I recently watch a Youtube from Nir Eyal and Vishen Lakhani titled The 4 Keys To Indistractable & Powerful Focus.

What I am about to share here is the 2nd of the fours lessons there.

I am sharing this first because this is something that I am currently practicing before I watched the video.

I usually skip Youtube ads, but when I saw Vishen Lakhani sharing that he does not use To Do Lists but instead a calendar, I had to finish it. Of course in this ad is where I got the link to The 4 Keys To Indistractable & Powerful Focus.

Let’s get started!

Do you plan for your day? Do you specify by what time will you do something? 

Nir Eyal mentioned that “If you don’t plan your day, somebody is going to plan it for you.”

And that usually is the case. 

So you have to plan our weekdays for work. You should also plan for you weekends!

How can we call if something is a distraction if we don’t know what it is distracting you from?

We only have a limited set of time. We have to make sure that we spend it properly. Time is one of the most important commodities in life. We all have 24 hours. We can be generous with our money, but we have to be stingy with our time.

Money can be earned and re-earned, but spent time cannot be retrieved. 

With this, we have to be mindful how we spend our time. And one of the techniques in doing so is managing our calendars properly. 

To be indistractable, we have to define how do we want to spend our time. 

Values are the attributes of the person we want to become. You decide your values based on the person you want to become. 

Use a Timebox Calendar. Basically you need to plan out what you want to do, and when do you want to do something. 

To build a Timebox Calendar, you need to look for the week ahead in advance. Then ask yourself, how would the person you want to become, spend their time in this 3 life domains.

• Personal Life – time for yourself for exercise, rest. These should be in your calendars. Time for fun as well.
• Relationships – some people don’t make time for relationships
• Work – how would the person I want to become spend their time at work? Don’t be reactive! Plot your time accordingly. Plot your time for reflective work, wherein work without distractions. Put some time for thinking time. 

Don’t measure your productivity based on your To Do Lists, whether you have accomplished the things that you have set there. To Do Lists do not have any constraints, and can keep expanding. If you base your productivity here, you would feel down because you can never complete your To Do List. 

Rather, measure yourself based on this quote for Nir Eyal:

“Did I do what I said I was going to do, for as long as I said I would, without distractions?”