8 Productivity Hacks You Can Do in 30 Minutes

Hello and welcome to the near and Far Podcast. My name is Nick Gray, but we're here with our superstar, Nir Eyal. Nir, will you say hello and what we're doing?

Absolutely. Hey, Nick, it's good to see you again. Everybody, this is Nick Gray. If you're not familiar with him, he is the author of the Two Hour Cocktail Party. He's an awesome guy. He's a friend of mine and he does a great job reading these articles. And we're going to kind of discuss the latest blog post@nearandfar.com and kind of give some flavor that you might not get if you just read the article on your own.

Well, today we're going to do one of my favorite articles, which is eight productivity hacks you can do in 30 minutes. They're part of the secret of becoming indistractable. Got a few minutes? Then why not use them to implement these quick fixes that cut distraction and aid productivity? I uncovered these productivity fixes while researching how to combat distraction and increase productivity for my book Indistractible. And I've relied on them ever since. From adjustments to your phone, desktop, email, and more. These productivity hacks all take less than 30 minutes to complete and they help you thwart those external triggers that are usually the culprit for your struggle with distraction. A caveat. Becoming more productive isn't as simple as finding the perfect productivity apps or hacks. No app or hack is so magical as to instantly morph you into super productive, always focused person. To become indistractable, you'll have to follow my indistractible model. Step one, master internal triggers. Step two, make time for traction. Step three, hack back external triggers. Step four, prevent distraction with pacts. I'm going to take a pause to ask Nir about that. That indistractible model is something so core and fundamental to what you teach. Could you speak about it or just riff on it for a minute?

Absolutely. So this is really the four part model that I really would love to imprint on people's brains. So that worst case scenario, if you can't remember which specific app or which hack or which technique or whatever it is that you read about. If you remember one thing, remember this picture. Remember traction to the right. The opposite attraction is distraction to the left. And then we have the external triggers, the internal triggers, and the external triggers from the top and bottom. So you think of these like four arrows. If you're watching over video, you can see me making little hand gestures here, but essentially an arrow to the right, that represents traction. An arrow to the left that represents distraction. And then an arrow from the top pointing to the center and an arrow from the bottom point to the center. Those represent internal and external triggers. So now we have kind of the four points of our compass. And so these four steps represent the solution for this model around why we get distracted in the first place. So step number one, the most important step is to master the internal triggers. If you don't master your internal triggers, they will become your masters. And so internal triggers. I've written a lot about this. Of course you know the biggest section of the book. This is the source of 90% of our distractions. 9,0% of our distractions come from we within. Loneliness, uncertainty, Boredom, Fatigue, Stress. Anxiety. This is the source of 90% of our distraction. So we have to learn techniques to master those internal triggers. First and foremost. Then we want to make time for traction. If you don't plan your day, somebody's going to plan it for you. And you can't call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. So you have to make time for the things that are important to you. To help you live according to your values. You have to turn your values into time. That's what making time for traction is all about. Of course, I'm quickly summarizing here. There's a whole know section in the book about this. Next is hack back the external triggers. So even though they account for about 10% of our distractions, the pings, the dings, the rings, anything in our outside environment, our co workers, our kids, all these things can lead to distraction as well. These are called external triggers. There's a lot we can do around hacking back those external triggers and then finally preventing distraction with pacts. Pacts are a pre commitment device. It's when we decide in advance what we will do if we go off track. And you have to do it last after the other three techniques and but they can be very, very effective in keeping you in on the task that you're working on. As opposed to keeping distraction out. You also want to work on keeping yourself in. So that's, that's how we prevent distraction with packs. So it's really about these four techniques in concert. These four big strategies. Mastering internal triggers, making time for traction, hacking back external triggers, and preventing distraction with packs. This is how you become fully indistractable and anyone can do it. Now this article is about, you know, when people read the entire book indistractable or they hear about these techniques, it feels like a lot, right? I hear many times people say, well, where do I start? There's a lot I could do, but what should I do? So what I wanted to give people was, okay, depending on how much time you have right now, whether it's 2 minutes, 10 minutes or 30 minutes, here's what you can do right this minute to start getting you on the right track to becoming indistractable.

