People Make Time for What They Want — Rightfully So

People make time for what they really want. Hey, everyone. Welcome to the near and Far Podcast. This is Nir Eyal, and joining me, as always, is Nick Gray. Nick is the author of the Two Hour Cocktail Party, a wonderful book. If you're looking to reconnect with friends and loved ones as we come out of COVID and you're looking to reform those relationships and have yourself a fantastic cocktail party without all the stress and anxiety, definitely. Check out Nick's book. Nick, how are we doing?

I'm doing good. I'm excited to talk about this. You know, part of hosting parties is like, how do we build a friend network? How do we make acquaintances and things like that? So I'm excited to think about. I'm just guessing by the title, People make time for what they want. Is it about, like, time blocking our calendar for relationships and hobbies?

It's about making sure that you're putting aside time for what you really care about. So that many times we hear people saying, oh, I wish I had time for that, or this, or, you know, we should get coffee sometime, or, you know, why isn't this person making time for me? And the fact of the matter is we make time for what we really want, for what's really important to us. So it's. It's important that we're conscious of how we spend our time so that we don't look back and regret.

There's that phrase. I read it online recently where somebody said, you're not just too busy, you're not making it a priority. Would you agree with that?

Absolutely. Absolutely. We have plenty of time. Right. The average American watches 5 hours of television a night, so we definitely have the time. We just are not using that time in a way that actually serves us.

Five hours of television. I get the idea that listeners to this podcast are not in that group. They are high achievers. Right? Right. But still, that's what the facts are. So if you're just joining us, I'm gonna read through Nir's article and then we'll add some commentary to the article as well. I'll go ahead and get started. People make time for what they want. Rightfully so. People make time for what they want, and we should aspire to that. People make time for what they want to make time for. Though the author is unknown, this saying has become an axiom to soothe distraught thoughts. Some use it as a reasoning to understand why another person isn't making time for them. Maybe they're just not that into you. According to a video from Sex and the City. Why aren't they calling or texting or replying? For others, it's become a mantra to kickstart the mindset shift. They need to make difficult yet necessary decisions that protect their time, which usually means letting go of some activities and people to reserve space for others. It's a valid justification. Time is precious. We only have so much of it. We must be careful about who and what we give it to. Still, that can be a challenge. Every day we face people and activities that try to steal our time. Here's how to make sure you spend time on what you want. Smart people make time for what's important to them. It's not wise to waste your time and attention. They are scarce commodities. When we let someone steal our time and attention with distraction, we're paying with a non refundable, non renewable resource. If we're to spend our time how we want to, we have to see distraction for the thief it is. And we have to start valuing our time and managing it as carefully as we do our money. Indistractable people already do this. These people make time for what they want by setting boundaries. And they don't feel guilty about being stingy with their time. Because to surrender control of their time is to surrender how they want to live their life and what type of person they want to become. People make time for who they want in their life just as important as limiting what we allow in our life is limiting who we allow in our life. The company we keep has a massive influence on our behavior, driving us either to distraction or to its opposite, traction, which is any action we do with intent. It's essential to make time only for people who enable us to pursue traction. That means focusing on quality relationships over quantity. Ensuring the values of the people in your life don't conflict with your own is critical to picking quality relationships. But we also must pick friends with as much interest and time to put into the relationships as we do. If you find yourself putting a lot of effort into a one sided relationship, let it go. People make time for who they want to make time for. Likewise, you should make time only for people who make time for you. You deserve people who actively include you in their life and enrich yours.

Yeah, I'm so curious. You have so much experience getting people together. How does this strike you?

So I had a situation about 10 years ago where I made the difficult decision to, I don't want to say cut out of my life, but to stop hanging out with a close friend. And I realized that I Liked that friend because when I first moved to New York City, he was so generous with his time and his apartment and he'd invite me over and I gotta be honest, we would hang out and we would maybe drink a beer and watch tv and that was an exciting relaxation for me. But it became kind of all that we did together and I realized that I wanted to better my life. At the time I was experimenting with not drinking alcohol and I kind of, I tried to invite him to other things and do more, but. So it was a weird thing that had to happen for me was to start saying no to his invitations and to really phase him out. I'm just curious if you have any thought. There's no really good way to do that.

Yeah, I mean, people make time for what they want, right? So if your friend wanted time for beer and football, well then that's what he's going to make time for. But if he wanted time to hang out with you and build your friendship, he didn't make time for that. So yeah, I think that that's the point of this article is to understand what's important to you, what are your values and how do you want to spend your time, but also to find like minded people who want to spend time doing similar things and who want to invest in the relationship as much as you do. And that's not easy because that could be a very small overlapping Venn diagram. Right. Of like things they want and things you want and sometimes there isn't an overlap.

