Lessons - Master the Art of Time-Blocking to Eliminate Distractions | Nir Eyal - Behavioral Design Expert

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