Nir Eyal explains timeboxing: schedule your week in advance, then spend 15 minutes weekly reviewing what stuck and what didn't. The technique uses implementation intentions, a psychological concept that deciding when you'll do something makes you more likely to actually do it.
Chapters
Whether at work, at home, or on our own, planning ahead and timeboxing our schedule is an essential step to becoming indistractable. By defining how we spend our time and syncing with stakeholders in our lives, we ensure that we do the things that matter and ignore the things that don't. It frees us, as it did me, from the trivialities of our day and gives us back the time we can't afford to waste. The most effective way to make time for traction is through time boxing. Timeboxing uses a well researched technique Psychologists call setting an implementation intention, which is just a fancy way of saying deciding what you're going to do and when you're going to do it. This technique can be used to make time for traction in each of our life domains. The goal with this practice is to eliminate all the white space in your calendar so that you're left with a template for how you intend to spend your time each and every day. It doesn't so much matter what you do with your time. Rather, success is measured by whether you did what you planned to do. Watching a video, scrolling social media, or taking a nap is fine as long as that's what you had previously planned to do with your time. Alternatively, checking work Email A seemingly productive task is a distraction if it's done when you intended to be with your family or work on a presentation. If you're not spending your time doing what you plan, you are off track. To create your weekly time box schedule, you'll need to decide how much time you want to spend in each of your life domains. Start by creating a weekly calendar template for your perfect week. Next, book 15 minutes on your schedule every week to reflect and refine your calendar by asking these two questions. Question number one Reflect when in my schedule did I do what I said I would do? And when did I get distracted? Answering this question requires looking back at the past week. If you became distracted due to an internal trigger, what strategies will you use to cope the next time that that discomfort arises? Did an external trigger, like a phone call or a talkative colleague, prompt you to stop doing what you wanted to do? Question 2 Refine Are there any changes I can make to my calendar that will give me the time I need to better express my values? Maybe something unexpected came up, or perhaps there was a problem with how you planned your day? Timeboxing enables us to think of each week as a mini experiment. The goal is to figure out where your schedule didn't work out in the prior week so that you can make it easier to follow the next time around. Sa.
