How to Stop Wasting Your Life (No More Distractions)
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Summary
You re procrastinating way too freaking much. You know it, and I know it. So today we re gonna fix that. You don t just beat procrastination with brute force. There are ways to hack your brain into being 10 times more productive, if not more.
Transcript
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It's because procrastination isn't what you think it is.
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and help thousands of other entrepreneurs do the exact same.
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you don't just beat procrastination with brute force.
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into being 10 times more productive, if not more.
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how to stay locked in once you're actually doing the work
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and how to permanently wire these systems into your brain
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why you actually procrastinate in the first place.
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See, most people think distractions come from the outside.
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I'm talking emails and the pinging and the phone buzzing
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and Slack notifications going off, but that's not true.
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My friend near EL, an author of Indistractable,
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says that we reach for distractions to escape boredom,
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but you're actually using them to keep yourself busy
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People avoid things that might stress them out.
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he says stress primarily comes from not taking action
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over something that you can have some control over.
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So the stress that you created by not doing the thing
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is where the stress came from versus just saying,
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I got control over this, let me do something with it.
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So now that you understand the reasons behind distractions,
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We need to figure out what all those distractions
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Signal in many ways follows the Pareto principle,
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which is 20% of the work actually drives 80% of the results.
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Or the distraction, the vices, the video games,
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These are all things that just keep you distracted
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in meetings that are just like getting updates?
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And honestly, you're not producing any results.
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See, he could see the signal and all the noise,
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but the truth was is that I was just allowing myself
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That's why I always go back to a simple premise.
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If you show me your calendar and your bank account,
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It can be a blank piece of paper or pull out your phone
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and start a new note, but find something to write with.
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Just put a direct line down the middle of that page,
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one labeled signal, the other one labeled noise.
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The second thing is I want you to think about everything
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And I want you to write it down on that piece of paper
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is you'll have a lot of stuff in the noise column.
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That's why I created my Scale Your Business workbook.
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so now you know what you're spending your time on when it comes to single to noise
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you can see exactly where you're wasting time and you can probably diagnose some
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of the stuff in the noise column that you need to cut to get rid of so how do you actually do that
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point number three eliminating distractions the way we become more productive is first we have
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to make it difficult for you to get distracted and we have to break out the habits of defaulting
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to devices so here are two ways you can do this i call it the friction rule either we add friction
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to make it hard or remove friction to make it work. So the first thing is we got to procrastinate
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the distraction itself. If you're about to go open up Instagram and go doom scroll, I want you to at
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least make a commitment to yourself. And I know it sounds weird because you're like, well, I was
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about to do it. How am I going to not do it? I'm telling you, just give yourself 10 minutes. I'll
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actually allow you to do it. If you can go, hey, I'm going to wait 10 minutes until I go and I
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doom scroll on Instagram because I really want to right now. But you put it off. I guarantee
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you're probably not going to want to do it and the truth is you'll usually get back into momentum
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and you won't even want the distraction anymore you just got to create separation from impulse
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to reaction if that doesn't work let's add some friction let's make it hard on yourself it's kind
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of like this fun game where i think about it's easier to avoid the dragon than to slay it see
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most people are like i'm going to have food in my house and i'm like well then you're going to want
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to eat that crap food versus if you take the food and you put it out of the house then you got to
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get in your car to go buy the food you shouldn't eat that made it hard see how that creates friction
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I like to make it easy for me to make good decisions.
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So I prep all my clothes so that when I wake up,
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I pretty much told everybody, including my wife,
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You have to make it easy to make the right choices.
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for you to get distracted or at least added some friction.
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because they're waiting for a spark of inspiration,
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Which brings us to point number four, building momentum.
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Second gear is easier because you're already in first gear.
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because now you're in second gear and you have momentum.
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When you're driving a car and you gotta put it into gear,
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By the time you're in third, fourth is way easier.
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If you go from zero to fourth, it doesn't work.
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you'll barely notice because you're already in momentum.
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And as a guy that literally drives his cars every day
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doing donuts, I know the power of mechanical momentum.
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And most people will wait until they're motivated
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and inspired and feeling good about their situation
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I say oftentimes it's feel the feelings, fly the plane.
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and being in momentum and you know when you're in it,
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I think too many people give up their power of momentum
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If you're staring at a blank page, do anything.
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and you don't like what you see, go for a walk.