I want to be very careful as I tiptoe around this idea that. And help me if I say anything stupid. But friends don't have to be forever. And I think there's a lot of people who maybe have friends from high school or from college that they've grown past or they want to grow past. And these people are very happy with their lives. You hear this a lot in, in people who want to start businesses and business owners, they need to surround themselves with other people taking risks and trying things and starting a business. And that's very hard with an old friend group. And I wonder if people have talked about thinking about that, but this is resonating me and it's making me think about who I spend time with now even.

Yeah, I wish I had a great answer for it. I'll tell you. It's something I struggle with between. I want to keep those lifelong friendships. The people that you have known for decades and decades. They're super important because when you look back you say, well, who am I going to be friends with in the next 20 years or people who I've probably known for 20 years. And you want to keep those relationships around. On the other hand. Yeah. What if your values are different? What if the time in your life is different? I think, as you said, it's perfectly fine for friends to be really close during certain phases of your life and then kind of drift off to other relationships at other points of your life. But then how do you strike that balance to continue to invest in those old relationships?

There's a quote that I read that said you can have friends for a reason, a season or a lifetime. And there are friends that you will have in different seasons of your life. And that's okay. It doesn't mean that they're all lifetime relationships. Something else I thought of was hold the term friendship close. We can have acquaintances, you can have a lot of acquaintances, but your close friends hold that sort of at a higher thing. Anyhow, we're talking about how people make time for who they want in their life. And that part really resonated.

It's a really good point. There's also. I also have heard this dichotomy between fun friends and loyal friends that there is. And it's typically, you don't usually find a person with both traits. Right. Like, there's a person who's fun and who's great to hang out with, and they're very entertaining, but that means they're very entertaining to lots of people. And so they're not necessarily the most loyal. And then there's the kind of people who are super loyal and who are great to have in your corner, but they're not the most exciting people at a party.

I think what you're talking about in this article is be careful with who you give the default yes to. Do you want to hang out? You know, yes, because why? Because they're my friend or are they really. Is that someone who I really want? Does that friendship take priority over these other values that I have in my life? For example, for me, a value that I wanted was to spend less time with alcohol. And I had to make the difficult decision that those friends that really prioritized drinking and alcohol, our values just didn't line up anymore. And that's hard.

Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Great points.

Follow these steps to control your time. People make time for what they want by making a conscious effort to control their time and attention. That begins with identifying the values they want to live by. Intimacy, selflessness, and determination are all values or characteristics of the people we want to become. Once we know our values and the activities that facilitate them, we can turn them into time by adding them to a time boxed calendar. Exercise might be scheduled for Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 7am to 8am Leisure reading every night for 30 minutes. Family dinners every weeknight from 6:30 to 8pm with this timeboxed calendar in hand, we can live the life we really want. Anything that drags our attention away from the Timebox calendar we created for ourselves, be it social media, an unhealthy relationship or a micromanaging boss is a distraction. You can get other people in your life on board with your timebox calendar by schedule syncing with them. For example, share your hours for focused work with your boss and coworkers so they know when not to bombard you with emails, meetings or Slack messages. It's 100% within your right to make time for what you want. Start exercising control at work by setting boundaries to facilitate a work life balance. Start exercising control over your personal life by letting go of people and activities that no longer support the life you want. These are the things you need to do to make time for who you want to be.

