Ask Me Anything

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the near and Far Podcast. This is Nir Eyal and with me, as always, is Nick Gray, author of the Two Hour Cocktail Party. Nick, how's it going?

It's going great. I'm excited for today's episode because we're going to do Q and A and we're just going to have fun with it. We got some great reader questions that'll be good to dive into.

Absolutely, yeah. Usually we read articles on this podcast, but today we've collected a few interesting questions. So it's going to be an AMA with Nick and Nir.

Mostly with Nir. I'm going to be doing the question asking written in from Justin and we got one from Natasha and one from Whitey. And by the way, if you have a question that you want to see Nir answer on a future episode, write back to one of his emails. You can subscribe to his email newsletter@nearandfar.com right back and we will answer your question live on tape as we're doing now. Should I go into Justin? He sent us a really good question.

Sure.

Justin says, I am a huge fan of your timeboxing approach and try to plan my days or week in advance if I can. Indistractable was a great read with a lot of useful suggestions for managing time and dealing with distractions. Here's this question. Do you have any tips for managing your schedule when things don't go as planned? Some examples work meetings that go longer than expected. Phone calls that pop up out of the blue. Family issues that need urgent attention. I have a newborn, he says, so that makes it particularly challenging right now. But aside from that, do you find you have to adjust your schedule frequently for these unplanned events? Do you skip things and push them to the next day, or do you try to stay true to the day's tasks, even if they are off schedule?

Yeah. So this is a big question, a very frequent question, and one that I want to get into the specifics of, because I think if you think too much about the strategy, you won't get into the tactics. Right. Strategy is. Sorry, tactics are what you do. Strategy is why you do it. So the big strategy here is that you want to stick to your timebox calendar. Right. That's why timeboxing works, is because we're planning in advance what we want to do and when we want to do it. We are not planning or measuring ourselves by what we finish. Okay. So this is really important. I think there's a big mental shift that needs to happen in most people's brains around time management is task management. It is not. Time management is time management. That's all it is. That's all you can manage. Because there are too many exogenous factors. There's too many things that you don't know that will affect whether you will finish an outcome. Right. You might work on a presentation and you need the slides from Jimmy and you need the numbers from Janet. And you know, there's just too many things outside of your control to make you plan to finish a task by a certain, you know, specific time and place. But what you can control, what is in your control, is two things. Time and attention. And so that's all you are responsible for, is your time and your attention. Now, if you don't put in those two factors, there's no way you can finish the task. You can have all the component pieces ready, but if you don't put in your time and attention, you won't finish the task. So by just focusing on the input, you will benefit from finishing the output, but you have to focus on the input. So what you should do with a Timebox calendar is to plan that time ahead of time. It needs to be done at least the day before. But when you have that Timebox calendar, you need to follow it as strictly as you possibly can. Now you will fall off track. Okay, I wrote the book Indistractable and I still fall off track from time to time. It happens regularly. But here's the difference. An indistractable person knows why they went off track and they do something about it, whereas a distractible person keeps getting distracted by the same thing again and again and again. It's this wonderful Poelo Coelho quote who said, a mistake repeated more than once is a decision. A mistake repeated more than once is a decision. So if you keep getting distracted by the same things again and again, now you're making a choice to be distracted. So here we can, to answer your question, we can start bifurcating between things that we really cannot predict and things we can predict. So I'm the proud father of a 14 year old, and I remember when my daughter was very young, she cried when she was a baby. You know why? Because babies cry. Babies need stuff. So you would think it'd be something that's not predictable. What do I do if all of a sudden my baby starts crying? Yeah, but you know what? That's predictable. We know that babies need attention. The problem is not that our babies cry. That happens. That's predictable. That you could plan for that the problem is with us, that we think we should be able to work and stay updated with the news and do an exercise and do all this stuff and take care of our kids. Whereas what you should do instead is to focus on just spending your time and attention doing that one thing that you said you were going to do. So if you have time to be on call with your child, that's your primary responsibility. And yeah, you know what, if your kid decides to take a nap, okay, well, then you can use that time, but your primary objective is to be on call. That's where your time and attention should go. And so we can plan for these things that we otherwise think, think are unplanned for. I would say that 99% of the things that people think, oh, you can't plan for. You actually can plan for, like traffic, for example. You say, well, how can I possibly time box if I'm stuck in traffic for half an hour? Well, guess what? Doesn't traffic happen like every day? So what do you do about it if you have a very important meeting with somebody? Let's say one of your heroes wants to meet with you, right? The. The Oprah Winfrey says, I want to take a lunch meeting with you. And, and you really want to make that meeting. Well, what are you going to do if traffic might. Might occur? You leave a little earlier, right? You leave some buffer. And so that's the answer. And this is why timeboxing is so much better than using a to do list. When you measure yourself by how many cute little boxes you checked off, right? Finishing the task, which I'm telling you is not what you should measure yourself by, rather you should measure yourself by, did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would? What you are now able to do is, is to predict those possible buffer zones. So if you plan that that time and say, look, I'm going to budget 15 minutes for traffic, and darn it, traffic took you 30 minutes. Okay, well, now you know, next time to build an extra buffer. And that same principle is something we can do with all sorts of tasks. Every single one of the things that he listed off, oh, this meeting went over a bit. Okay, well, guess what? That's kind of predictable. We know that sometimes a meeting that is budgeted for one hour because goes to an hour 15, goes to an hour 20. Well, guess what? You put in buffer time into your schedule. And if that buffer time turns out to not be used, wonderful. Do whatever you want with it. Go take A walk, go scroll the Internet, check email. It doesn't matter. The point is you want to learn over time through timeboxing what type of things are are bound to go out of that budget. And then you're going to make adjustments. Not in the day. You never change your time box calendar in the day, but you can make adjustments for the next day or the next week or the next time, knowing that this task might take a little longer or shorter than what you originally planned for. So the main point here is stick to that time box schedule. Even if you go off track, just get back to whatever's in your calendar. Don't go asking yourself, oh, should I move this around? Nope. For that day, do whatever it is you planned in advance. Point number two is make adjustments for the next time based on what you learned in that previous time box so that you can say, okay, I might need to build in some buffer time or this task takes less time or more time. And point number three, focus on one thing at a time. So if your primary objective is to be there for your child, be there for your child. Don't try and do everything all at once. Decide in advance how you will spend that time and attention.