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You can start a diet halfway through a bag of chips
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by calling anybody and ask them to buy something.
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The thing that stops people from winning in general
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is they don't have clarity around what they wanna do.
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even if you don't make a commitment to doing it.
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Then step two, pick anything that is a small task
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that you could do that takes less than two minutes.
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That's called the mins, most important next step.
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and then do another one and just start and build momentum
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and go from first gear to second gear to third gear.
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And that is how we create and stay in momentum.
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to making a list of things I know that I gotta do
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And next day I know, I'm like, I'll do another one
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And then I'm like, ooh, I'm getting some feedback.
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I can see where the finish line's gonna come from.
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I can't believe I thought it had to be motivated to even start. So now we got momentum. You're in
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motion, but we got to make sure that you're not just staying busy. We actually have to be efficient
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in what we're doing, which takes us to point number five, doing the work efficiently. That's
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where I use Parkinson's law, which states the work expands to fill the time you give it. I can't tell
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you how often people say to me, Hey man, I'll give that to you by the end of the week. And I go,
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why not Wednesday? Well, I can do a Wednesday. All right. Why when? End of the day. Why not noon?
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Yeah, I could probably do it by noon. Cool. What changed from the first time I asked for it to get
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done and me asking if you can get it done sooner? They're like, I don't know. It's like, how about
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we do that to ourselves? So I'm a big fan of saying what is aggressive, but not impossible,
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because if you don't, you will just take up as much time as you want to get the task done.
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it's like when I go on vacation, the day before I leave, I get everything that are open loops done.
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Why? Because I know the next day I'm gone for a while. So think about what's the mindset you had
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before you went on vacation. How do you live your day that way? See, if there's no date,
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there's no priority, there's no pressure, there's no execution. So what I've done is I've built a
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system on how to do that. And it comes in three parts. Here's how we go about it step by step.
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One, we want to allocate specific amounts of time to finish the task and schedule it in the
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calendar. I'm talking a day of the week, a date in the calendar and a time of day. This is called
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time blocking. And the reason I do this is that the more you do it, the more you'll learn to
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estimate properly. Most people are always late because they don't ever give themselves deadlines.
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So they don't know if they overestimated or underestimated. The second thing is at the end
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of that time, schedule a meeting with somebody else or make a commitment to show somebody the
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work that you did during that time block. That'll create a forcing function for you to get it done
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because you know right after you're in another meeting
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It basically creates a deadline you have to stick to.
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into 25 minute chunks, which are called Pomodoros.
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And then I have a timer that literally sits on my computer
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I'll get done in that 25 minutes and I get it done.
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This system creates a massive amounts of productivity
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and accountability because it gives you an efficient way
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to force you to focus, to force you to stay in momentum,
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So now that we've eliminated all the distraction,
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So the last step is to make it easy and permanent.
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I remember one time I was talking to Tony Robbins
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and he said, the strongest force in human personality
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So the last step is to turn those habits into identity
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from buying a vape when you're driving home after work
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probably never why because you don't vape you have an identity of that's not who i am
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and eventually a habit like going to the gym becomes an identity i'm an athlete and athletes
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go to the gym and athletes don't order pizza for lunch and athletes are very consistent in their
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training and athletes have coaches all of a sudden that identity drives your behaviors and we want to
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do that for your productivity when it becomes part of your identity you don't have to hack yourself
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anymore. I have an identity that I'm the kind of person that preps before a meeting, that gets
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done on time, that follows my calendar 100%. So I don't have to sit there and stress myself out
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trying to do these things because it's who I am. So here's what I want you to do. First off,
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we're going to write one sentence, I always. And I want you to finish this with identity
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statements that essentially is empowering. If you think about the person who easily achieves
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the results that you do in your life, what do they always do? Do they always work efficiently?
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And finish this with something that you no longer wanna do
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some short-term distractions for long-term dreams,
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And write down, I never, and insert that there.
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What I always tell people is you have a 10.0 version
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You just gotta start acting like that person today.
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So the key is, is to repeat those statements all the time
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until your brain believes it, until it becomes identity,
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in avoiding the distractions to staying focused
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Where's the potential for your next breakthrough?
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and I wanna know that you got what I was sharing.
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find me on Instagram, Dan Martell, 2Ls of Martell
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and I'll send you over my full scale your business workbook.