This content is locked. Please login or become a member.
When it comes to managing our attention and choosing our life, we have to remember that you can’t call something a distraction unless you know what it is distracting you from. So, this means if we don’t plan our day, somebody is going to plan it for us. Whether it’s your kids, your boss, whatever’s happening in the news. If we have big white space on our calendar, we know what we’re going to do. Some company or someone or something is going to use up our time and attention.
Be intentional
So, the way we know the difference between traction and distraction is one word: intent. Anything we plan to do with our time is traction. Anything that is not what we plan to do is distraction. And it’s impossible to know the difference between traction and distraction if you can’t look at some sort of plan for your day. Remember, you can’t call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. And so that means not only do we need to keep a calendar, but I recommend keeping a timebox calendar, literally accounting for every minute of your day, according to your values. What I want you to do is to turn your values into time.
You know, if you asked me a few years ago what I value in life, what are the attributes of the person I’d want to become, I would tell you that I very much value being a devoted father, being a good friend, taking care of my health. All those things are values that I hold. And yet, if you looked at my calendar, you wouldn’t see any of those things. And so we know what happens when we have wide open space on our calendar — we fill it with potential distractions. But how do we define those distractions if we don’t know what it is distracting us from? And this is why it’s critical to account for every minute of the day. Now, it doesn’t mean that you have to rigidly enforce every single thing you say you’re going to do. However, now for the first time, by creating a time-boxed calendar, you can look at that time-boxed calendar and say, “Aha, everything that’s on my calendar is traction. Anything that is not what I plan to do is a distraction.”
So, the price of all this progress, the price of carrying the world’s information in your fingertips and all these videos and emails and potential distractions on our device is that if you don’t plan your day, somebody else will. Your boss, your kids, your spouse, whatever’s happening in the news — something is going to suck up your attention unless you decide for yourself what you want to do with that time. Now it’s perfectly wonderful to watch a video, to spend time on Google or YouTube or Facebook or whatever other thing you want to do with your time. Remember, the time you plan to waste is not wasted time. But do it on your schedule, not according to someone else’s schedule or the app maker’s schedule.
Sync schedules to sync goals
One of the benefits of making a time-boxed calendar is that we can share our plans with the stakeholders in our life. We can do this with our family members, with our friends, even, and most importantly, we can do this with our colleagues in the workplace. So, one of the big problems that we find occurs in the workplace is managers lobbing over tasks to employees without a good understanding of how they spend their time. So, managers say, “Please do X, Y, and Z.” They add things to the backlog with no understanding of when those things get done. So, when employees keep a time-boxed calendar, they can share their plans with their colleagues and say, “Look, here’s what I’m going to do this week. Does this sound right? Are my priorities properly arranged? And here’s the things I didn’t have time for. Are any of those tasks something that I should now put in the calendar, and what should be deprioritized?”
One of the mistakes that we make in the workforce today is that we only consider the outputs. I call this the myth of the to-do list. We’ve been told that if we just write things on our to-do list that somehow everything will magically get done. And we know that’s not true. Half of our to-do list gets moved and recycled to the next day and the next day and the next day, and tasks don’t get done day after day. That’s craziness. And part of the reason they don’t get done is because making a to-do list is just the first step. If something’s on your to-do list it has to also be on your calendar. And what we want to do is to arrange a regular meeting of just fifteen minutes or less with our colleagues to go over that schedule, synchronize our plans, and make sure we have the right priorities for the week ahead.