One Question to Ask Yourself to Know Your Future

One question to ask yourself to know your future welcome to the near and Far Podcast. I'm Nir Eyal, and with me, as always, is Nick Gray. Nick, how's it going?

It's going great. I'm excited. We're back to your articles today and you have a new one that I'm excited about. I'm saying hello after south by Southwest here, here in Austin, Texas, and I'm getting booted back up into productivity and mindset and stuff like that. So I'm excited for today's article.

Excellent. Welcome back.

Thank you. Thanks very much. So for those that are just joining us, I'm going to read Nir's article and we're on the near and Far podcast. I'm going to read some of it and then Nir is going to add his commentary. So let's get started with today's article. One question to ask yourself to know your future and to change it too the German writer and philosopher Goethe was believed he could predict someone's future based on one simple fact. If I know how you spend your time, he wrote, then I know what might become of you. Seeing how you spend your time reveals your values and thus shows where your investment of time, attention, and effort will lead you. The trouble is that too many of us spend too much time distracted rather than focused on the things that matter. Wasting time on distractions, which we'll later regret, leads to a life filled with missed opportunities. Using a few of the concepts I discuss in my book Indistractable, you can become the person you want to be without letting distractions lead you astray. Who do you want to be tomorrow? Either way, the best way to draw up a draft of who you want to be is to home in on the characteristics you want to embody, also known as your values. According to Russ Harris, author of the Happiness Trap, values are how we want to be, what we want to stand for, and how we want to relate to the world around us. People make time for what they want. For example, one of my values is to be a caring, fun, and involved father to my daughter. These values then act as a roadmap to becoming your ideal future self. You can use them to guide you toward the activities that help you fulfill those values. To support my value of being the father I want to be, I created a system with my daughter. Every week, we randomly select from a jar containing pieces of paper with a fun activity scribbled on each. And then we do that activity by consistently putting in this time to be fully present with my daughter I feel confident that I'm becoming the kind of father I hope to be. Listing your values and the activities that push you to meet them reveals any gaps between how you spend your time and who you want to become. Let's say you want to be an author. Unless you're spending time writing regularly, it's all but guaranteed that you won't publish as much. You have to make time for it or it won't happen. Thoughts on this section?

Absolutely. Yeah. So this is something I believe very strongly. The article is about how to predict your future. And the point, the big thrust of the article is if you know your values, you can predict your. Your future. But of course, that fundamental step that a lot of people don't do is to actually think about, well, how can I turn my values into time? We can always talk a good game about people's values, right? People say they value their health, they value their family, they value their, their particular faith. But when it comes to do they live out those values, do they actually possess those values? And does it actually guide their decision making? I think the two best places to look if you want to see if someone is really living out their values is you look at how they spend their money and how they spend their time. And I think of the two, time is the more important variable there because you can always make more money, right? Money you can always make more of. And I don't care if you're Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, you can't make more time. We all have the same 24 hours in a day. So of those two, time or money, I think we should be even more stingy about our time because it's a non renewable resource. We can always make more money. You can't make more time. So we have to be very stingy with our time. But I think generous with our money. But of course, most people have it flipped around, right? They split the check when they go out to lunch with a friend, they clip coupons. They won't pay 99 cents for an app if it's too expensive for them. But when it comes to their time, oh, they give it away to whoever wants it, right? Whatever stupid thing is on cable news, whatever silly thing is happening on Twitter, whatever gossip is passing around the office. That's the kind of stuff we give unlimited time to. But I think we should be very stingy with our time because again, we just don't get more of it. And so this is an article really about how we can let our values guide our future selves by making sure that we turn our values into time.

Thinking about that, there's two things. How we spend our time and how we spend our money. As looking at. I like that a lot. Would you be willing to share some of the activities that you've done in the past with your daughter from that jar?

Absolutely. Yeah. So we put all kinds of silly things in there from have a paper airplane contest or go visit the museum or go to the botanical gardens or go to the library, go get an ice cream. We just put. We sat down one afternoon. We literally put down all the different things that we wanted to do. The reason we did this, I didn't explain this in the article, but a little like life hack when it comes to kids, you know, sometimes there's things that kids really want to do that parents will kind of go along with.

Right?

Like, yeah, okay, I'll do that thing, you know, But I. I don't really want to. Right. You know, you can only play so many rounds of Uno before you want to go do something else. So I put in there things that I might want to do too, that maybe she didn't naturally want to do on her own, but got us some extra exposure to good cultural events. So. I love museums. I know you do too, Nick, but my daughter, she needed a little bit of coaxing. So if it was like, hey, last time we picked out of the fun jar and it was go get ice cream, this time, hey, we picked to go to a museum. Okay? So this is something maybe daddy would enjoy as much as you would if you. If you gave it a shot. So we kind of mixed it up.

Nice. That sounds fun. Can I give a shout out to a family friendly game I played recently?

Yeah, let's hear it.

Have you ever heard of this game called taco cat goat cheese pizza?

