#553: How to Become Indistractable

If all of our behaviors are spurred by a desire to escape discomfort in one form or another, what that means is that time management is pain management. I don't care what life hacks you just read about, or what guru tells you to take a cold shower at 4 AM. None of that stuff works unless, first and foremost, we learn how to deal with discomfort.

Everything we do results from a desire to escape discomfort

It turns out that two-thirds of Americans don't keep any sort of calendar. Think about how crazy this is. We spend so much time and effort protecting our stuff. We lock up our money in banks, we have home security systems, and we have car alarms. We protect our stuff because we don't want anybody to steal it. But when it comes to our time, we say, 'Come on in and take it; do whatever you want with it.' If you don't plan your day, why are you surprised when someone else plans it for you?

Between email and meetings, the time left over for the average knowledge worker to do everything they have to do in their day is only an hour and a half

Every habit-forming product aims to attach the product's use to some kind of uncomfortable emotion

Two-thirds of people with a smartphone never change their notification settings. That's ridiculous. Can we really complain about technology addicting us if we haven't taken 10 minutes to change the notification settings?

The more I dove into the psychology of procrastination, the more I realized that we have it all wrong. The technology is not the cause of distraction; it's the symptom. The root cause is much more interesting, and much more important to identify, if we are really going to tackle distraction.

When there's an identity involved, we become more likely to live up to that moniker. A devout Muslim doesn't ask themselves every day, 'Should I have that gin and tonic?' Devout Muslims don't drink alcohol, period. It's who they are.

Habit-forming products appreciate in value the more you interact with them

The time you plan to waste is not wasted time

Open offices are a hotbed of distraction

There's this magic thing that happens when you let non-urgent emails wait: they decompose. This is called email decomposition. When you let non-urgent emails wait a little while, you won't need to answer most of them because people figure out stuff on their own, or something just gets crushed under the weight of some other priority and is no longer relevant.

If you're looking for distraction, it's easier than ever to find

We cannot call something a distraction unless we know what it distracted us from

If you want to get fewer emails, you have to send fewer emails