That's great. I like what you said there. A mistake repeated more than once is a decision. I wrote that down. That's a big one.

I can't take credit for that. That's not my quote. That's Poelo Coelho who said that.

Kudas much? Kudas. All right, next question that we got from Courtney says, what is the best time blocking app or what tool should I use to do it? Someone else submitted Xanthi said, do you have tips on blocking out time without using your phone as an alarm? I'll do time boxing, but when I check my phone to see what time it is, I get dragged back into doom scrolling.

Two wonderful questions. Okay. And they're both easy to answer. The first question of what is the best time blocking tool? The best time blocking tool is the one you will use. That's the best tool. So I use Google Calendar. Some people like it, some people don't. I use it consistently. The reason I like Google Calendar is it's free. I like the fact that when I make my my calendar once, I would say about 80% of what's in my calendar goes from week to week to week. It's the same right when I wake up, when I'm gonna shower, when I'm gonna have breakfast, when I'm gonna exercise, when I' to have this podcast with you all these things are pretty much stay the same from week to week, and I'd say maybe 20% is adjusted so I don't have to keep changing. Those things that happen week after week, they're scheduled in perpetuity in my calendar. But if that's tricky for you if you're not a big fan, if some people really like a printed calendar, that's great, no problem. You can, you know, go get a calendar if you would like. You can go to my website. If you go to near and far.com schedule-maker again, that's near and far.com forward slash, schedule, schedule, maker. There's a free downloadable Google Doc that you can fill in your schedule on that Google Doc and then just print it out or download it so that you can have it and, you know, use that instead. Some people really like that approach. If you just want a planner like we used to use before phones, that's also fine. Paper and pen work great. The best one is the one that we use consistently. What you don't want to do is to fall into this trap of constantly looking for the best tool and blaming the tool and for the practice. It's not the tool that's going to make the practice, the practice is the practice. The tool accentuates the practice, maybe makes it a little easier. So I would say, you know what? Start with paper and pencil. That's actually the best thing you can do. Just start the old school way. And then if you say, oh, you know what, I'm sick of rewriting this. Once you get into the practice, then say, oh, I can see some benefits to using a software, for example, but start with the basic stuff first and then work from there. The second question about how can I measure my time blocks? How can I make sure that I don't go over on a time block without using my phone? Easy. Go to Amazon, get one of these. If you, if you're listening to me and you can't see the video, I'm holding up this tiny digital timer that I bought from Amazon for. I think it cost me $4. Super easy. I just put in the number of minutes I want to do a task for and then I hit start and then it beeps at me when it, when it's time to stop. This is, you know, pretty basic technology. All it takes is a AAA battery and it works like a charm.

