4 Mental Traps That Kill Productivity - Nir And Far

Four mental traps that kill your productivity. Hey everyone, this is Nir Eyal, author of Indistractable how to Control your Attention and choose youe Life. And today we're going to be reading through this article with Nick Gray. Nick, how's it going?

It's going great. I'm really excited. So I'm going to read Nir's latest article and then occasionally Nir and I will check in and we'll get some behind the scenes commentary from Nir on what he was thinking writing this article and anything new and just additional context. So I will be reading the article and then Nir will be giving us the commentary along the way. For those that are new to the podcast, Nir, anything that they should know about our style that we do or what was your goal in thinking of wanting to do it in this way? I know you're writing these articles every single week, which is pretty cool.

Yeah, that's a good question, actually. So we never actually addressed that. So here's the thing. I read through these articles like 6,000 times when I write them, right? The writing, the first draft, the second draft, the rewriting, the editing. Like you read them so many times that it's daily difficult to kind of hear a new perspective or the last thing you want to do is read them yet again. And so I was finding that I didn't want to actually read the articles into the podcast myself because it was super boring and I took lessons from my book Indistractable. I didn't invent this technique, but this technique is called making a pre commitment. A pre commitment is when you make a pact with yourself, with someone else, so that you do the things that you say you're going to do. And so I knew I needed to get these articles recorded into this podcast, but I didn't want to do it. It's hard work. It's not fun. I've read it a million times. There's nothing new for me. And then because I wrote the article, but if I call my friend Nick and he's awesome, he was so kind enough to read the article with me. 1 It had this commitment pact that I know that, hey, Monday morning, this is when we're going to read the article together. We're going to get it done. And it's great to hear Nick's perspective and his questions that maybe didn't pop into my mind, but might pop into his mind and therefore the reader's mind as well.

It's so fun for me too, because I get to learn about productivity through osmosis learning and reading about these every week with you. And the timeboxing, which I know that this article is going to talk about, is something that I'm working on and I'm really excited about that. Well, without further ado, let me get started. Four Mental Traps that Kill Productivity and How to Avoid Them to Keep a Productivity Mindset Productivity has many enemies, too many meetings, external triggers like interruptions from coworkers and multitasking the wrong way, to name a few. But more often than not, it's mental traps that trip us up. Quote Mental traps are habitual modes of thinking that disturb our ease, take up enormous amounts of our time, and deplete our energy without accomplishing anything of value. End quote From a psychology professor, Andre Kukla, who wrote in his book Mental the Overthinker's Guide to a Happier Life, learning to recognize these mental traps disarms them, enabling us to move past their threat to our productivity. Here are some common Mental traps accompanied by a solution to set you free A quick note that I'm going to ask Nir about Andre Kukla, and he wrote in that book. Did that book really lead the charge for this article? Was it a new book or how did it sort of lead this article with that quote, I think I came.

Across his work before and then I decided to open his book and see, okay, what exactly how did he define that term? Because, you know, there's a lot of words really matter to me and I it's very important to be very precise with my words. You know, in indistractable I started out with defining distraction versus traction. It's very important to be very careful with the words we use. And so I wanted to go back to the source of like, wait, what is a mental trap exactly? And so I felt like he gave a pretty good definition of that.

Well, here are some common mental traps accompanied by a solution to set you free Mental Trap the Planning Fallacy According to the American Psychology association, the planning fallacy is quote, the tendency to underestimate the amount of time needed to complete a future task, due in part to the reliance on overly optimistic performance scenarios. End quote Underestimating the time you need for certain tasks means that you're constantly unable to stick to a timeline. If you're a freelancer whose clients have strict deadlines or part of a team that depends on you to complete a project as expected, meeting deadlines is crucial to your professional success. Misjudging how much time you need to tackle tasks also means you'll try to Accomplish more than is possible in one day, which will cause an imbalance in your life. If you take on too much at your job, you might have to reallocate hours reserved for other domains of life, yourself and your relationships to finishing those tasks. Those high expectations plus the low control you have in meeting them are a guaranteed formula for burnout. After sacrificing hours previously meant for fun, self care or sleep, you're likely to enter a state of emotional, mental, and often physical exhaustion brought on by, by prolonged or repeated stress. Wow, the burnout thing is really resonating with me there. And I think I definitely have a planning fallacy for myself. Anything you want on this one to add near?

