A $7 kitchen timer reveals how much time you actually spend working versus getting distracted. Set it for a task, stop it when you check your phone or Slack, and compare elapsed time to your estimate. Most people discover they work far less than they think.
I have this timer that I have on my desk. It's the easiest purchase you can make. I think it was like $7 on Amazon. It's a little twist kitchen timer. It's very easy. It's been probably my biggest focus hack, you know, to date, which is I turn it when I want to start working. And part of it allows me to think how long I get better at predicting how long it's going to take me to do something. I think this will take me 35 minutes. So I turn the clock to 35 and I click on and I start working on the thing. And the moment my phone rings or I look at Slack or whatever, I stop the timer. And so you actually see that your time on task is usually significantly less than you think it is. And I think that in my early days, I would spend a very long time in front of a computer telling myself that I was working with very few minutes actually on task. And that's why I think that most things are actually significantly easier than people think they are. They just don't know how to try hard. And so it's like if you can just learn to love what trying hard feels like, then all of a sudden it becomes unreasonable that you can't win.