That is great. I wrote down to. What you don't want to do is fall into the trap of constantly looking for the best tool. Start with paper and pencil Get a simple kitchen timer to help you. That's great. I like that. We got another question that Natasha says. I want to be better at influencing my daily outcome, particularly with family, so I can maintain my family friend time and stay balanced and feel great and hit all my goals. Instead of letting a walk with my mother turn into a whole day event, I start my workday later than anticipated and less energized because I don't hit any of my morning marks. This type of scenario takes place way more often than I'd like in my life. I want to go with the flow less. How can I do that?

Yeah, terrific question. So this is something that is not just about productivity advice, because I can hear in the question that there's a lot of emotion, this question, particularly when it comes around family. And so. So it's very difficult to manage these family relationships when you feel an obligation to someone, as opposed to in a business context, you can say, oh, I've got another meeting. Sometimes it can be very difficult with family to stop in the middle and say, oh, I have to go do something else. I totally understand that. I've been there many, many times. And so two pieces of advice here. One is to build in buffer, right? We talked about this a little bit earlier. If you can say, look, I really do need to get to my task at a certain time. I need to start working, doing a project at work, or I need to go exercise or I need to go be with somebody else for a while, then building in that buffer, time to say, look, I've got about an hour, but I'm going to give myself an extra 20 minutes in case it runs over. Okay, that's one strategy. Another strategy is to perhaps change the time when you're with your mother, for example. So in this person's case, if she wants to make time to walk with her mother, but she finds that if she doesn't in the morning, it takes her off track for the rest of the day. And I've certainly been there. If you feel like your morning's wasted, well, now it's only about 20 minutes till lunch. I'm not going to start anything just now. Let me just watch some YouTube videos and then it's lunch and I'm kind of tired and I'm low energy and I'll start again tomorrow. And then before you know it, the whole day is wasted. Well, one simple solution is to move the time of that event that you feel kind of drains your energy. So if it's a task, particularly one that doesn't require a lot of cognitive work. That would be the kind of task I'd recommend trying to put at the end of the day versus the beginning of the day. You want to save, for most people, the high cognitive task, the thing that is the most effortful. That's the thing that's typically done best first thing in the morning. Not for everyone, and I would say experiment with this. But if you know there's a task that you don't have to be firing in all cylinders, it's a conversation. It's something that's kind of easy to do, that's not high stakes, that's not high pressure or high stress. That's something that I would perhaps explore doing at the end of the day when you don't need a lot of energy, you don't need your full cognitive abilities. So taking a walk with your mom and just having a nice conversation, doing something good for her and yourself, spending that quality time together, I would try and see if you could adjust that to the end of the day. Especially if you in particular know that you love that feeling of getting a lot of stuff done first thing in the morning. Then I would see if you could flop that around.

We got a question about this topic of slow multitasking, and I admit I had to look it up. Are you familiar with this term or do you want me to read the definition?

I know what multitasking is. What's slow multitasking?

Slow motion multitasking is when we have several projects in progress at the same time and we move from one to the other and back again as the mood takes us or the situation demands. That's the definition. The question was in the context of this. This was from Malan. He said, how do you work when you have competing priority one goals? Or how to know when you can stop working on priority one goals for a while?