This is my favorite definition of burnout or the cause of burnout. And this comes from studies done by two research Stansfields and Candy at Oxford. I think they're at Oxford and always think it's one of those models that you can't stop seeing of. The cause of burnout is high expectations with low control. And it's not just burnout. Actually what they found was that organizations, companies that had these two conditions at the same time. High expectations and low control also led to higher rates of depression and anxiety disorder. So literally workplace environments that make us sick. And so you can translate this into many facets of our life whenever we're in a situation where we have high expectations plus low control. By the way, it's very interesting. If you have high expectations with high control, no problem. People really thrive in those circumstances. But when it's high expectations and low control, we have to do a lot and there's not that much we can do to do those things that leads to all kinds of undue stress, anxiety, depression, and unfortunately, burnout.

When you're talking about control, you mean that, for example, if I'm like working at a restaurant or something like that, that there's very limited amount that I can do as a server to make the guests happy if the food is not good. Is that sort of what you mean as far as the control could be?

Yeah, any, any sort of human agency. So if you've got a problem, right, you have this expectation of you need to do X, Y and Z at your job, but your tools that you have to affect the outcome or the output of what you're assigned to do don't give you that ability. That's literally driving us crazy. So that, that is maddening when you, when you, you know there's a problem, it needs to be fixed and you can't do anything about it that's what leads to burnout.

Well, let's talk about the solution to this. Moving on to the article Solution don't use a to do list without time boxing on their own. To do lists are a trap with no constraints. They don't show force, prioritization, trade offs, nor help you stick to a realistic schedule. Timeboxing, on the other hand, is a time management technique by which you reserve a specific period of time in your calendar for each activity. It's a great way to beat the planning fallacy because it enables you to visualize your time. If you're new to timeboxing, you can try this schedule maker template on Near's website to get started. That's available at www.nearandfar.com schedule-maker. You can use time tracker applications to monitor how much time you usually need to complete a work project, a recipe, a workout session, and more. Once you have a good idea of how long something might take, you plot it in your timeboxed calendar. This should give you a good idea of what you can realistically do in one day. Be liberal with assigning time to your tasks. Don't limit yourself to the minutes you need for the best case scenario of productivity. Timebox for your worst case scenario. If you finish early, then you have breathing room to take a break.

So this directly leads into you say, okay, well what, what if I'm in a situation where I have a. I do have high expectations and low control. What do I do? And why is time boxing the solution to that problem? The beauty of the timeboxing technique, and this is not, certainly not something that I invented, it's been around for decades. It's one of the most widely studied productivity techniques out there. Literally thousands of peer reviewed studies have found this to be the most effective technique you can use. Much better by the way, than the silly to do list method where people just put things on a to do list and you know it's limitless. There's, there's no end, there's no constraint to how many things you can put on a to do list. Whereas with a timebox calendar there is a constraint. The constraint is the 24 hours in your day. So by time boxing, suddenly you give yourself agency and control over the one thing that you really can control over, which is your time. So by time boxing, your responsibility is no longer to finish anything. And this is something that people really have trouble getting their head around because we're so used to the to do list mentality of finish this, finish that, check off the Cute little box. But if you think about it, you can't have output without input. And what is your input for creative work? It's your time and your attention. That's it. So you have to plan the input if you want the output. If you go to a baker and you say, hey, I need a birthday cake, well, the baker's going to say, okay, do I have enough flour? Do I have enough sugar? Do I have enough eggs? He's going to ask if he has the input in order to make the output. And the same has to go for you and your job. All of our jobs, we require the time and the attention. So by time boxing, what you're doing is you're saying, look, I have control. I have agency over how I will spend this segment of time. And by the way, this is in all facets of your life. It can be in your professional life. It can be in how you take care of yourself. It can be how you take care of others. That time is something that you have control over. And the goal is to not finish anything. This is how we conquer the planning fallacy, which is we don't set ourselves this requirement of, oh, in this amount of time, I have to finish something. No, because you don't always control all the factors that go into a task. This is why the planning fallacy occurs, is because we think something's going to take us one unit of time. On average, it takes us three times as much. Studies have found this. That's that things take three times longer than the average person expects them to take. So by simply measuring yourself by, did I work on what I said I was going to work on for as long as I said I would without distraction. You control that aspect. You don't control if you finish. That's not the point. The point is to work on the task without distraction. The kicker here, of course, is that surprisingly, people who use that technique, people who simply measure themselves on their ability to work on a task without distraction. It can be 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes. It doesn't matter the length of time. They actually get more done at the end of the day than the people who use just a to do list. Because a to do list has no constraints and it has no feedback mechanism. Whereas the way you beat the planning fallacy is to say, okay, I worked on this project for 30 minutes without distraction. A hundred percent of my mind share was focused on that task. How much did I get done? Did I get 5% done, 10% done? And now I can begin to estimate because of this feedback loop to say, how many more of those time blocks will I need to finish the task.