That's fantastic. And these tips, oh my gosh, I just looked up your book on Amazon, by the way. Over 5,4000 reviews. If you have not checked out Indistractable yet, you should definitely check it out. I'm sure you have if you're listening to this podcast, but if you haven't, what are you waiting for? And you can also get the Audible audiobook, so check that out. But these tips and this article really go into step three that Nir mentioned, which is hack back the external triggers. So let's file these productivity hacks under step three and get started. Here are eight productivity improvements to make in just 2 to 30 minutes less than 2 minutes use your phone to your advantage. Apple iOS has a range of focus modes that silence disruptions while you're driving, sleeping and working. It also lets you create custom focus modes for when you're exercising, reading, meditating and more. Android's digital well being focus mode lets you preset a schedule to automatically mute certain apps during during personal time or your scheduled focus work sessions. Every hour a chime goes off on my phone to help me stay on track with my timeboxed calendar rather than let the hours slip by. I know when I need to speed up my work pace and I can correct my pace before it derails the rest of the day.

Yeah, so this is a super simple technique. Of course many of these tools you don't have to pay for, they just come pre installed on your phone. Digital wellbeing ON Android or iOS has similar features. And then this, this chime I, I like it. I, you know, I throughout my day I get this little ping that says okay, it's the top of the hour. So when you have a time box calendar, it's very helpful. Sometimes when you're, you feel like you're, you know, in the zone or you're just trying to rush to, to to get something done, you're not really sure, you don't want to keep looking at your clock. I found that that internal trigger of worrying that oh my timebox is almost up is gone now because all I have to do is just keep working. I know, I'm going to get a little chime that dings. It tells me it's top of the hour. It's not intrusive. It doesn't make me feel bad. It's just a reminder. Yep, it's top of the hour. Days going by Nir.

I wonder what you think about this idea. I had the opportunity to hang out with Matt Mullenweg last week, the founder of WordPress. And Matt uses an app that he says is called We Croak. And the WeCroak app notifies him. At five times throughout the day, random times, it comes up with an alert that says, you're going to die. It basically reminds you of the finality of life. Have you heard about this app?

Yeah, Memento Mori. So it's very stoic to remind yourself that remember you are mortal. Right. That you're going to die too. I think that's a great reminder to focus on your values, to focus on. Am I spending my time the way I want to spend my time? Because it is finite, after all. Not so much a time management technique, but maybe a tool to help you refocus on prioritizing the right things that you want to do with your time and attention.

All right, the next one. Declutter your desktop. Visual clutter can lead to mental clutter. Therefore, it's important to have a clean workspace. How you go about this depends on your preferences. Are you someone who chooses to properly organize every file that's taking space on your desktop? Fine. But if you're like me, you might cheat and simply throw everything on your desktop into a desktop file marked, well, everything. This may seem like too quick a fix, but I found that sorting files into folders is an unnecessary step. My desktop is clean and I can search for whatever document I need in my everything folder.

Yeah, it's a super simple technique that people have a lot of trouble with, but can really benefit you because remember, you know, all that visual clutter on your. On your desktop, on your digital device. So if you have. What I used to have was, you know, my desktop was full, filled with all these files. Oh, I got to work on this, I got to work on that. You know, I'll just leave everything here and then that way I'll get to it. But of course, when I found myself looking for procrastination, when I felt those internal triggers of stress, anxiety, it's, oh, yeah, let me just work on that thing for a quick minute as opposed to what I said I was going to do with my time and Attention. So clearing away that digital dendritis that's on your desktop can be a very easy thing, right? Here's what you do. You select all and you move it into a folder called everything, right? And if you need it, it's there. You can always open it up later. And of course, the search functionality that comes on our computers these days, you really don't need to file every folder into a special little place. You can just put everything in one file and search for it. The search functionality is so good, you'll be able to find it later.

I'm going to do that later today. That's Inspiring. Less than 15 minutes. Filter your emails. Don't open and respond to all emails in the same span of time. Instead, rely on the two touch method for emails. At the first touch, you'll open the email and tag it for response either today or this week. Then you'll close it without replying unless it needs an immediate response. Tagging emails in this way frees your mind from distraction because you know you'll reply during the specified time you've allocated. For this purpose in your time boxed schedule, I set aside time every day to reply to today emails and then three hours at the end of my week to respond to this week emails.

