Feeling busy

Design your life like a choice architect:

• Encourage smarter decisions you want to do by making them more accessible.
• Add friction to habits you want to quit, making them less accessible, or remove the option to perform them completely.

“First, never underestimate the power of inertia. Second, that power can be harnessed.” 

1. Observe the need to procrastinate, recognizing and being aware of your desire. This is called meta-recognition and is what all the Gurus keep talking about when they speak about awareness.
2. Label and accept your urge to waste your time, but without any negative judgement.
3. Validate your urge to procrastinate, increasing your self-esteem.
4. Approach procrastination as a friend, not as a threat.

The biggest obstacle, the main villain hampering our productivity is always in your hands, and rarely in your pockets. _It’s your smartphone. It needs to be powered off for some time. Your laptop, clamouring for attention, is not helping either. Remove all distractions and notifications so that you can get in the ‘flow’ mode.

Creating friction between us and the open black hole of the online distractions helps us focus on work.

Collaborations can be unproductive, time-wasting, and a strain on top employees.

Collaborative organizational structure can drain people’s time and resources, wherein employees are “emailed to death and meetinged to death."

... (or delegation), it helps to know where everyone’s expertise lies. 

Make sure your employees get to know each other, whether that happens through group lunches, coffee breaks, or informal social events. This also builds trust — a vital element for successful collaboration.

We can reclaim our time and our attention. Unlike a physical space, we can wipe the slate clean in our digital environment.

If you clear apps from your phone, nothing will happen. You can always reinstall the ones you use.

• Clear your browser history.
• Unsubscribe from newsletters, podcasts, blogs, and anything else you consume.
• Delete all the apps that are currently on your phone and desktop or laptop (as long as you don’t have to buy a new version of anything).

• Grab a piece of paper and write down all the habits that you think are unhealthy and want to get rid of. Once you have finished, rank them in order. Now start with number #1. Forget the rest for now.
• Add layers of “friction” to your vices to make it harder for yourself to keep doing them. Keep adding layers of friction of time, money, or both.

• Remove all social media apps from your phone
• Change your passwords to something impossible to remember. Save them in a document/cloud
• Log out after each session.
• The radical option: Delete your accounts.

Examples of half-work:

• You start writing a report but stop randomly to check your phone for no reason or to open up Facebook or Twitter.
• You try out a new workout routine. Two days later, you read about another “new” fitness program and try a little bit of that. You make little progress in either program and so you start searching for something better.
• Your mind wanders to your email inbox while you're on the phone with someone.

Decisions and choices that you make throughout the day tend to drain your willpower. You're less likely to make a good decision at the end of the day than you are at the beginning.

If you do the most important thing first, then you’ll never have a day when you didn’t get something important done.

This behavior keeps you from dedicating your time to meaningful work. Replying to email may feel productive, but the truth is emails are rarely the most important thing on your to-do list.

So instead of keeping your inbox open all day, change your default behavior to working on emails in batches.

Real-time communication sets the expectation that you’re always available. And for many of us, our default behaviors support just that.

In order to change this behavior, you need to set expectations on response time. Mute specific channels, get rid of pop-ups, turn off mobile notifications, etc.

With this strategy, you won’t waste time checking emails constantly throughout the day. 

Instead, you’ll establish an end-of-day email routine. Research found that people who check their emails three times a day respond to the same amount of emails 20 percent faster than those who constantly respond to messages as they came in.

... if you’re just receiving several emails a day. Otherwise, strive to empty your inbox out once a week.

• Regular Aerobic Exercise: Great for both your physical and mental health. Increases the production of dopamine and boosts creativity.
• Preparing Your Own Meals. It’ll take some getting used to, but it’s a habit that’ll boost your health, wealth and productivity. 

• Create a Household Budget: the best habit to help you save money. A household budget helps to encourage frugality and discourage impulse spending. You’ll feel more motivated to engage in other good financial habits once you’ve got this in place.
• Financial Audits. This involves frequent checks as to whether you’re spending your money as wisely as possible.

• Deep work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. Creates value.
• Shallow work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. Doesn't create value.

• Monastic: maximize Deep Work by minimizing or removing shallow obligations. Isolate yourself for long periods of time without distractions; no shallow work allowed
• Bimodal: divide your time into some clearly defined stretches to deep pursuits and leave the rest open to everything else. Reserve a few consecutive days when you will be working like a monastic. You need at least one day a week
• Rhythmic: involves creating a routine where you define a specific time period — ideally three to four hours every day — that you can devote to Deep Work
• Journalistic: alternate your day between deep and shallow work as it fits your blocks of time. Not recommended to try out first.