Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…what's important. "So, just let me look at my email inbox. My email inbox will tell me what to do. What's really important for my business? That's really hard. I don't really want to think about that. I'll look at my to-do list and I'll start ticking off easy tasks to do that make me feel productive." That's terrible. What you want to do instead is to book time in your schedule for this reflective work time, which is where you do the kind of work that requires you to work without distraction. Planning, strategizing, thinking, for god's sakes, can only be done without distraction. So, that fills up your calendar, as well. And what you're going to find, that there's never enough time for everything, which is good because what this forces you to do, and this is one of the main reasons why to-do lists suck, is because to-do lists have no constraints. You can always add more to a to-do list. You can always add more, but here's what happens. This is what happened to me. I would get home from work. I have a very busy day and I'd look at my to-do list and it's a hundred items long and I think, "Wow, I've been working real hard all day and look at all this stuff I still didn't do. Loser." And so, day after day, week after week, month after month, I was reinforcing this self-image as someone who doesn't know how to manage their time. And then I started saying stupid stuff like, "Oh, maybe I'm no good at time management. Maybe I have undiagnosed ADHD. Maybe there's something wrong with me." There's nothing wrong with me. There's something wrong with this very stupid to-do list method, which doesn't force you to understand that there are trade-offs that you have to prioritize properly and that can only be done with constraints and that constraints come from your calendar. So, you're turning your values into time by making time for traction and having this calendar and then, only then you can look at your calendar and say, "Ah, whatever it is I plan to do, that's traction. Everything else is distraction." I want to share a couple things that worked for me that are very much along these lines. One is booking. I call it deep work time within the day. This was the only thing I had in the calendar, so I didn't do the other things, which I think would've been really helpful, but I had a, I called it deep work time. I will slap you if you book anything over this meeting. I love it.…

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