Not Enough Hours in the Day To Slay Your To-Do List - Nir And Far

Not enough hours in the day to slay your to do list hey, welcome to the near and Far Podcast. My name is Nick. I'll be reading this article and we're joined by Nir. I'll let him give the introduction. How this works is I'm going to read Nir's latest article, not enough hours in the day to slay your to do list. Even the most productive person can't have it all. At least not all at once. We're going to talk about that. But Nir, why don't you say hello to your fans and tell them what we're doing and then we'll get into the article.

Hey Nick. Hey everyone. It's great to be with you today. This is Nir Eyal, author of Indistractable how to Control youl Attention and choose youe Life. And today we have Nick Gray, as always with us to read through this article. Nick is a great friend of mine. He's offered to read through this article that I wrote recently and we're going to stop and talk about different points as they come up. Nick, by the way, is a fantastic author of a book you should absolutely check out called the Two Hour Cocktail Party. He gives you a step by step guide for how to connect with your friends, how to be more social, how to have more joy in your life by inviting people into your home with without the big mess and ordeal of having a big dinner party. So fantastic book. Highly recommend you check it out. Two Hour Cocktail Party.

Well, thanks for that shout out. Let's get talking about the productivity and what you're gonna help us learn here with your new article. Not enough hours in the day to slay your to do list. I'll get started reading it now. Even the most productive person can't have it all. At least not all at once. You can search for the best productivity apps to make you more efficient and focused on. You can implement productivity hacks and cut distractions, but you still might feel like there simply are not enough hours in the day for everything you need to get done. Something has to give. You have to prioritize some activities over others or else you'll be spread too thin to dedicate yourself to anything fully. Read on for a simple strategy to identify and honor your priorities to prioritize, turn your values into time. When you look at your list of want to do's, everything may seem necessary. Everything you listed is good for you. It would be great if you dedicated five hours a week to exercise. Fantastic. If you spent an hour practicing a new language. Marvelous if you committed one day a week to business growth Tasks so how do you choose which goals and tasks to prioritize and which to set aside for now? Don't spend a fraught number of hours weighing the importance of every goal and task. Instead of starting with what we're going to do, we should begin with why we're going to do it. So we should start with our values. Values are the attributes of the person you want to become. They are how we want to be, what we want to stand for, and how we want to relate to the world around us, according to Russ Harris, author of the Happiness Trap. In the article, there's a link to 20 common values. You can categorize your values into three domains of life, yourself, your work, and your relationships. See a graphic that NIRS made here on his website at nearandfar.com the graphic says life domains and there's three circles. The smallest circle in the middle says you. The next largest circle outside of it says relationships and the next circle, the biggest one on the outside says work. The caption says the three life domains, you, relationships and work. Once you've identified your values, they act as a guiding star, showing you where to focus your attention. You can then turn your values into time. First, write down which tasks will help fulfill those values and move you toward your ideal self. Doing so helps you decide which goals and tasks need to be prioritized. Now try to limit the number of these primary goals and tasks to the most essential. You can always add more later, but the point is to ensure your top priorities have real estate on your calendar. Next, use time boxing, the most powerful time management technique, to block off space for your priorities in a calendar, giving them all the time they require to get started. You can use my free Schedule maker. Find that schedule maker, by the way, at www.nearandfar.com schedule maker. You might add dinner time with your family every weekday, an hour of exercise every morning, or the number of hours of sleep you require. Even timeboxing one activity is a great start.

