Nir Eyal: recommendation

Transcript context

…What I like about this is one, it's kind of like the Pomodoro technique, but it's shorter. The 10 minutes I think is a really clever tweak versus 20 minutes, which a lot of people recommend. And then I guess a couple of follow-up questions. Do you do this one time in the morning and then not come back to it? Is this like a jump start for the day and then you start... If I start a thing like this, it won't be 10 minutes, it'll be like an hour because I'm like, "Okay, I did the hard thing, I'm into it. I'm just going to keep working." So, is this like a jump start for the morning or do you come back to this throughout the day? So, you can do it whenever you find yourself slipping off track. And so, the Pomodoro is a version of this. I don't think it's complete enough because Pomodoro just said, "Set the timer, do it." Okay, fine. And that's great if it works for you. By the way, anything I'm saying right now, if the thing is working for you, if your life is awesome and you're doing what you said you're going to do, maybe this isn't the podcast. Maybe my book isn't the book for you, right? I'm talking to the people who, for whatever reason, you know you're capable of more, you know you're drifting off track. Maybe if like me, you said you were going to exercise but you didn't or you said you're going to eat right, but you don't. You said you were going to work on that big task, but you procrastinate. That's really who I was and that's who I wrote this book for. And so, you can use that technique whenever you get distracted. It's not the whole picture. So, it's super important. Remember we talked about those four steps. This is just step number one. There's about a dozen different things you can do. Maybe this particular 10-minute rule doesn't work for you, doesn't work for everyone. There might be other techniques you use. So, there's dozens of different techniques just about this step around mastering internal triggers. But the next step to answer your question of well, how long do I go for? Do I do it for an hour? If now, I'm in the zone? And my answer is emphatically no. You don't go as long as you think you can. What you want to do, and this is step number two, is you're making time for traction by turning your values into time, which means you are going to make a time box schedule because you cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. I'll say that again. You can't call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. So, for me, at least, when I would succumb to, "Oh, let me just check email for a quick minute, let me just see what's happening on Twitter for a quick minute," part of that was because I would justify to myself, "Well, this is a work-related task. I got to do it sometime," and there wasn't a specific time to do it on my calendar, so I would keep thinking, "Well, I got to do it sometime. Might as well just do it now." And that's a huge mistake because if you can't look at your calendar and say, "Oh, that's traction." Okay, check email, write the blog post, post the podcast, go on social media. If that's not what's written in your calendar, if it's not there, it's a distraction. And so, it's not just work-related stuff. I literally have time in my calendar, spend time with my daughter, go on social media, watch Netflix. It's in my calendar. So now, I took what was previously distraction and I turned it into traction by putting it on my schedule. So, you actually do this through the day you have, "I'm going to check Twitter during this time of the day, I'm going to hang out with my daughter during this time of the day."…

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