Completely, that is blowing my mind that it shows it takes three times longer than we anticipate. And in my own experience, learning from you on this podcast, I've learned that what makes timeboxing successful is did I do what I said I would do during that time on my calendar? It's not did I reach inbox zero? It's did I work on my emails for 30 minutes? Right. Is that the correct basic understanding?

That's exactly right. Because think about it. Okay, let's say you put on your to do list, get to inbox zero. Well, you don't know how long that's going to take you, right? So what ends up happening is people either work on that task all day and it takes them way longer than they expect, or even worse, they work on it for five minutes. They say, oh, this is hard, and I'm not really making much progress. Let me go check something else for a little bit. Let me go look at the news, Let me go chat with my coworker. Let me do 100 different things other than the thing I said I was going to do. Whereas if you said, look, I'm going to check email for 30 minutes, that's it. Then at the end of those 30 minutes, you can say, okay, well, I have a hundred emails in my inbox, and I got through 20. Okay, well, 20 times five. That's how many units of time I'm going to need to finish that task completely. But for that unit of time, it's not about finishing, okay? It's just about working without distraction. That is the only way you can tell how long things actually take you to do. Because the reason we had this planning fallacy is that there's no feedback loop with the to do list. Say, I'm going to write a blog post. How many words can you write in 30 minutes? Well, if you don't use it as a time block, you will never get that feedback mechanism. So it's through this process of timeboxing again and again, you get better and better at estimating how long things will take you to complete so that you eliminate the planning fallacy.

That leads us into the next mental trap that's called liminal moments. And the solution on how to deal with that. I'll go back to the article now. Mental trap, liminal moments. Liminal moments are transitions from one thing to another throughout our days. Have you ever opened a tab in your web browser, got annoyed by how long it's taking to load and opened up another webpage while you waited or looked at a social media app while walking from one meeting to the next, only to keep scrolling when you got back to your desk. By doing these actions for quote, just a second or quote, five minutes tops, we're likely to do things we later regret, like getting off track for half an hour. Solution the 10 minute rule next time you feel the urge to check your phone in a moment of boredom or distraction, tell yourself to wait just 10 minutes. It's likely that once the 10 minutes are over, your urge will be over. The 10 minute rule, also known as surfing the urge is when you take a breath to notice your sensations and ride them like a wave, which helps you cope until the feelings subside. Surfing the urge is effective at helping me deal with all sorts of potential distractions, like Googling something rather than writing, eating something unhealthy when I'm bored, or watching another episode on Netflix when I'm, quote, too tired to go to bed. End quote. This 10 minute rule is new to me. Near I've never heard of that before. That's pretty neat.

I use the 10 minute rule almost every single day. It's. It's such a good one. Again, I didn't invent it. It comes from acceptance of commitment therapy, so I can't take credit for it. But it is a life changer that if you just tell yourself I can do whatever I want, I can give in to that distraction. I can eat that piece of chocolate cake, I can smoke that cigarette, whatever it is that you're trying to to avoid, whatever is distraction for you that's taking you away from traction by telling yourself, yeah, I can give into that thing. But not right now, in 10 minutes. Not, by the way, not for 10 minutes. One time somebody said, but I understand, after I check the social media for 10 minutes, I just want more and more. No, no, no. It's in 10 minutes. Before 10 minutes. Okay, big difference. So you know, so if you're watching your weight, for example, and you know that you want to avoid that sweet treat, especially in these liminal moments, I find that, you know, what gets me oftentimes is, okay, I'm going to take a quick break and I'll get right back to that task at hand. But while I'm taking the break, I look at social media for a minute. Or maybe I want that quick snack and saying, okay, you know what, if I really want that thing, I can give into it, but let me just wait for 10 minutes or if I'm writing, you know, writing is really hard work for me. Even though I've been doing it for over a decade professionally, every time I write, it's hard work. It's not a habit, it's a routine. It's something that's really difficult. It's. And all I want to do is check email or go on social media or Google something to avoid the pain of writing. If I can tell myself, okay, just wait 10 minutes and you can give into that distraction, then, well, what I'm doing again, back to agency. How important control is. We talked about it earlier. By proving to myself, wait a minute, I'm not beholden to these distractions. It's not hijacking my brain, it's not stealing my attention. No, it's something that I choose to delay for a few minutes. And by doing that, I'm proving to myself, wait a minute, the 10 minute rule can be the 12 minute rule, can be the 15 minute rule. And you're building that ability, you're building that agency, that muscle to delay distraction for a few more minutes each time.

