A good friend sent me a link to a 90-minute video on becoming super productive that essentially boils down to this: focus only on the things that matter and stop doing the million other things that don’t.

That’s not rocket science thankfully, it’s just separating what matters from what doesn’t, and the speaker, Darren Hardy, talks about the things that to him don’t matter—like playing golf, following sports, and being the handyman around the house. He literally won’t spend any time doing things that he’s not exceptionally good at, and he’s become exceptionally good at those things because he won’t give his time to anything else.

But we’re not like that.

We give up our time and attention easily to “Do you have a moment?”,  or “Is now a good time?”   We almost never respond with a “No!”, or, the middle finger we really want to give to the bosses who interrupt us with:

  • “Can you come to a meeting?”
  • “Will you be on the call?”
  • “Can you double-check this report John did, before I send it?”
  • “The CEO said … today and I thought you’d be just the person to get on that.”

Those “requests” pull you away from the commitments you already made to this same bozo who complains about your “productivity” and “time-management skills”.

Been there? I have.

But what’s interesting is our tendency to deal with the stress from these “requests” – and our unwillingness to say no – with diversions that perversely increase our stress by giving us less time to honour the commitments we should not have made … but did.

For many it’s social media: twenty, thirty, ninety minutes a day searching through news feeds and chasing links, posting stuff you hope at least thirty of your closest five-hundred friends will “like”, and feeling hurt when they don’t.

For some, it’s sports, others it’s reality TV, or binge-watching The Walking Dead. For me, it’s the news. I can’t seem to help checking what’s happening internationally and I also have this morbid fascination with Trump.  I haven’t discerned why, but I am mesmerized by his latest rants, ramblings and twitter torpedoes into truth, and decency.

Millions of us keep getting distracted with insanities as they happen; we get daily drips of him and everything else that’s happening in the world, and 99% of it is bad. And each drip pulls our attention away from what really matters to us e.g. building our relationships, increasing our skills, or fulfilling our ambitions.

The news organizations learned a long time ago that our brains are wired to pay attention to disaster. We want to know who died and from what, we slow down to watch the wreck on the other side of the highway, and we will consume any news about tragedy, disaster, crime, horrible crime, corruption, and fall from grace.

We can’t get enough of it.

My girlfriend reminds me of this all the time, and while I have reduced my intake from the local newspapers, I can’t wean myself from Trump. Not yet, but I think I’m getting better.

At least I’ve taken the first of the twelve steps. I acknowledge I’m addicted to Trump news and that’s at least 50% of the battle. If you can’t acknowledge that you have a problem you can’t do anything about it.

Darren is right, if you want to be more productive you need to focus on what really matters, and even if you don’t yet know, you can recognize the distractions you’re addicted to and get rid of them.

What distractions are you addicted to?

The video’s below and it’s called “Insane Productivity”.