Yeah, so I just wanted to reinforce this idea here of the purpose of a timebox calendar is that you have to add constraints. That we know that without having constraints, this is where we tend to do things we later regret. And so one of the rules that I kind of live by and that I wrote about in Indistractable is that you can't call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. So if you have a bunch of white space in your calendar, you can't really say you got distracted because what exactly did you get distracted from? You didn't plan anything, so you didn't get distracted from anything. So that's why making this timebox calendar is super important and the frustration that many people have in starting a timebox calendar. They say, well, where do I start? Where do I begin? And so that's why I made these three concentric circles that help you identify your values. So your values in your life domain of yourself, how would the person you want to become take care of themselves? Whether that's getting enough sleep, whether that's exercise, whether that's playing video games, it doesn't really matter what you do. And it's not up to me or anyone else to judge you and tell you how you should spend your time. It's really up to you. It's about making sure you do the things that you yourself want to do. So you've got the life domain of you, all those things that you require to take care of yourself. Then you've got the relationship domain. And so I know Nick and I talk about this quite a bit about how important it is to plan time for the most important people in your life. If you don't make that time, if you just give people whatever scraps of time are left over in your life, you're not going to build the kind of quality relationships you need to live a fulfilling life. And then finally, your work domain. And that's the place where most people begin timeboxing. But I actually think that's the last place we should start. This is where we separate work into the kind of work that's reflective work versus reactive work. So reactive work is all the work of checking emails and notifications and meetings. And reflective work is the kind of work that can only be done without distraction. So creative tasks, strategizing, planning, thinking, for God's sakes, has to be planned for. You have to make that time in your calendar or it's just not going to get done properly. What ends up happening to people who don't plan is they run real fast in the wrong direction. So we've got to make sure we have that time in our day by turning our values into time.

Two things I thought about. One thing I love is that whenever we talk about this, you never make me feel shame for using social media, for wanting to play video games to say, look, I'm not going to judge whether that's good or bad. Choose what goes into that. You box. So I really appreciate that about your philosophy and guiding principles, really absolutely.

It's interesting. I read this study recently that found that the amount of time that people spent on social media did not affect their mental health. What did affect their mental health was their perception of the time they spent on social media. So there was no correlation between deleterious effects and time spent. Right. So there was no correlation there. There was correlation between how bad people felt about the behavior. And so we really can kind of get ourselves in this rumination loop of, ooh, I'm not supposed to be doing this. I should be more productive. I should be spending time doing this, that or the other. I feel guilty, I feel shame. And of course, that vicious cycle of shame and guilt, what does that do? It makes us feel worse. And the worse we feel, the more likely we are to seek distraction from the bad feelings. So we want to eliminate the guilt and shame. We want to stop moralizing and medicalizing and saying, there's nothing wrong with checking social media. There's nothing wrong with watching YouTube videos or Netflix movies or playing video games. If that's what you want to do according to your values, wonderful.

Do it.

But don't do it as an escape from reality. Do it as something you plan to do according to your values. I want to be the kind of person who enjoys playing video games. Awesome. But have it in your schedule. So it's not something you're doing impulsively. It's something you're doing consciously, mindfully, by planning that time ahead of time.

Did this idea nir for you of the relationship or the you sort of bucket then the relationships and the work? It made me think, as I was reading the article about that big rocks story. I don't know if you remember that story where you choose the biggest rocks. Did that motivate this or do these go sort of in tandem?

It wasn't directly inspired by that. There's many, many people who've done this concentric circle idea of, like, how to plan your life. It actually was a Greek philosopher whose name is slipping in my mind at the moment, who talked about your moral responsibilities as a citizen. And he talked about how, like, you have a responsibility to your family and then to your city or then your town, and then your, you know, like, that was like the framework, and I kind of liked that. So I played with it to make it more about how to spend time.