I love that idea of using the 10 minute rule to build that muscle. That's strong mental trap. The Mere Urgency Effect the mere urgency effect is quote the tendency to pursue urgency over importance. Close quote as defined by this recent study and that recent study on Nir's blog links to Psychnet.apa.org it says open quote People may choose to perform urgent tasks with short completion windows instead of important tasks with larger outcomes. Close quote in other words, we tend to prioritize the completion of the five minute menial task rather than the important project that will take us hours of work. Email is a perfect example. It's the curse of the modern worker. The average office dwelling worker receives 100 messages per day. Even if you can tap out a reply in just two minutes for each one, that adds up to more than three hours daily. It will consume all the time you need for more important tasks if you let it. Solution Plan focused work sessions. Timeboxing can protect us from the siren call of menial tasks in your calendar. Reserve a period for focused work and let your family coworkers boss. Anyone who might try to approach you in that time know that you'll be unavailable. This will eliminate the guilt or anxiety you feel over not responding to emails every 30 seconds because your boss and coworkers will know that you're not slacking. You're indistractable. Planning focused work time will also let you know that any other task you do in that time is a distraction. You might be tempted to recheck your inbox or if you're working from home, quickly throw some laundry in the wash. But that's off limits during your focused work time.

This is a super important point because we find that the distractions that really get us, they're not the obvious distractions, right? People think that distractions come from your phone, it's the video games, it's social media, it's Netflix. But that's just a fraction of the number of times that we get distracted by things that we think are productive tasks. Right? Let me just check email for a quick minute. Let me just scroll that Slack channel. Let me just, you know, do this thing or that, oh, let me do the easy task on my to do list just to feel like I'm productive. But if the thing that you really need to work on, the thing that you said you were going to do with your time and attention is something else, you are distracted. Even if it's a work related task, it doesn't matter. That is the most dangerous form of distraction because of this mere urgency effect. What happens is we do the easy stuff, we do the urgent stuff at the expense of the hard and important work we have to do to move our lives and careers forward. So just because it's a work related task doesn't mean it's not a distraction. I would argue that's the most terrible kind of distraction because you don't even realize you're getting distracted. What happens, you wake up weeks, months, maybe years later and you say, I was working on all this urgent stuff, but I didn't do the important stuff. And what happens is many people, they get into this habit of simply working on what we call reactive work. Reactive work is the emails, the notifications, the meetings, all the stuff that we are reacting to. And, and they have no time to spend some, at least some time doing what's called reflective work. And people get into this, this rut of, okay, I do what's demanded of me if my client calls or my boss calls or the email, the messages, the Slack channels because it's easy in a way. It's cognitively easy to be told what to do all the time as opposed to, wait a minute, let me think for a second. What are really my priorities here? What are really my values? How do I make sure that I run in the right direction as opposed to running really fast in the wrong direction? So without that planning time, without time in your schedule planned in advance for focused work that's what will happen. You'll run real fast in the wrong direction unless you have that time planned ahead for when you'll do focused work.

Well, we have one more mental trap and the solution left, but I just want to take a commercial break. You're listening to near and Far Business Behavior and the Brain. Nir Eyal is the bestselling author of how to Build Habit Forming Products and and also how to control your attention and choose your life. Near blogs@nearandfar.com and has a weekly newsletter filled with science backed strategies for designing healthy habits your customers will love. Whether designing customer behaviors or your own habits, you'll benefit from understanding the research that near shares, just like on this podcast from User Experience Design, Behavioral Economics, and Neuroscience. If you're not already on the list, you got to sign up. Sign up for Near's free newsletter right now at www.near spelled n I r nearandfar.com Back to the article Mental Trap Shame for not getting everything done Humans aren't machines, so we're going to have moments of low productivity even if we're proactive about managing our time and attention. Making yourself feel shame about your lack of productivity isn't going to do you any good. Maybe you've made yourself feel shame for sleeping in instead of getting up for your early morning workout. Or maybe distraction was able to steal your attention more than usual today. Don't give in to self blame. That toxic guilt will only make you feel even worse and can ironically lead you to seek even more distraction and in order to escape the pain of shame. Solution Self Compassion Everyone struggles with distractions from time to time. The important thing is to take responsibility for our actions without toxic shame. Self compassion makes people more resilient to letdowns by breaking the vicious cycle of stress that often accompanies failure. If you find yourself listening to the little voice in your head that sometimes bullies you around, it's important to know how to respond. Instead of accepting what the voice says or arguing with it, remind yourself that obstacles are part of the process of growth. Talk to yourself the way you would do a friend. We tend to be our own worst critics, but if we talk to ourselves the way we'd help a friend, we can see the situation for what it really is. Telling yourself things like this is what it's like to get better at something and you're on our way are healthier ways to handle self doubt. Feelings of guilt are yet another reason to use a schedule builder over to do lists which perpetuate harmful self stereotypes because they act as a constant reminder that you didn't do what you said you'd do. Want more tips to foster productivity? Here are eight productivity hacks that you can do in 30 minutes. Find that article at www.nearandfar.com productivity-hacks near Thoughts on this one with the self, compassion and the shame for not getting everything done, this is a really, really big one.

