Indistractable Chapter 10
Chapter 10, Control the Inputs, Not the Outcomes
It's often best to focus on what you can control instead of things you can't. You can't control the stock market - but you can control how much you contribute to your retirement accounts. You can't control what other drivers do, but you can be a better defensive driver. All of the actions that you can control and improve are all centered on you.
It's up to you to protect the time for you to be the best you can be. Time will fly by regardless of how you use it - make sure that you're using it to the best of your ability. That's not to say that you must only work, but that you have to be mindful about how much work you can get done that is of good quality. Or, how much relaxation time you need well before you get to burnout.
The author recounts his difficulty sleeping, even when he creates his schedule to include enough hours to devote to it. If he wasn't able to get to sleep at a particular time, he would worry about it, which would then not let him get to sleep. This sounds rather familiar! Instead of worrying, Eyal would repeat a mantra of "The body gets what the body needs" over and over until he fell asleep. He took pressure off of trying to fall asleep, and instead focused on creating the time and environment that would be conducive to sleeping. When his body could fall asleep, it would. I notice that I do a better job falling asleep when I run the guided meditation app with the narrator calmly telling me something about meditation or gratitude or emotions or something similar. I feel victorious when I wake up to my alarm, realizing that I have no idea how the meditation ended.
I know that I previously would schedule both the time to give for a task and the outcome I wanted out of the task. Then, if I had setbacks, I felt both guilty that I hadn't used the time like I had planned, and now was well off course for my task completion that was a requirement for another task I had scheduled. I'd soon quit because I was well behind what I had expected of myself without understanding if my expectations were reasonable. I'm working through this by expecting that I'll just spend some time doing the task without an expectation of how far I would get.
Chapter Summary:
It's often best to focus on what you can control instead of things you can't. You can't control the stock market - but you can control how much you contribute to your retirement accounts. You can't control what other drivers do, but you can be a better defensive driver. All of the actions that you can control and improve are all centered on you.
It's up to you to protect the time for you to be the best you can be. Time will fly by regardless of how you use it - make sure that you're using it to the best of your ability. That's not to say that you must only work, but that you have to be mindful about how much work you can get done that is of good quality. Or, how much relaxation time you need well before you get to burnout.
The author recounts his difficulty sleeping, even when he creates his schedule to include enough hours to devote to it. If he wasn't able to get to sleep at a particular time, he would worry about it, which would then not let him get to sleep. This sounds rather familiar! Instead of worrying, Eyal would repeat a mantra of "The body gets what the body needs" over and over until he fell asleep. He took pressure off of trying to fall asleep, and instead focused on creating the time and environment that would be conducive to sleeping. When his body could fall asleep, it would. I notice that I do a better job falling asleep when I run the guided meditation app with the narrator calmly telling me something about meditation or gratitude or emotions or something similar. I feel victorious when I wake up to my alarm, realizing that I have no idea how the meditation ended.
I know that I previously would schedule both the time to give for a task and the outcome I wanted out of the task. Then, if I had setbacks, I felt both guilty that I hadn't used the time like I had planned, and now was well off course for my task completion that was a requirement for another task I had scheduled. I'd soon quit because I was well behind what I had expected of myself without understanding if my expectations were reasonable. I'm working through this by expecting that I'll just spend some time doing the task without an expectation of how far I would get.
Chapter Summary:
- Schedule time for yourself first. You are at the center of the three life domains of you, relationships and work. Without allocating time for yourself, the other two domains suffer.
- Show up when you say you will. You can't always control what you get our of time you spend, but you can control how much time you put into a task.
- Input is much more certain than outcome. When it comes to living the life you want, making sure you allocate time to living your values is the only thing you should focus on.
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