Lessons - Six Cognitive Distortions that Waste Your Time

Welcome to the lessons episodes of Success Story. These lessons episodes will be shorter clips from past guests, accomplished value community members, and myself. In each short episode, we'll feature concise and insightful actionable conversations and tactics, providing you with real-world strategies and tips to help you achieve your personal and professional goals. If you're seeking a no-nonsense approach to growth and progress, you've come to the right spot. Settle in, take notes, and enjoy. You definitely don't need to tell me that life is passing by faster and faster every single day. With a million different projects on the go and honestly enough aspirations to fill several lifetimes, I am all too aware the time is slipping away, and I'm still young. But time is a precious and fleeting resource, but what if I told you you were wasting it without even realizing? We've covered cognitive distortions here before, black and white thinking, catastrophizing. I've noticed that a number of these distortions are particularly relevant to time. They warp our perception of it, leading to an unhealthy relationship with the clock that can have far-reaching consequences for our well-being, productivity, and creativity. Today, I want to take a closer look at the cognitive distortions that stop us from making the most of our days, and how we can start challenging them for better results. Let's get into it. Let's look at all or nothing reasoning. This is also called dichotomous thinking. This cognitive distortion is characterized by two extremes, it's either all good or all bad. I've got an example for this when I think you'll all relate to, even if you pretend not to. Picture this. It's Monday morning after a pretty jam packed weekend, you've got a healthy to-do list waiting for you. There are emails begging for responses and projects that need your attention, one that alarm goes off, you accidentally hit snooze, and the rest of the morning away. It's midday by the time you wake up, of course, if you started now, you'd still get a solid six or seven hours of work in, but all or nothing reasoning tells us that it's a total right off. The day is room, you might as well go back to the bed. I'm not sure what the logic is behind this, but that's the point. It's an irrational perspective, it's not a logical one. Imagine how many hours we'd save by taking life an hour at a time, rather than compartmentalizing it into 24 hour blocks. The second thing that we have to be aware of is overestimating or underestimating time. One would call this less of a distortion, and more of a lapse in judgment. It certainly gets better with experience, but there's nothing quite so disarming as realizing you've underestimated or overestimated the time it takes you to complete a task. I don't know about you, but when I'm pressed for time and have a lot of tasks on my plate, I tend to do one of two things. Either underestimate how long something will take me and then get overwhelmed, or overestimate it and end up feeling like I've wasted tons of hours. Either way, it's not great news or productivity. So to avoid this distortion, we need to focus on accuracy over speed, take the time to accurately estimate how long each project will take before diving in. This will help you structure your day and your week in your life. And I've come up with a system for this, which is to break up my regular tasks and the categories based on their complexity. For example, writing emails, writing blog posts, creating a website, and keep a record of how long each take. After a while, I've got enough data points to create averages for each category. It's a very simple solution, but sometimes simple as the most effective. The next cognitive distortion we have to be aware of is the present bias. See, we humans have been commenting on procrastination since ancient Greece. It's a common thread between all of us. To varying degrees, we value our present comfort over any potential future gain. This is what we call the present bias. And yes, you might have the most important investor call of your career in a few days time, but it's easy to get distracted by the tasks that give a short-term gratification. Like posting business, social media content or replying to email, it's not just all Netflix. See, the present-day stuff makes us feel productive even if they aren't the most pressing tasks. See, I've learned to be very aware of this bias, but it's not always obvious. One of the most effective ways to overcome this is to use the eyes and hour matrix. This is basically a matrix that categorizes all of your tasks in a day and a week into urgent and important, and then it helps you decide what to work on. The next cognitive distortion is called time confetti. So who here is guilty of the five-minute doom scroll? This one where during little time pockets throughout the day, you take a break by filling your minutes with something low-value. For me, this often happens when I'm trying to procrastinate on something, I'll tell myself I just need a five-minute break, and then I end up spending 30 minutes scrolling to Instagram or Twitter. It's time confetti. It's gone as soon as you spend it, but the effects last much longer than that. So confetti is so small, just a few minutes here and there. But it doesn't stay small for long, and the scariest part is that you never really notice how much time you've just wasted, because it's in such small chunks. Five minutes here, ten minutes there, take a long lunch, scroll on your phone in the bathroom, whatever it is, it adds up, and it takes away a huge amount of your life. The fifth thing we have to be aware of is called Parkinson's Law. Just as gas will expand to fill a space, work expands to fill the time you give it. You devote three hours to a task, guaranteed it'll take you three hours to finish. This is Parkinson's Law. The idea that work expands is to fill the time available for its completion. Knowing this, it's important not to give yourself too much time for a task. The more wiggle room you're going to give yourself, the bigger the task will become in your mind, and the longer it will take to complete it. There are obvious holes to compoke here. I mean, you can't set yourself 15 minutes for a detailed financial report and expect the end result to be perfect, and you probably won't take five hours to write one email. Even if that's the time you've allowed yourself, but it's a useful concept if you understand what the implications are. It's less of a literal perspective and more of a wake up call. Our minds get very fixated on the fictional constraints and deadlines we set, and we can either let that reality take over or we can use it to our advantage. The next one is called Time Scarsity Mentality. At the beginning of today's video, I mentioned how quickly time seems to be flying, and ironically, that's a prime example of time scarcity mentality. We've got it in our heads that no matter how many hours there are in a day, we don't have enough. We feel rushed and hurried. We look at the years laid out before us and think that's all, that's all I've got, and of course, tension at play here is that no one, not a single person on this planet knows how much time they've got left. So my mind we've got two options, assume we're rich with time, or believe we're just moments away from running out. I know which one I prefer. So now you know some of these distortions, how do we actually combat them? How do we fight them? Because entrepreneurs were not in the business of wasting time. Every second is a second we could spend investing in our business and our baby that we're trying to grow, right? Don't get me wrong. I'm not an advocate for workaholism, and I'll never be an advocate for workaholism. We need our rest, but there's a huge difference between rest and waste. Your best chance at combating cognitive distortions is to observe which ones apply to you and how they're affecting your productivity. As you were reading through the list of distortions, if you were listening to it, did any make you feel particularly attacked? That's a good spot to start. It might be a good indication of the distortions you frequently engage with. For example, if you're typically an organized person, but your long term deadlines always end up in a rush, you've got a present bias problem. If you spend hours laying out your calendar, but always seem to be in a rush, it's probably a case of underestimation. So the key to battling cognitive distortions is to understand them. And the best way to do that is by taking this step back and looking at how they're affecting you. To identify which ones are causing problems in your life, it's just a case of consciously changing your behavior and working against them. See, cognitive distortions will run our lives if we're not careful. Some people gain awareness of them through therapy, others through learning the hard way. The worst place to be is in a state of oblivion, and that's why I create videos like this. So I encourage all of you to take some time watching this video, write down this list, and figure out exactly where all of your time is draining away. You might have 40-50 years ahead of you yet, but that doesn't mean you have to make your time less valuable. Use it for all its worth.