Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - Master the Art of Time-Blocking to Eliminate Distractions | Nir Eyal - Behavioral Design Expert

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Lessons - Master the Art of Time-Blocking to Eliminate Distractions | Nir Eyal - Behavioral Design Expert · Success Story with Scott Clary

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  In this lessons episode, discover how time blocking becomes powerful when rooted in your core values,
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  not just task lists or urgency. Learn how applying the regret minimization framework helps you
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  protect your time like money, how scheduling for self-care relationships, and reflective work builds
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  a regret-free life, and how mastering internal triggers is the foundation for true productivity.
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  This is a quick question on time blocking because I want to sort of move on from that,
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  but just as I'm thinking through how to implement this and people that are listening are probably
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  I'm assuming thinking the same thing. When you time block your day out, because you before time
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  blocking you had this list of things you had to get done, how do you decide the allocation of time
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  for certain tasks? I mean, is it an urgent, important matrix, Eisenhower matrix,
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  ask thing that you apply or is there some other framework? Because again, I still have to get
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  through these things. It's important. There's a timestamp that an update that has to be done by.
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  So how do I sort of break up my day? So what's the big goal here? What's the purpose of figuring out
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  productivity and how we spend our time and time management? What's the big picture here? Why are we
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  doing this? Big picture for me at least and what's worked for me is I really was inspired by Jeff
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  Bezos has this regret minimization framework. The whole idea is that when we make these decisions
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  with how we spend our time, how we spend our money, we want to spend it in ways we don't
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  later regret. And so when we think about our money, people are very stingy with their money.
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  They put their money in banks. They keep it in vaults. They split checks. They clip coupons.
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  We do everything we can to save a buck. But when it comes to our time, we give it away to whoever
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  wants it. You need me to do this. The stupid thing in the news that doesn't involve me,
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  this war thousands of miles away. Oh, yeah, sure. I'll give that my attention. Whatever,
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  whatever stupid thing, take my attention. But it should be exactly the opposite. Because while
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  you can always make more money, you cannot make more time. Time is a limited resource. I don't
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  care if you're Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. You have the same 24 hours in the day and a limited
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  time on earth. So we should be very stingy with our time, but generous with our money.
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  And so the way we do that is by turning our values into time. It has to start with your values.
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  In order to minimize regret, in order to look back at your day, your week, your month, your year,
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  your lifetime, my goal, and the reason I did this research and wrote this book was so that I can
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  look back on every day, week, month, year, lifetime and say, you know what? I spent that the way I wanted
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  to, not the way a media company wanted me to, not the way someone else wanted me to, but the way
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  I wanted to. And so to do that, I start with my values. And so here's what you do. You look at
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  these three life domains, these three life domains start with you. You're at the center of these
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  three life domains. If you can't take care of yourself, you can't take care of other people,
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  you can't make the world a better place. So it starts with asking yourself, how would the person
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  I want to become spend time taking care of themselves? And you look at your calendar in the week
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  ahead, you take a blank calendar, whether you do it on paper or Google calendar, it doesn't matter,
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  just any tool where you can see your week ahead. And you ask yourself, how would the person I want
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  to become spend their time taking care of themselves? So for me, it's time for proper rest, right?
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  My, my, I used to tell my daughter, oh, it's past your bedtime. And then one day she looked at me,
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  she said, daddy, do you have a bedtime? And she was absolutely right. I was being a hypocrite.
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  Now I have a bedtime time time to take care of myself by going to the gym. People's, oh, health,
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  health is very, very important. That's super important. They'll spend too much money on vitamins and
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  pills and potions and powders. But when it comes to spending time in the gym, do you have that
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  time scheduled? Have you made that commitment to yourself to do that thing that you said you
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  want to do for your personal health? So it comes down to first scheduling the time to take care
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  of yourself. By the way, it can include time for fun. It should include time for fun. You love
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  playing video games? Awesome. Put in your calendar. You like social media? Put it in your calendar.
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  That's the most important thing. Then the next life domain is your relationships. And I think part
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  of the reason that we have a low-minus epidemic in the United States is because we have lost these
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  institutions that used to hold time for relationships on our calendars. You know, we used to have
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  the church group and the Kiwanis Club and the local events that now as society became more and
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  more secular, people don't have those those institutions that brought them in. And I'm not saying
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  you have to be religious per se, but we need to bring back those regular places in our calendar
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  to interact with our relationships, especially men. Men in particular, we let our best buddies kind
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  of go. You know, they move away. They drift away and our relationships kind of starve to death.
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  So put that time in your calendar for your most important friends, your family, your
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  kids, your wife, your spouse, right? Whoever it is, if there's someone important in your life,
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  then fill up your calendar with the time that you ask yourself, how would the person I want to
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  become spend time with their most important relationships? That's the second life domain.
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  The third life domain is work. Okay, most people start with work. And I actually think we should
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  end with work. And then work subdivides into two kinds of work. Okay, this is where we spend most
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  of our waking hours. Work can need to be divided into what's called reactive work. Reactive work
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  is reacting to emails, reacting to notifications, reacting to taps on the shoulders from colleagues.
