hey, what am I going to do with this time in advance?" as opposed to, I see a lot of people who run their life on this antiquated, terrible technique that we're all taught is supposed to make us more productive, called "the to-do list".  The to-do list is one of the worst things you can do for your personal productivity, and specifically I'm saying running your life on a to-do list.  Keeping a list of things that you need to get to, that's okay.    What you don't want to do is wake up in the morning and say, "What do I do with my time?  What's on my to-do list?" big, big mistake, as opposed to a calendar, specifically a timebox calendar.  Because remember, the only way to know if you got distracted from something is to know what you got distracted from.  If you just have white space on your calendar, what did you get distracted from?  You didn't decide in advance how you want to spend your time, so you can't call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from.  One of the techniques I talk about in the book is called Schedule Syncing, and this will change your life.  So, if you're in a position of authority, if you have people working for you, fantastic, then you really have no excuse.  But what if your boss is demanding your time and then people say, "Well, I can't have reflective work, because I'm constantly on call, my bosses are constantly asking me for things".  Okay, here's a solution.  The solution is, once you make that time-box calendar, once you make time for traction, you have an artefact, you have something you can share with other people.  So, what you want to do is to book time with your manager, this can be ten minutes a week, it takes very little time.  You say, "Okay, I need a conversation with you, ten minutes Monday morning, can we chat?" and what you do is you show them your timebox calendar.  You literally do a printout or screenshot and show them what your calendar looks like from 9.00am to 5.00pm during working hours, and you're showing them, "Hey, here's what I'm doing.  I'm going to spend an hour on email here, I've got this meeting, I've got this project.  Here's how I'm planning every minute of my day".  Then, you have another thing you're going to show them.  You're going to show them the list of things you couldn't fit on that calendar and you're going to ask your boss, "Look, here's the stuff that I plan to do, here's my calendar, and here's this list of stuff you asked me to do.  I'm having trouble prioritising; can you help me prioritise?"  That's your boss' most important job, is to prioritise.  If you're saying, "I don't know where to put this stuff.  Help me make these trade-offs", they will always, if you give them the opportunity, they will say, "You know what, that meeting, that's actually way less important than that other to-do that I really need to get done", or whatever the case might be.  Now you're giving them visibility into how you spend your time, and this is so revolutionary, because let me tell you, if you've ever managed people, you are constantly thinking, "How is this person spending their time?" and we don't want to ask.  Managers don't want to ask, because they don't want you to feel like you're being micromanaged.  So, don't put them in that awkward position; you do it.  You proactively give them visibility into your schedule; it will change your life, because now they can see, in black and white, how you spend your time, and they can help you reprioritise what's important and what's not important.  Helen Tupper: Are there any other final words of wisdom for someone who might be listening to this, and the reason that they have come to this episode is because they are feeling a bit overwhelmed and maybe unfocused?  To that person listening now who's started feeling like that, is there any final advice that you would offer to them?  Nir Eyal: It's not your fault, okay.  I think we've been told that if you're bad with time management, if you feel like you struggle with prioritisation, that there must be something broken with you.  Even if you do struggle with your time and attention, it's not your fault, but it is your responsibility.  So, how do we deal with them?  Fundamentally, if you want to boil down what I learned over the past five years of research into this field, it's this mantra that, "The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought", that distraction and procrastination is not a character flaw, it's simply that we haven't learned how to deal with those impulses, those urges that can lead us towards distraction.    So, what do we do about it?  We take steps today to prevent being distracted tomorrow.  If you wait until the last minute, you will lose.  If we plan ahead, if we realise that the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought, thinking ahead, there is no distraction we can't overcome and anyone can become indistractable.  Helen Tupper: Thank you so much for listening to today's episode.  Next in our series, you're going to hear Sarah talking to Ethan Kross, the author of Chatter, about self-belief.  You Coach You is out now, so whether you want to develop in a new direction, or build your resilience reserves, we've written our book to help you.  There are more than 50 ideas for actions and over 100 coach-yourself questions, and lots and lots of tools to try out.  It is a very, very practical book.  We would love it if you could support and share our work.  We love all of your reviews and would love to get some reviews on what you think about the book, so let us know.  Email us, either at helen&sarah@squigglycareers.com, or tag us in your posts on social media; we do love to see your "shelfies", so the book on a shelf in your house is always brilliant to see!  You can just tag us @amazingif.  Speak to you soon, everyone.  Bye for now.