Things I did today

Chapter 26, Distraction Is a Sign of Dysfunction In companies that have a poor company culture, often workers are given unreasonable tasks, or unreasonable timelines, or both. As pressure mounts, the workers experience depression as they try to meet demands, often by working well past their scheduled time, responding to emails during off work hours when they are trying to have dinner with their families or sleep. If there are a multitude of demands made from different managers, often each manager assumes their requests are the most pressing for the employee. This is often a complain of college students (or at least, when I was in college) that it seemed as if professors required large projects to be done in the same week. You can power through (if it's true that you couldn't get any work done earlier) as a 20 year old, but by 40, you can't burn the midnight oil like you used to. As a person in the Infrastructure group, I don't quite get the luxury for turning my p

Chapter 25, Prevent Distract with Identity Pacts It's easier to take an action when it is part of your identity. Eyal discussed a study about voter turnout when the questions were about how likely they were to vote versus questions about being a voter. For those that had the questionnaire that discussed them being a voter, the turnout was much greater. We change our behavior by how we view ourselves. I struggle with practicing piano. I like piano. I used to call myself a piano player. Now, I cringe when someone says that about me - it's a reminder that I'm not doing what I had set up as 'who I am'. Since I have such a problem with it, I either tell everyone it was something I used to do, and then beat myself up about it in my head. I'm struggling to find something that works, especially in the light of current events - it's tough to continue on beyond basic tasks. I'll head back to basic tactics, like the first book I read about making habits obvio

Chapter 24, Prevent Distraction with Price Pacts Price pacts are about adding an uncomfortable financial wager to motivate the kind of behavior desired. Eyal discussed a smoking cessation group with a goal of 6 months' of no smoking. They were given different motivations. Group 1 was the control group, who were offered free nicotine patches and educational resources. Group 2 was offered $800 if they stopped smoking. Group 3 had to make a precommitment of $150 with a pledge to stop smoking for 6 months, but if they hit their goal, they are rewarded with $650 along with the $150 back. The percentages of success? Group 1: 6% Group 2: 17% Group 3: 52% Several years ago, I entered in a few price pacts for weight loss, called DietBet. It was successful, and plenty of people lost weight, but not everyone. I would put in $30 and would routinely get back $40 - $50 for the month due to the people who had paid in but not hit their goal. I managed to lose 15 pounds or so, but a

Chapter 23, Prevent Distraction with Effort Pacts Eyal uses pacts with friends who have similar schedules to have focused bouts of work time. He mentioned that he is more likely to stay on task when his friend is also on task, and they are both bound to their mutually agreed upon amount of focused work time. When his friend who did this with him most often went to a conference, Eyal sought out Focusmate, videoconferencing service that pairs you with someone that has a similar schedule, so both can have focused time and a sense of not wanting to let someone else down. Chapter Summary: And effort pact prevents distraction by making unwanted behaviors more difficult to do. In the age of the personal computer, social pressure to stay on task has largely disappeared. No one can see what you're working on, so it's easier to slack off. Working next to a colleague or friend for a set period of time can be a highly effective effort pact. You can use tech to stay off tech. Ap

Chapter 22, The Power of Precommitments. The chapter, not surprisingly, shares the story of Ulysses sailing past the sirens. He made his crew fill their ears with beeswax so they cannot hear the sirens, nor Ulysses tell them to change course, and had them tie him to the mast so he could hear the song, but not throw himself overboard to find the sirens. Ulysses' precommitment kept everyone safe and completed his goal of hearing the sirens. Precommitments won't work if you've also not done the work beforehand - removing external triggers that distract us, make time for things we do want to do, and removing the external triggers that don't help us, it's likely that we will fail. Chapter Summary: Being indistractable does not only require keeping distraction out. It also necessitates reining ourselves in. Precommitments can reduce the likelihood of distraction. They help us stick with decisions we've made in advance. Precomitments should only be used af

My neighbors have turned up their music rather loudly, which is terrible timing as we'll all be working from home for the foreseeable future. I tried drowning it out by listening to music via my TV/soundbar. I tried talking to them - they said they would turn it down - and I tried listening to music with headphones, but the headphones eventually hurt my head (as they usually do after an hour or so.) They've been playing music from 10am to at least 8:30pm - I can't hear it now with the dishwasher running. I moved my desk setup to the dining room rather than living room which has greatly reduced the amount of bass. Tomorrow, I'll put my white noise machine in the living room to see if it blocks the noise. I spent most of the day learning about how to block noise and specifically bass. A lot of the very effective solutions require doing things to the apartment that I can't do - get down to the drywall and reinsulate and use Green Glue, for example, or building a room

Chapter 21, Hack Back Feeds Eyal spends this chapter showing how to remove newsfeeds or other information for the user that would be relevant for continuing to consume media or other distractions easily. He removes the newsfeed in Facebook, and only goes to the messaging subsite of LinkedIn instead of the feed provided by LinkedIn. He also uses an extension for YouTube that removes the videothumbnails and ads on the right side of the screen, showing a much cleaner look. I have a Facebook account, but rarely scroll through the newsfeed. I never go to Twitter or LinkedIn anymore, and I don't have Instagram, Snapchat or Pinterest. Reddit, however, is the community I most need to limit my exposure, as I've gone from 'learning something most of the time' to 're-reading an idea in an echo chamber'. I am hoping with the inclusion of Pocket on my phone and replacing the Reddit icon in my folder of most used apps to Pocket, I'll switch my usage from Echo Chamber