That's nice. That's nice. I like that. All right, well, we're going to continue reading the article. Overcoming not enough hours in a day is a process. By focusing on a few things at a time you're more likely to achieve them. The participants of one study who tried to accomplish multiple goals were less committed and less likely to succeed than those who focused on a single goal. Trying to accomplish too much at once is overwhelming. I have a friend who's always wanted to learn a second language, but it wasn't until she made learning Spanish a priority for two years that she made significant progress in becoming fluent. Perhaps the idea of dedicating a chunk of time every week to the same task for two years sounds daunting to you. My friend claims the years went by quickly and that she likely wouldn't have achieved anything else significant in its place if she pursued too many goals. However, if that reassurance is wholly unsatisfying for you, here are a few tried and true techniques for prioritizing competing values. Number one give seasons to your life, say, 90 days to a year in which you focus on one thing before moving on to the next. It may make you more comfortable prioritizing a value if you know it's just for a certain period. 2. Identify what is urgent what matters most right now? If you value being a role model for your children, you must prioritize time with them in their formative years. 3 Use the bubble sort method. List your values on a horizontal grid. Ask yourself which of the first two values is more important and move the most important to the left. Then compare the second and third values and move the most important to the left. Continue until your values are in order of importance from left to right. 4. Tackle values that are simple to fulfill first. For example, getting enough sleep is a natural starting point if you want to be mentally and physically healthier. And number five follow the 8020 rule. Identify the 20% of your values that will likely contribute to achieving 80% of what you want. In other words, assign time to the values that will result in the most significant attraction toward your ideal self. With a manageable set of priorities, we also increase the likelihood that they become routines or habits. They are not the same, by the way. See a link to why they're not the same by going to nearandfar.com habits. Once those activities are streamlined, you'll have more headspace and calendar space to focus on others. Sometimes dedicating time to activities that fulfill a value reveals surprising truths, such as that a value is not as significant as you once thought. Giving time to our perceived priorities helps us learn about ourselves. Naturally, your values and priorities can change over time. You can revise your time boxed calendar. As your life and values evolve, it's the best way to ensure you can have it all, even if it's not all at once.

Yeah. Great. Thank you so much, Nick. That was a great reading. And curious for you. Have there been times in your life where you've had competing values and competing demands on your time? Curious how you prioritize them?

I think absolutely. When I go through phases of living in a proactive versus a reactive work mode, when just being honest, most days I just wake up and deal with I'm not proud of it, but deal with my inbox as that's where I sort my to do list. And I find myself as an author now being more reactive than being proactive and I want to shift into that. So I like that idea of thinking about what matters most. For example, for me, I just got back from a trip to Mexico City and oh boy, was my Spanish embarrassing. I was talking to one of our mutual friends, Taylor, who runs Focus Mate, and Taylor said in learning Spanish he went to a yoga class and oh gosh, this is a tangent. But he said he never learned the word in Spanish for the word wall. And so in yoga it's face the wall, go towards the wall, do this in the wall. And he, you don't learn the word. Why? Why would he need to learn the word wall in his Spanish class? And he, he just realized and I myself, oh my gosh, my Spanish, I really want to get better at it, but it's not a priority for me right now. I liked what you said about the seasons to your life and thinking, setting a time box, even for that learning process.

Yeah, absolutely. That's been really helpful for me as I write my books. I'm not sure if you had the similar experience when you wrote your book, but there was a time for kind of flaring and learning, letting myself kind of run wild intellectually and explore different topics and different research ideas and just kind of collect information. And then there was a time to really hunker down and stop reading more information and just process it and start putting it down on paper. And so there was that kind of seasonal for me. It takes five years to write a book on average so far with my past two. And so sometimes it does take just years of thinking about different ideas, let them marinate and actually not making them the priority, having other priorities in my life. But then when it comes time to, okay, I think I have something significant here to contribute now, to really hunker down and just focus on the writing, I had to go into that season mode to say, okay, everything Else is secondary because this is my primary goal right now.

The idea of the bubble sort method I thought was interesting, and I have to think how I could do that on the ones that are most important and say, if we're being vulnerable. You know, I'm 40 years old now and I'm almost 41. And as I think about wanting to start a family or something like that, maybe a lot of other people realize that as we focus on our career so much, then these other goals really sneak up on us that have more of a time limit to those types of goals.