Yeah, so this is, you know, email is the bane of our existence. People can't seem to stop checking email constantly. And the reason is because it's such a good relief for these emotional triggers. Right? So when I don't know what to do right now or I don't feel like working on the big project, let me just check email for a quick minute. I'm sure there's something that I can do that feels productive. But remember, just because something feels productive, just because it might feel like it's a work related task, doesn't mean it's not distraction. If you said you were going to write or work on that big project or prepare that presentation and you're checking email, even if it's work related, it is a distraction. So instead, what you want to do is use these two techniques together of having a time box schedule where you say this is my email work time and if I check it at any other time, that's a distraction. By the way, you can do that throughout the day. You can say, I'm going to check email four times a day for 15 minutes each time, that's totally fine. But you want to define that time in advance. You're not doing it whenever you feel like it, you're doing it when it's on your schedule. And then every time you're checking your email, you're not replying to whatever's at the top of your inbox. You want to reply to what's most important to receive a reply. So you file them based on either today or this week, and you only reply to the emails that need an urgent reply today. So statistically that's gonna be about 20% of your emails actually need a reply today. The other 80% of those emails don't need a reply today. They can be replied to sometime this week. And you say, well, aren't you just kicking the can here? You're gonna have to get to them eventually at some point, right? No, here's where it saves you time because it stops you from playing what I call email ping pong. What people do is when they find that there's an easy way to reply, even if it's not urgent, they reply. Then the other person replies. Now we're playing email ping pong back and forth and that wastes everybody's time. Whereas if you only reply to emails by when they actually need a reply, here's what you're going to find. About half of that 80% of those emails turns out didn't need a reply. If you just let them simmer. If you just let other people figure out their own problems or the situation will take care of itself or get crushed under the weight of some other priority, you'll find many times it doesn't need a reply at all. So about half of the 80% of the emails turns out you don't need to reply to it all. And if you reply to them when you get them, you just wasted a bunch of time. So that's why it's so important to learn how to filter your emails. Touch them the first time just to label when they need a reply, then go back on your time box schedule to only reply to the emails that need an urgent reply.

Well, a quick sponsor message. This is the near and Far podcast where Nir talks about behavioral design. Nir's doing this for you, for the benefit. And if you enjoy this, would you do a favor and leave him a review in the app that you're listening to your podcast on Review, Write back an email if you like this new style or even share it with a friend perhaps. It really encourages us to keep up this interactive style that I know I get so much value from hearing this additional juice from Near. We're going to keep going now. Bundle tasks. It's okay to multitask if you follow My rule for multichannel multitasking, for instance, you can walk and listen to a podcast at the same time. You can do laundry and brainstorm the opening lines for that next blog post. For personally, I exercise and use the Pocket app to listen to online articles I flagged earlier. Spend a few minutes thinking how you might bundle your tasks to save time. Well, in the last episode, Nier, we talked exactly about the same thing. Are you still using that app? Do you still like that one?

Every day. Every day. And you know, I do a lot of reading and research for my writing. And so this is just such a productivity hack because it's a myth that multitasking is impossible. That's not true. You actually can multitask if you do it correctly, if you do what I call multi channel multitasking. So while I'm exercising, I'm reading an article, as opposed to reading an article just by sitting here passively. I can kill two birds with one stone as long as they're on different sensory channels. So I can input information through my auditory channel by listening to something while I'm exercising. The physical channel, I can catch up with a friend while I'm walking or driving or commuting. So using multichannel multitasking properly is a great way to kill several birds of one stone.

That's fantastic. We'll go on to the next step. These are things that are less than 30 minutes, and this is a big one. Implement the four Rs of hacking back your smartphone. The first three Rs might take you 30 minutes combined, and the last one takes about 30 minutes on its own. The first R, Remove. Kick to the curb all apps that no longer serve you or align with your values. Purging these will create more space on your phone and shrink the potential for distraction. The second R, replace. Rather than give in to the temptation to constantly check problematic apps like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, consider replacing them with a new system. Delete those apps from your phone and instead add time for social media or whatever qualifies as your problematic app to a time boxed calendar. That way you can indulge your social media craving at the allotted time without guilt. Well, I'm going to pause this here because I find myself, I admit every waking moment, even at the airport, if I'm. I don't want to say, but I'm checking it all the time. That is powerful.

