Five moves to reclaim your focus

Productivity is about getting meaningful work done, period. The human mind, the human brain, is not going to naturally end up in deep focus. What you have to do is re-architect your environment so you can do the meaningful things. We have this kind of almost reverential, kind of quasi-biblical approach to our to-do list. and that we look at it all the time. We bow to it, we write on it and do things. Everybody has a to-do list. I keep a to-don't list. And I think this is one that is actually close to universally practical. And so a to-don't list is you think about the things that waste your time, drain your energy, suck the very life out of you. You write those things down, then you don't do them, obviously, but you treat that to-don't list with the same sanctity with which you treat your to-do list. I don't know about the rest of you, but my head is just ticking through my own to-don't list that I am surfacing right now. So it's gonna embarrass me a little bit. Okay, Instagram, I have done the things. I have turned my phone to grayscale. I have made promises to myself to put my phone in other rooms. And somehow- You've set a time limit? I've set a time limit. Yeah. So- I would, I'll push you even further, man. Okay. Delete the app for a week and see how it goes. Yeah. That, that is the better approach, right? Just try it. Sometimes it's like crossing the bridge. That is hard. almost every day when I have my to-do list, I will put at the top, MIT, colon, most important task. I will do that first. Sometimes I will only write that on my to-do list, one thing, and then we'll fill in the rest of the to-do list once I accomplish that. We have a tendency in our bodies and minds that when we're faced with a big thing and some little things, we'll do the little things first and kind of eat our way up to the big thing, but we never actually reach there. We're wired not to want to confront these big, daunting tasks. And so the question is, do we change ourself or do we change our environment? And it's much easier to change your environment than it is to change yourselves. This question comes from Richard in Utah. What's your advice for workers whose most important projects keep getting deprioritized by leadership, adding new fires? Richard, number one, I feel your pain. What I learned to do was both conceptual and practical. The conceptual thing was, is actually don't assume that your boss is trying to torture you by doing this. I think a lot of times when things go poorly, we as human beings, we personalize it too much. Oh, my boss doesn't like me, and that's why she's doing this thing. My boss is incompetent, that's why she's doing these things. One could very well have a boss who's incompetent and doesn't like you. But in many cases, the boss is as beleaguered as you are, so have a little empathy for your boss. The second thing, which I did many times is this, listen, you want me to do this thing? Let me show you what I have on my list right now of things to do. I can add this, please tell me which of this current list do you want me to deprioritize? That usually stops them. And it forces them to think, because a lot of times those seven things are like, oh God, you're just still doing that? I didn't even realize you were still doing that. Get rid of that and do something else. Everyone is different, both personality, psychologically, and everyone's work is different. You want to impose some structure, not too much structure, but it's sort of a Goldilocks level of structure. And for me, that Goldilocks level of structure is, because I'm a writer, is in a word count. What other people might do is to say, I'm going to block out a certain amount of time. The clock can give us a form of structure that ultimately ends up being liberating. What you do is you set the kitchen timer and you then just work during that 25 minute segment and don't do anything else. That's gonna be undistracted time. And whatever I get done during that time is a win. The single biggest day-to-day motivator on the job is making progress in meaningful work. I love naming wins. Do you? Well, here's the thing. We have a lot of evidence about this. The thing is, we often don't see the progress that we make. And so I think actually recording the progress that you make, taking a progress ritual at the end of the day and writing down three ways you made progress that day is another way to see the progress that you're making to see those wins. Aida from the UK asks, Dan, in your productivity toolkit, what's the biggest trap that keeps people busy but doesn't move things forward for them? feeling that we get of accomplishment for knocking off things that don't matter. We want to do things that feel like we're making some progress. And so you clear out like 11 emails. That feels pretty good. I had five minutes today. What a great day. Yeah. All right. Would you actually would you actually accomplish? So I think that's the trap. I mean, it's cliche, but you can be busy but not productive.