And I like the way Brene Brown differentiates between guilt and shame. Guilt is when you feel bad about something you did. Shame is when you feel bad of something that you are. And we talked, actually, I think in the very last episode, we talked about the importance of labels. And so labeling yourself with shame is a terrible thing to do because when you start thinking, oh, somehow I'm deficient, I'm broken, there's something wrong with me or my personality character. You do listen to the conversation you have with yourself. And so that shame leads to more of what I call these internal triggers, these uncomfortable emotional states, which, ironically enough, what do we do when we feel this discomfort? We look for more distraction to take our minds off of the way we're feeling. And this can lead to a very, very harmful, vicious cycle. So we want to make sure that we can free ourself of that shame, that we have a script in our head that redirects that discomfort in a healthy way that leads us to traction rather than distraction. So, for example, a daily mantra that I repeat whenever I get these uncomfortable internal triggers, when I feel the sneaky sensation of shame creeping up, I no longer give in to that. That ridiculous narrative that somehow I'm broken or deficient. Rather, I have a new narrative which is, you know what? This is what it feels like to get better at something. Right? That's such an empowering narrative. When a task is hard, whether it's working out in the gym, whether it's, you know, working on a new book, whether it's that big project, whether it's making sales calls, whatever it is, that's difficult. That discomfort is part of the human condition. It's part of being alive. We should see it as a blessing. And so by reframing it, by reimagining that internal trigger, not necessarily something harmful we need to escape, but something we can lean into and say, ah, okay, this is what it feels like to get better at something. To me, that's been incredibly empowering, really helpful.

Well, this has been a reading of four mental traps that kill productivity. But wait, if you wouldn't mind, would you leave a review for this podcast in any app that you listen to this on, it really means a lot. I want to give a special shout out to Irksome Wanderer who just last week said listen and learn great life ideas. Nir and team do a great job talking about life and how to help arrange everything without judgment on your personal priorities. Thank you so much for that review. Every single one really means a lot and encourages Nir to take time to do this free podcast for all of his free fans and subscribers. One last plug for the newsletter. Sign up for Science backed strategies for designing healthy habits your customers will love. If you're not already getting it Near's free weekly newsletter. It's beloved by thousands of designers, founders and investors. You can sign up for it right now at www.nearandfar.com. that's spelled N I R A N--far.com this has been yet another episode of near and Far Business Behav and the Brain. My name is Nick Gray. We've been here with Nir. Nir, thanks. This was fun. I love doing these every week with you and I can't wait till next week.

I appreciate it Nick. And also I can't let you get away without a quick plug actually for your book because I think it's a terrific book that everyone needs to read called two Hour Cocktail Party. Go check it out on Amazon. I guarantee you will love the book. It's a wonderful way to learn how to reconnect with people in your life. If you found that through Covid, maybe you're finding it's a little more difficult to make long lasting relationships that Nick gives you this step by step guide in a very low friction way. How to have people come back into your life. Have them into your home without all the ruckus and difficulty of having like a big deal party. How to have just a two hour cocktail party. It's amazing. It's a life changing book. Absolutely. Go check it out.

Big win by the way, that I'm celebrating for my book. I just got my 300th review on Amazon so I'm very Congratulations. I'm pretty proud.

Amazing. Well deserved. Many more to come too by the way.

Yes, thank you very much. Well, great. Thanks everybody for listening. We'll see you next week on the next episode. Bye bye.