Distraction erodes your day-to-day life and diverts your resources toward things that don’t really matter. Your daily habits are a foundation on which you are building who you are-your values, goals, personality, etc. Every building needs a sturdy foundation.
Indistractable Pillars
Traction: positive actions draw or pull us toward what we want in life.
- Distractions: things that push us away from the things we want most in life
- All behaviors, both traction and distraction, are prompted by triggers, both internal and external
- Internal triggers cue us from within: When we feel our belly growl, we look for a snack
- External triggers: cues in our environment such as the pings, dings, and rings that prompt us to check our email, answer a phone call, or open a news alert
- Whether it’s an internal or an external trigger that prompts us, the resulting action is either aligned with our broader intention (traction) or misaligned
- We can manage distractions that originate from within by changing how we think about them
- Reimagining the internal trigger, the task, and our temperament are powerful and proven ways to deal with distractions
Is this trigger serving me, or am I serving it?
After we have learned to master internal triggers, make time for traction, and hack back external triggers, the last step to becoming indistractable involves preventing ourselves from sliding into distraction
- To do so, we must learn a powerful technique called “precommitment,” which involves removing a choice in the future to overcome our impulses in the present.
- Precommitments are the last line of defense preventing us from slipping into distraction.
Being indistractable is about making sure you make time for traction each day
Planning your time with intention is critical, even if you choose to spend it scrolling through celebrity headlines or reading a ****** romance novel
- By defining how we spend our time and syncing with the stakeholders in our lives, we ensure that we do the things that matter and ignore things that don’t
- It frees us from the trivialities of our day and gives us back the time we can’t afford to waste
External triggers hamper our productivity and diminish our well-being
While technology companies use cues like the pings and dings on our phones to hack our behavior, external triggers are not confined to our digital devices.
- They’re all around us-from cookies beckoning when we open the kitchen cabinet to a chatty coworker keeping us from finishing a time-sensitive project.