Okay, so let's say the multitasking part for a little bit later, because that actually doesn't sound like multitasking. That sounds like task switching. Multitasking is when you have information from two sensory channels at the same time. And it's something that we don't do, we can't do. Humans can't do two math problems at the same time. You can't listen to two podcast episodes at the same time. You can't read two books at the same time. So multitasking in that respect is impossible. What he sounds like he's doing is going from one task for a little bit and then doing the next task for a little bit. Then doing the next task for a little bit. There's some. Some cons to that we can talk about. If you do it a specific way, how to do it, but let's get back to it in a minute. But the second question around, priority one goals. This is why it's so important to not measure yourself by how much you finish. Okay? That's not the ultimate goal. This is not how you should measure yourself. Rather, it's how you do what you say you're going to do for as long as you said you would. Because when you do that, when you work on a priority one goal, if you say, okay, this is the most important thing I've got to do at work, I have to focus on this and I'm going to do it for what proportion of my day? Okay, so you look at all the other stuff you have to do in your day. You have to meet with your reports, you have to do email, you have to go to meetings, et cetera. How much time do you have for that priority one goal? Right. That you actually have time for? You put in that time and then you measure how much progress you made on that goal in that fixed period of time. That is the only way that you could say a good estimate of how long it's going to take you to finish the task. So if you got to finish a big presentation, okay, that's your priority one goal. I've got to finish this presentation, make all the slides, and I say, oh, wow, you know what? I worked on this for an hour and I got through three slides. Okay, well, if I know that the whole presentation has to be 30 slides, well, that means I need to take an hour times 10 to finish the entire project. But you can only do that with time boxing. So when is enough time to your priority one goal? When you've finished it, right? When you've estimated the time and you at least, even if you didn't finish the task, I would say that's not actually accurate. When you know that you have enough time boxes in your schedule to allow you to work on that task without distraction until completion. Okay? But without being able to estimate, you're just guessing. And this is why people procrastinate, because they think, okay, I'll have time, I'll have time, I'll have time. And they avoid that discomfort of doing the task by rationalizing, well, I'll just do it later, later, later. And of course, the more they procrastinate, the more discomfort they feel. And so it's this vicious cycle. Whereas if you just work on it a little bit at a time. Even if it's 15 minutes, right? This is the best thing you can do if you're a procrastinator like I am. If you can just put in a little bit of time, 15 minutes is too much. No problem. Do five minutes, do two minutes, okay? Work on the task for literally two minutes and see how much progress you made. Any amount of progress, even if it's just two minutes of progress. If you can do that two minutes of progress, you can begin to start estimating. Okay, well, here, here's how long it's going to take. And so if I just put in that consistent effort, right? If I put in that time in the calendar, I know eventually the task will get done. Now, if you have a deadline, this makes it quit pretty easy, right? Because you can take the deadline, you can take your estimate of how long a task is going to take, and then you have to budget in how much time it's going to take you to finish the task. But asking yourself to finish the task in a certain amount of time in that time box is almost impossible because there's so many exhaustionist factors, there's so many things outside of your control. So the best thing you can do with those priority one tasks is, number one we didn't talk about, but I think is the most important thing is to clarify with whoever dictates that that should be your priority. So we've talked before on the podcast around schedule syncing, sitting down with your manager, with your boss, with your colleagues, and showing them your timebox calendar and asking them to help you reprioritize. Because what's going to happen is you're going to have the limited time in your calendar. You're going to have that filled in with your timebox tasks that you're going to do all the things you have to do in your week, and then you're going to have this list of other things. And so it's up to your manager to help you reprioritize by saying, hey, this stuff on your list, this is way more important than that stupid meeting. Don't go to the meeting, do this instead. And now you can begin to reprioritize to figure out, okay, what's priority one, what's priority two? What's the most important tasks? And now that you had that time budgeted in your calendar in the right amounts, and you can begin this feedback loop of figuring out how long things will take, this is a much healthier way to finish these tasks. And when I say healthy. I mean, from a mental health perspective, we know that there's a certain kind of work that literally drives people crazy that leads to anxiety and depression disorder. And these are tasks or work environments where you have high expectations and low control. This is literally the recipe for depression and anxiety disorder in the workplace. High expectations and low control. If you have high expectations and high control, no problem. People rise to the occasion. It's when you have high expectations with low control that. That people feel burnout, they feel depressed, they feel demotivated. So what you want to do personally take charge of your own mental health is give yourself more control. How do you give yourself more control? By putting it on your damn calendar? By knowing, hey, I have control over my time and attention. This is when I'm going to work on this task consistently until it's done.