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  That's reactive work. And then we have what's called reflective work. Reflective work is the kind of
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  work that can only be done without distraction, planning, strategizing, thinking for God's sakes,
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  requires us to work without distraction. Most people spend their entire day doing reactive work,
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  right? They look to their email inbox and tell them what they do. They look at their to do list
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  to tell them what they do. They ask their boss what they should be doing. As opposed to
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  planning at least some time in your day for that reflective work, right? That can only be done
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  without distraction. And if you're not planning that time for reflective work, I promise you,
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  you're running real fast in the wrong direction. So that's how we build that calendar. So
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  when you look at you, your relationships, then your work, now you filled out what your ideal
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  week would look like. Is it going to be perfect? Are you going to follow to the tea? Of course not.
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  You're always going to fall off track from time to time. But now as soon as you fall off track and
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  you're doing something else, even if it sounds important in the minute, you can always look back
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  on that calendar and say, wait a minute, wait a minute, is this traction? Is this what I said I was
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  going to do? Or is it distraction? Is it anything else? It's so funny how I, you know, when you
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  when you lay it out like that, it's so simple. But I would assume that most people in their entire
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  life, like you mentioned before, they're only ever to even a small degree planning the reactive work
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  and everything else is just ad hoc, right? Right. Right. Planning the relationship, the person,
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  like I, I feel like most people go through life without ever purposefully putting any kind of
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  energy into planning those things. And I think that's why you want to, you want to have extraordinary
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  things, you want to be an extraordinary person, you have to do extraordinary things, right? You
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  want to be average, do whatever else does. Yeah. But it's not even it's, it's so sad how the bar
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  for extraordinary seems to be so low. It's true. These are not complicated concepts. It's very
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  very, very true. But you know, the thing is, it's so much easier to have an easy excuse, right?
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  It's the news. It's Mark Zuckerberg. It's this, it's that it must, it's my ADHD. There's so many
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  ways to get out of taking personal responsibility, just taking a few steps, right? Just doing a
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  few couple of things here where there's four steps, right? Master internal triggers that we didn't
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  really talk about it, just a little bit around, understand this by the way, this is the most
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  important step. If you don't do this first, nothing else. You can talk about that a little bit more
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  too, as we will understand that. Remember those internal triggers we talked about earlier,
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  boredom, anxiety, uncertainty. If you don't understand the root cause of the problem,
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  you will always get distracted by one thing or another, whether it's too much news, too much
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  booze, too much football, too much Facebook, you're always going to get distracted by something
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  unless you understand what you are trying to escape. What's that uncomfortable icky, sticky feeling
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  that some distraction is solving for you, okay? That's the first and most important step. If you
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  don't solve that, nothing else matters. That you have to figure out how to master those internal
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  triggers and you don't have to go to therapy for this. You just have to have a tool in your toolkit
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  right ago so that when you feel bored, when you feel anxious, when you feel lonely, when you feel
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  uncertain, you know what to do with that sensation as opposed to trying to escape it. I don't want to
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  feel it. Let me click it away. Let me scroll it away. Let me drink it away. No, you're going to deal
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  with it in a healthy way that leads it towards traction, okay? So that's step number one, master
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  internal triggers. Step number two, which we've been talking about the most, make time for traction,
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  right? Planning out what it is you're going to do and when you're going to do it sounds so simple.
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  Most people don't take that step because they realize if they did, they would actually have to
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  do the hard work. That's the truth. I've heard every, oh, I work in the services business. I can't
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  plan my time. I have international clients. I have distributed teams. I have kids. I have this. I
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  have all these excuses when we're not willing to face the fact that if we actually said, you know what,
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  11 o'clock, I'm going to go to the gym and then I'm going to go to the gym. That's something people
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  don't want to do. I don't want to do the behavior. So I'm not going to, I'm not going to plan the time
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  because they haven't done step one. They haven't dealt with the uncomfortable sensation in the first
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  place. Okay. So that's why step one is so, so, so important. So step everyone, master internal
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  triggers, step number two, make time for traction, step number three, hack back the external triggers.
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  So this is where we talk about the pings, the dings, the rings, even though they only account for
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  about 10% of your distractions, we go through systematically. How do you work through each and
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  every one of those? Not only the usual suspects, you know, the, the things on your phone and computer,
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  that's kindergarten. That's very, very easy to deal with. I can show you in about five minutes
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  how to make your phone indestractable. The harder stuff that people don't really want to deal with
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  are the stupid meetings that are nothing but distractions that we didn't need to be in. The emails
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  that didn't need to be sent or received that are nothing but distractions. Our kids, we love
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  into death, but they can be a huge source of distraction. So we go step by step through each
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  and one of these external triggers. And then the last step is to prevent distraction with packs.
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  A pack is a pre-comment device is when we decide in advance what will be the consequence of
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  getting distracted and we make a pact with ourselves or others to make sure that that doesn't happen.
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  It's the last line of defense. And I promise you, if you use these four steps in concert,
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  just do one small thing in each of these four steps. Anyone can become indestractable.
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  Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so
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  you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the
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  links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.