Nir Eyal (author of How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life) explains timeboxing: planning what you will do and when. He argues timeboxing makes distractions identifiable and recommends measuring success by whether you did what you said you would for the allotted time. He outlines three common reasons people avoid or abandon timeboxing—whataboutism (excuses), treating schedules as fixed rather than iterative, and psychological reactance (rebelling against perceived control)—and gives practical advice (allow small trial periods, iterate daily, provide options within slots). He mentions tools (Google Calendar, pen-and-paper, a free Google Sheet template) and directs viewers to Indistractable.com for an 80-page workbook.
Chapters
Why do I keep getting distracted? Why don't I do what I say I'm going to do? How do I find my focus? If you don't plan your time, somebody is going to plan it for you. My name is Nir Eyal and I'm the author of how to control your attention and choose your life. Today we are going to dive into the science behind timeboxing. Timeboxing is the most effective thing you could possibly do to manage your time and attention. Timeboxing simply involves planning out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it. Remember, you can't call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. So if you have a big open calendar where you haven't decided what you're going to do with your time and attention, then everything is a distraction to do. Lists are nothing more than a register of output. It's all the things you want to finish, right? It's all the tasks you want done without accounting for how you're going to do them and specifically when you're going to do them. But in order to get output, we need input. So instead of measuring our productivity by how many cute little boxes we checked off, a much better way to measure ourselves is by one criteria and one criteria only, which is, did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would? So, being a proponent of timeboxing for years, I've heard every excuse in the book. And so what I want to do today is to go over the three most common reasons people don't start timeboxing, or why they quit after adopting this technique. Number one, what about ism is when people come up with every possible excuse around why a particular time management technique won't work. What I want you to try is a small unit of time to implement this technique in your own life. Ask yourself what the ideal weekend afternoon would look like for you. How can you live out your values? How would I spend time taking care of myself? How would I spend time in relationships that are important to me? How would I spend time doing work? Number two, not realizing that timeboxing is an iterative process. Many people, when they think about timeboxing, they approach it like a drill sergeant telling them what to do and when they're going to do it. Immediately. And it becomes a very punitive approach. Your timebox calendar is not set in stone forever and ever. It's set in stone for that day ahead. But that doesn't mean that the day after you can't alter to suit your needs. So the idea here is that you're constantly iterating on your time box schedule. Not in the day, but in the next day. For years I had in my time box schedule time to write in the afternoons. But then I started experimenting with what it might be like to write first thing in the morning. And I loved it. Number three, succumbing to psychological reactance. Psychological reactance is this phenomenon when our autonomy is threatened. When we feel bossed around, we rebel. But of course that's ridiculous. You get to make up your own time box schedule. Nobody's telling you what to do. When I exercise, I have time in my time box calendar every day for some kind of physical activity. I just need to get some exercise. I can go do some pushups, I can go to the gym, I can take a run, I can go for a walk, I can go for a swim. It's absolutely fine to have a few options in each time box slot. So for me it's just Google Calendar that I use from day to day. But you can use anything. I've met people who use pen and paper. On my website, near. Com, there's a free tool. It's a. It's a link to a Google Doc that I made, a Google sheet specifically where you can fill in your daily schedule with this template plate that you can use from week to week. Thanks so much for watching. To learn more about timeboxing as well as how to become Indistractable, visit Indistractable.com where you can download a free 80 page workbook again at Indistractable.com.