I like that. What's that thing? If you have high demands and high control, then you can be happy. But if you have high demands and low control, then that's the recipe for burnout.

Yeah, expectations. High expectations and low control. And this isn't my research. This was done at Oxford by two researchers by the name of Stansfield and Candy, and they found that this is exactly the case, that the recipe for burnout is high expectations with low control. But what's fascinating about this, that many people think, oh, well, then I need to lower my workload. That's kind of the natural reaction, oh, I'm burning out. I'm doing too much. Let me lower expectations. That's not the only way to solve this problem. In fact, I would argue that's not the best way to solve it. Because when you lower expectations but you still don't have control, well, now you still have low control, low agency, low ability to affect your future, but you're expecting less from yourself, that feels crappy. That's not a good solution. A much better solution is to have those high expectations, but find ways to increase control, increase your sense of agency, increase your belief that you can do the thing that's assigned to you. Okay. And the way you do that is by getting greater control over your time and attention.

Hey, if you're just tuning in, we're doing an Ask Me Anything with author Nir Eyal, and we would love if you leave a review on the podcast app that you listen to. For this podcast. We're on a goal to try to get two more reviews this month as we record. It would really mean a lot. Whatever app you listen to, if you could take a second, it would be awesome. If you want to have your question answered here live on recording for our next Ask Me anything, just reply back to nir's newsletter with your next question and we'll queue it up. Speaking of which, we got another question from Whitey. Whitey says, I work a day job and I also manage a laundromat. It requires a bit of a balancing act. What is the optimal time frame for deep focus work? How long should you work before a break, and then how long should sleep said break be?

Okay, so I'm going to respond to this question in a similar fashion as I did earlier about the which tool to use question, and that is that the optimal length of a break is the one that works for you. There is no scientific evidence that, oh, there's a magic number. You know, people say it's, oh, the pomodoro technique or the 45 minute. There's no optimal number. The optimal number is the one you can do. If you can sustain your attention for five minutes, and that's as long as you want to go, that's fine. But the point is, congratulate yourself for working on whatever it is you said you were going to work on for five minutes without distraction. What we do know is that the average amount of time that someone will switch from one task to the next from. I should say from one screen to the next. I just heard an interview with Gloria Mark, who's a researcher in attention research, and she said it was 42 seconds. Okay, 42 seconds. So if you can do longer than 42 seconds, pat yourself on the back, congratulate yourself for being able to do the task you said you were going to do for as long as you said you would. Now, the idea is that over time, you're going to grow that muscle, right? You're going to grow that ability, that strength that you have to do what you said you're going to do. So in indistractable, I talk about the 10 minute rule, which is where you say to yourself, I can give in to that distraction in 10 minutes. So that probably would be a good starting place for most people. If you can just work on a task, have a focused work session for 10 minutes, right? And that's your rule. You can do anything for 10 minutes, right? There's very few things that you can't focus on for 10 minutes. If you set your mind to it, pretty much anyone can do that. So the idea here, though, is that after you prove to yourself, hey, yeah, I worked on this task for 10 minutes and look how much I Got done. Well, now Let me try 12 minutes. Now let me try 15 minutes. Now let me try 20 minutes. And so over time you're proving to yourself, actually, you know what, I can focus on just this one task at a time for that period of time. Oh, and he asked about breaks too, right?

Yes. How long should the set break be? How long should you work before a break? He then had another bonus question. I don't know if this helps to know. But he also said, if you have time, how should I schedule my day and week to avoid burnout or lost in productivity?

So let's, let's take the break question first. So the optimal length of break again is the, is the length that you need. What I would warn against is that many people think that there's some kind of optimal break, like we've heard a lot these days. And there is some good research to show that going for a walk in nature is very rejuvenating. Now that's pretty good advice. There's nothing wrong with that. If you enjoy a walk in nature, I certainly do go for it. The problem is that people think that's a requirement, right? They think, oh, if I don't go walk in nature, then I will not have properly rested. And now it becomes another excuse for procrastination. And so you want to avoid that, Right. Sometimes all I need is to take literally five minutes, go refill my cup of coffee and come back up to my desk and get back to work. Because that's, that's all I, I can afford, so to speak, in my schedule in that morning. Now what I might do is later on, maybe later in the day, I'll go do a 30 minute walk, which I, I do quite a bit. You know, after a meal I like to take a walk. So, so don't let good be the enemy of. Sorry that perf. Don't let the, don't let perfect be the enemy of good. That something doesn't have to be absolutely perfect and optimal in order for you to do it. So if you only have time for a five minute break, enjoy the five minute break. Right. It doesn't have to be, you know, go out in the woods and smell the sequoias and do that for 30 minutes. Do it. Do what you can afford to do with your schedule and your lifestyle.