Yeah, so I think it all starts from your values. I know I repeat this a lot during many of our episodes and articles, but it really does start from your values and asking yourself what kind of person you want to become. And then for me, this time boxing technique is so effective because essentially what I'm doing is helping myself be in the present moment. I'm not worried about the future. I'm not reminiscent at the past. I'm saying how do I want to spend this moment right here? And then by putting that time on the calendar, that's the only way you can ensure that you know the difference between traction, anything that you say is on the calendar and distraction, everything else. One of the techniques, back to friendships that I didn't mention this article but has really served me in my life in getting that, that, that balance of having those, those three types of friendships you mentioned those lifelong friendships which I think are the hardest ones to nourish as a society becomes more affluent. Right? The fact that, you know, many people stay in their hometown but as you have more opportunities, as you know, you go to college in one place, you get your first job in somewhere else and then after that you move to a third location. Every time that happens, you're at risk of losing your old friendships. And so it becomes even more important to decide where and who you're going to spend time with as you Move. Because if you move to a different city, you. You know, you really have to put that extra effort. You have to be conscious about staying in touch with the people that you really care about. So I'll tell you two things that I do that have really enhanced my life. One is a few years ago, actually, while I was writing Indistractable and I was learning many of these techniques, I decided to time box time with my closest, longest friendships. And so there's three people in my life that don't live in the same city as I do, but I really wanted to stay in touch with. These are people who I've known since I was a teenager. And so here's what I did. I called. And by the way, so we would have this problem of saying, okay, let's get together. Let's talk some time. And it would always be kind of a drag to schedule. Well, how about, you know, how about this day or that day? And we have to, you know, go back and forth, and then what invariably happens is time goes by, and then it starts feeling weird. You know, if, like, we were such good friends and we've been buddies for our whole life, shouldn't we have talked more recently than, you know, six months ago? And so it became more and more awkward the more time went by. So here's what we did. We did a schedule sync, and I mentioned this in the article, but the schedule sync goes like this. So I called up my friends and I said, look, I really value our relationship, but I don't think that we are going to keep in touch if we have to schedule every time we want to talk. So how about we schedule time on the calendar as a default? So it's not that default? No, it's default. Yes. Okay, so the default is every month we have time on the calendar schedule. So with my buddy Travis, it's the third Tuesday of the month. That's time for Travis. We have the same time. It's always scheduled. And so it's on a reoccurring appointment on both of our calendars. So we know that time is already booked. Right. The time we have together, Nick, actually is the same way. It's already booked, and it's. It's kind of every week. And unless something happens, we don't cancel that time. Now sometimes we do. Right? Like, if I can't get. If I can't make the call with my buddy Travis, no problem. I text him and say, hey, let's skip this month. I'll talk to you next month. No problem. But the Default is that there's always time scheduled and we do our best not to schedule over it. So at least for those really long term relationships, I know I have time on the calendar. Another technique that I, that I started using just recently actually somebody told me about this is to have a list of relationships. Maybe they're, you know, maybe some of them are more acquaintances. I don't, I know you use the term friendship very carefully, so maybe some of them are acquaintances, some of them are friendships. But having this list of people you want to stay in touch with and then I actually put in my calendar to just take five minutes to reach out from someone on that list once a week, right? So I'll just reach out to that person with, hey, I haven't heard from you for a while, what's going on? Or you know, maybe I'll call that person or maybe I'll schedule time to see that person and then I'll just kind of run through that list every once in a while just to remember that there's people in my life that I just, I care about them and I want to see how they're doing and I don't want them to just kind of, I don't want to forget about them. So. And I do that only once a week, takes five minutes. And it's a nice way to kind of review those relationships and make sure that the, those people are still doing all right.

I love that idea. I'm getting excited to do it myself. Hey, if you're listening to this podcast, that is something you can do right now. Pause this podcast, take five minutes and send a message to somebody that maybe you want in your life, you want more of them, but you haven't heard from them recently, say hey, that you're thinking about them and maybe think about time boxing something with them. I thought about this. Nir, what do you think about this idea? If you want to only schedule time for people in your life that align with your values, consider shifting some of those old friendships to perhaps a workout together, perhaps co working together, perhaps meal prep together, that that can be your productive time with your friends.

I love that. In fact, I've been doing that recently. It's so funny you mentioned that there's this new gym that opened up that I became a member of and I really love this gym. And I don't know, I think especially for guys, maybe this is a little bit gender biased, but it seems like guys, we need to do something right. Like it's kind of awkward, especially if it's somebody you don't know super well. Be like, hey, let's get together for coffee. I don't know, it's, it's, it's weird. I want to do something. So at this particular gym they had these workouts where you, you compete against each other as you're exercising. It's really nice. It's called sparked. And so, yeah, it's so funny you should say that because I go there three times a week and I would say two out of three times I invite one of my buddies to come with me and we always have a bunch of laughs and then we'll, you know, we'll hang out a little bit afterwards. That's, that's a fantastic, Nick. Fantastic idea, Nick. And I've actually used it to really enhance those relationships.

That sounds great. Well, if you're looking for two things you can do right now as takeaways from this article. Number one, take five minutes. Maybe set it every week to text somebody that you haven't heard from in a while or somebody that you want to have in your life. Number two, start to time box your friendship hangouts, whether it's at the gym for meal prep, reading books together or something like that. You've been listening to the Near Al podcast. It's called near and Far. And near is relaunching this podcast. Would you take a minute to just leave a review? Every single one he and I read and it brings us so much joy and it really helps us to get two more reviews. We're almost at this threshold. 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. Near blogs@nearandfar.com, where we've read from this article that's filled with hyperlinks and actionable tools. He also has a weekly newsletter filled with science backed strategies for designing healthy habits your customers will love. Sign up for his free newsletter@nearandfar.com thank you so much for listening to near and Far, the podcast. Whether designing customer behaviors of your own habits, you'll benefit from understanding the research that near shares from user experience design, behavioral economics and neuroscience. We'll see you next episode.