Yeah, yeah. And there's nothing wrong with that. Okay. There's nothing wrong with using these apps. So we don't want to medicalize and vilify and moralize these products. They're fantastic. I mean, you know, I've met so many friends and contacts that I now consider consider close friends because of these wonderful apps and services. Some of my closest friends I've never met in person, I've only met online. So there's nothing wrong or evil with these apps. There's nothing wrong about using them as long as you use them on your schedule and according to your values. So the way you can turn a distraction into traction is intent, right? It's forethought. So do you check social media just when you can't think of anything else better to do, or when you're feeling lonely or stressed and you want to escape the situation in your head? Or do you use it on a schedule, which is great? So by moving it from distraction, something you do to escape discomfort, to now traction something that you plan to do. So if you say okay, in my calendar every day I get to check social media for however amount of time is is aligned with your values. And I'm not going to tell you how much time is it 15 minutes? Is it an hour? Is it three hours? I don't care. But put it in your calendar. Say okay. Yep, every night after dinner, whatever that time is. 7pm that's when I get to go on social media and relax and catch up with my friends. Or wonderful. Totally nothing wrong with that.

I love that. It removes the guilt and the shame from using them and says they are powerful, right?

Exactly as long as you're using them according to your values and your schedule.

Well, the third R is rearrange Create your essential home screen. Tony Stubbledon, editor in chief of the popular medium publication Better Human and I think recently appointed CEO of New CEO that's right says to sort your apps into three categories, Primary tools, aspirations and slot machines. Primary tools are those you rely on frequently, the ones that get you a ride or directions to a location. Limit this category to six apps. Aspirations are for healthy habit building, apps for meditation, exercise, reading and more. Slot machine apps are the problematic ones that drive you to distraction and if you don't delete them, then you should remove them from your home screen. In fact, I recommend hiding them from your display screens altogether and instead using the search function on your phone to access them. Not having that app just one click away may give you the breath you need to refocus on your real task. The final R is reclaimed. Turn off the visual and sound notifications for all apps except for those that share urgent messages like the phone and texting apps. It's a one and done act that pays lifelong dividends. My hope is that implementing these tips will not only help to save you from distraction, but also give you the results and motivation you need to pursue becoming indistractable. By the way, the Time Box calendar I mentioned throughout this post is the most powerful productivity hack in my repertoire. Building it from scratch takes no longer than 30 minutes, and you'll get a great start by using my free Schedule Maker template. You can find that@nearandfar.com schedule maker once again, that's nearandfar.com schedule maker. Nir Is there anything to add to these four Rs?

Yeah, so you can actually make a timebox calendar with any tool you like. I built a tool because folks asked for it. So I built something very, very simple that anyone can make in a Google Doc with just a few minutes, you know, So I, I set the stage for you to put in what's important to you to do in your day. But you can use Google Calendar, you can use whatever calendar system you want. The important thing is to decide in advance how you're going to spend your time. So everything we talked about today is about this third step, this third strategy in the indestructible model around hacking back the external triggers. So what to do with your phone, what to do with your desktop interface. These are all these external triggers. But again, I want to reemphasize that the most important first step is the internal triggers. Learning to deal with our emotions. And of course we'll, we'll talk about that in future articles. I've written about it before and we'll definitely keep discussing in the future. But remembering these that there's always something you can do, some small step you can take to move you towards becoming indistractable. The worst thing you can do is to do nothing, right? To say, oh, I'm not sure what to do, so I'm not gonna do anything. There's always at least one small thing you can do to use a new tactic, a new technique that fits into one of these four budget buckets of master the internal triggers, make time for traction, hack back the external triggers and prevent distraction with packs.

Well, this is another episode of near and Far Business Behavior and the Brain. If you like this podcast, will you please leave a review for Near? It really means a lot and he reads every single one of those. Leave a review how you like it on any app that you listen to your podcasts on. Also, if you have an article, a favorite one that Nir's written that you'd love to see us do. Send Nir an email and we'll check it out. We're looking for greatest hits suggestions. Thank you so much for listening.

And thank you, Nick. By the way, I want to give a quick plug. Everyone, please check out Nick's book. It's a fantastic book, the Two Hour Cocktail Party. It's wonderful. I've read it. I've come to Nick's Cocktail parties. They're incredible. And if you want to get together with friends but you're not really sure how, you think it might be too much work, this is your essential guide. So definitely check out Nick Gray's book, two Hour Cocktail Party.

Thanks, Nir. All right. Thanks, everybody. Have a productive week.