Susan submits our last question for this recording. She says so many people constantly make to do lists and set goals, but never get to the actual taking action part. What are tips for that to actually take action?

Ah, this is a Great question. And part of the reason I hate to do lists. To do lists are terrible because of what I call the tyranny of the to do list. Now let me be very clear. I'm not saying you shouldn't get things out of your brain and onto a piece of paper and onto an app. That's fine. Getting them out of your brain is fine. The problem with it is that that's where people stop. Okay? And so what happens is exactly what Susan is asking here is that, you know, you have this list of things that you never get to. Why? Because there's no constraint with a to do list. You can always add more and more and more. And so this is where the tyranny of the to do list comes from. Because even when you have worked all day long, you've done as much as you possibly can, you feel tired, you come home from work, and then you just want to relax, you just want to hang out with your kids, you want to watch a movie on Netflix, you want to, you know, just, just chill out. The tyranny of the to do list says, no, no, no, you've still got a bunch of things on your to do list you haven't done yet. You know, and then that's why we wake up in the middle of the night at two in the morning thinking about all the things we we've left undone. Because if all you're doing with the to do list is writing things down, that's step one. You've forgotten the most important step, which is of course putting them on your calendar. And this is why a Timebox calendar, you know, eats a to do list for breakfast. It's such a better technique because when you have these loose ends on a to do list that's endless, you can always add more to that. But when you put it on your calendar, you are constrained by the 24 hours that all of us have in a day. And so it forces you to make trade offs. It forces you to figure out what's more important right now than something else. And so that's why most people never finish all these things on their to do list. What they do finish, it's ridiculous. They finish the easy stuff, right? They finish the urgent stuff. I've known people who will literally write in stuff on their to do list after they've done it just for that joy of checking it off. Ridiculous like that. If you do something that's silly, it tells you the technique is not working for you. Rather, the better technique is to immediately or as quickly as you can take that, those items, put those things that you, you've written down on your calendar in a time box schedule. And you know what that's going to do? That's going to force you to say, hey, I don't have time for some of that stuff. That's okay, that's great. That's progress. If you can say to yourself, this is stuff I will not be doing this week. Maybe I'll save it for next week and I can look at it later. Or maybe I'm never going to do it. That's an aspiration. Maybe it just doesn't fit with my values right now. By doing that, you've eliminated all that time wasting those time wasting tasks, which I would say are also distractions, and you've given yourself this gift of a guilt free life. Right now you're not thinking shoulda, coulda, woulda. You said no. All I said I was going to do was what was on my calendar. Everything else for me is not a priority.

Ooh, the gift of a guilt free life. I like that. We've heard a lot of that. Well, you're listening to near and Far Business Behavior and the Brain. Author Nir Eyal is the best selling author of Hooked how to build habit forming products and also how to control your attention and choose your life. You gotta check it out. If you haven't read his books yet, near blogsar.com and I will give one more plug to ask you to please leave a review or a rating in whatever app you listen to this. We don't have ads, we don't have sponsors right now. We're just doing this for you. So that is our agreement, that is our gift to you and in exchange will you please leave a review? Near has a weekly newsletter filled with science backed strategies for designing healthy habits that your customers will love. Whether designing customer behaviors or your own habits, you'll benefit from understanding the research that near shares from User Experience Design, Behavioral Economics and neuroscience. Sign up for the free newsletter@www.nearandfar.com that's spelled n I r and far f a r.com this has been our first ever Ask Me Anything. How to Go Near I think that was pretty fun.

Yeah, that was great. I'd love to do this again. So please, please do send us your questions. If you leave a review on itunes with a question or if you email me from my newsletter, please do send in those questions. I love answering them for you and much appreciated. Thanks so much for listening everyone.