Yes, yes, we have it. Actually, I haven't played it yet, but my daughter has it.

Yeah, it's a. It's a really fun game that's easy to learn. I played with my parents and my sister and her husband, so I recommend it. It was fun.

Very cool.

Moving on. Next section is called dedicate time to your future self. Too often, people don't make time for their values. They let outside influences, like external triggers bulldoze how they intended to spend their time or allow internal triggers to drive them to distraction. But here's the thing. Your life in the future isn't going to look the way you want it to unless you take control of your time and attention. The best way to make our ideal future come to fruition is to turn values into time, just to fill everyone in.

If you're not familiar with those terms, external triggers and internal triggers, I know we've talked about them a lot in the past, but if you're new to the podcast, an external trigger is something in your outside environment that drives you to some kind of action. So this can be a ping, a ding, a ring, your kids, your boss, anything in your outside environment that tells you what to do. An internal trigger are these uncomfortable emotional states. And that turns out to be 90% of the source of our distractions. Boredom, loneliness, fatigue, stress, anxiety. That's the overwhelming cause of distractions. So just if you're not familiar with those terms, that's what they mean.

Oh, I like that. That external triggers are a ping, a ding or a ring and internal triggers are the emotional stuff. Is that right?

That's right. Right. And the cause of most of our distractions are the feelings we are looking to escape from.

But here's the thing. Your life in the future isn't going to look the way you want it to unless you take control of your time and attention. The best way to make our ideal future come to fruition is to turn values into time. Timeboxing, a well studied time and attention management technique, facilitates that. It involves reserving specific periods in your calendar for traction the activities you planned to do in advance to live out your values. Knowing exactly what we should be doing each day and when we plan to do it helps us fight distractions and create a timeline for achieving goals. Unlike checking something off a to do list, using a time boxed calendar enables us to learn how long different tasks take us. That in turn informs a feedback loop for our progress. So if you have a goal to write a book, putting that on a to do list is a recipe for never getting it done. But if you time box 30 minutes a day for writing, you can track how much progress you make in that time and do some simple math to get an estimate of when you might complete the first draft. Once you've realized that you generally write 200 words in an hour, for example, you can calculate that it would take you about 200 hours to write a 40,000 word manuscript. That's actually not much considering the average American spends nearly five hours per day watching videos. When it comes to living the life and the future you want, making sure you allocate time to living your values is the best thing to focus on. Plan your time and your future is in sight.

Yeah, so that's, that's the Big point of this article is that by planning out our time, by turning our values into time, you know, it's one of the most important frequently asked questions that I get is like, where do I start? I want to become indistractable. How do I know how to spend my time? This is how what I refer people to. And it's such a better technique than the to do list technique where you put all the different things you ever wanted to do, all your aspirations in your life on a to do list. And of course you won't get to a fraction of them because it's not planned out when you want to do the thing that you said you're going to do with your time and attention. Because those, those are the raw materials of living the life you want. It's time and it's your attention. Everything else is details. But if you can't harness your time and attention, you're not going to live the kind of life you want. So sitting down takes me maybe 10 minutes a week to sit down and plan my timebox calendar. Now that I've been doing it for so long, most of the things in my timebox calendar stay the same, right? Because my values haven't changed. I still have time with my family, I have time with my friends. I have time to take care of my physical health. I have time for work. That's mostly in my calendar. What changes from day to day or week to week is, oh, that person can only make that meeting at this time. Okay, no problem. So I'm going to move my writing time to a different time of day. So I do that in advance. But once you set that time box calendar, it's absolutely imperative that you stick with it for that day. And so just overall, this is a very empowering technique as opposed to thinking, oh, my time and attention is being controlled by those evil, you know, social media monsters or the news media or whatever, as opposed to whining and complaining about it. This is one of the simplest and most effective technique and you don't take my word for it. This has been studied in thousands of peer reviewed studies. It's called setting an implementation intention, which is just a fancy way of saying planning out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it. I find that people who use this technique of simply planning out their day on their schedule, not on their to do list, but on their schedule, it's a life changing practice.

Well, a short plug. You're listening to near and far business behavior and the brain Now Wait. If you think this podcast is over, I have an ask have you written a review yet for Near's podcast? If you would go in there just like Southpaw38 who wrote a review that said Little prods for big changes, near and Nick concisely break down weekly action steps for making real changes to your life goals. Any little review like that would really mean a lot and it helps near reach new people to help them be more productive. Nir Eyal is the best selling author of Hooked how to build habit forming products and also Indistractable how to control your attention and choose your life. He blogs@nearandfar.com that's N I R A N-F-A-R.com and he has a weekly newsletter that is free that is filled with science backed strategies for designing healthy habits that you and your customers will love. Check it out. Sign up for the free newsletter and right back to one of his messages. If you have a question. We will be doing another Ask Me Anything episode with near sometime in the future, so write back to his email, send a question, send a tweet and we would love to hear from you. Thank you very much for tuning in. This is near and Far Business Behavior and the Brain. We'll see you next time.