So, yeah, definitely I felt the same thing. Having a family with my daughter. My daughter is going to go to college here in three or four years. And so that's definitely one of my. The priority, I should say not one of. But the priority right now is to really maximize my time with her before she's out of the house. So. Yeah, but a few years ago it wasn't. It was about, you know, making sure I could finish my second book. And so, yeah, these seasons of life are very important. I think it's again, it's not about what's right or wrong for everybody. It's not about prescribing how others should live their life. It's about saying, okay, what would I regret? What would I miss out on? Like, what's an opportunity that's going to happen right now that if I don't make sure I plan time for, it's going to slip away?

How would you summarize this article if you were to say for the listeners what their main takeaway would be? Would it be that they should line up their goals or their priorities with their values? Or that they need to think about those three buckets of you relationships at work? What's the key learning here for us to think about?

Yeah, I think it's turn your values into time that we can say we have one value or another. But you don't really know someone's values unless you look at how they spend their time and how they spend their money. That's how you really know what someone's value. It's very easy to say, oh, sure, I value my health, I value my family, I value my friends. But do you really, do you have time in your calendar? Do you spend money according to your values as well? Oh, being generous to others is very important. Okay, but do you have the time and money to show those are your values? So it's really turning your values into time by making this time box calendar so that you can just like Your bank account, you can account for your time as a reflection of the kind of person you want to become. And then I think the second thing I would emphasize is to prioritize the time, not the output. I think this is something that gets a lot of people, is that they say, well, I needed to do this thing, but then I didn't finish it, right? And that should not be the goal, especially. Especially with things that aren't always in our control. So, for example, I was speaking, I did a consulting, like a coaching call with someone who. A woman who really wants to start a family, but she doesn't have a significant other in her life. Well, she can't make the goal, find a husband. That's not all in her control, but what she does have control over is how she spends her time and attention. So saying, okay, here's what I'm going to do, here's how much time I'm going to spend per week, because this is one of my values, right? I want to be in a committed relationship. And so putting in the time, that is what you can control. So focusing on the elements you can control and not worrying about the things you can't control. You can't control if Mr. Right's going to walk into your life, but you can control the kind of time you spend on that particular value.

That made me think about something you said in another one of these episodes, which, by the way, if you enjoy these episodes, please leave a review in whatever podcast app that you listen to. Nir reads every single one of these. Send him a note back if you're listening. Doing this new format is really fun for us. And by the way, if you have an article or an idea that you'd like Nir and I to read about, please send that in as well. It made me think about Nir when you said that timeboxing, the measure of success is not whether you accomplish your goals and that, but it's, did you work on what you said you would work on when you were going to work on it? And I think about this, of what you're saying essentially, I think is your calendar doesn't lie. If it's really important, it'll show up in your calendar.

Right? And this has been repeated time and time again. I mean, I learned a lot of this from Steven Pressfield, the guy who wrote the War of Art. And he basically says, you know, this idea that, oh, the muse is going to come and it's going to be, you know, creativity is just going to bless upon you and, you know, when inspiration strikes is not really true that you need to put your butt in the chair and write. If you're an artist, you need to get to work and create. Inspiration favors those who put in the work. But the problem is that many times we don't plan that time. We don't make time on our calendars to actually work on the projects that are important to us. And the same goes for relationships, right? We want great relationships, but. But then we give people the leftovers, right? We call it the residual benefactor, the person who gets whatever scraps are left over. But then we. And then we wonder, why did our relationships break down? Well, it's because we didn't put in the time. And so I think that that's the solution is to actually make our schedules in accordance with what we value in life.

Well, that's fantastic. Well, this has been a reading of Nir's article. Not enough hours in the day to slay your to do list. Hey, have you downloaded the official indistractible workbook? If you haven't yet, you can find it@nearandfar.com this will help you regain control of your time today. You'll get the indistractible supplemental workbook. It's free. Download it now. You just need your email address. You can find that@nearandfar.com thank you very much for listening. We'll see you next week.