The Reason You Don’t Get Things Done (How To Destroy Egoic Distractions) - #44

The Reason You Don’t Get Things Done (How To Destroy Egoic Distractions)

No. 44 — read time 5 minutes

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Today at a glance

• Essay: The Reason You Don’t Get Things Done

• Tweet: How To Legally Own Another Person

• Article: The Dawn of Everything

• Quote: Sadghuru On Time

Title

Every time I’ve been in a rut in life I could usually pin down the core underlying reason why—distractions.

Netflix. Doomscrolling. Friend drama. News.

Endless streams of information combatting for our attention, all designed to tap into our most base instincts.

Jaan Panksepp, a radical neuroscientist, identified seven basic human instincts: seeking, anger, fear, panic-grief, care, pleasure/lust, and play.

Being in a constant state of base instincts is not a healthy place to be.

And it certainly doesn’t give you the space to do your best work.

The times in my life where I accomplished the most (getting into Y Combinator, raising massive amounts of venture capital, getting into MIT, building deep-tech aerospace products, losing 30 lbs. and completing a triathlon) were also periods in my life where I shut out all noise and distractions.

Complete focus.

Through meditation, therapy, and experimentation I’ve boiled down both the root cause of my addiction to distractions and how to combat them.

The Root Cause of Distractions

Sometimes distractions are just that. Harmless distractions.

But I’d be willing to bet that for the large majority of the population, the distractions we’re all aware of are not harmless.

And they come from a deeper place.

A place where the ego resides and tries with all its might to be protected.

Distractions defending the ego because the ego is you.

The ego drives much of our unconscious behavior.

The process of deep inner work, whether it be in the form of silent meditation or taking mushrooms usually leads to a similar path—ego death.

I’ll leave that topic alone for today as it requires a much deeper essay but simply keep this in mind. The ego wants to be preserved. Distractions are one of its tools.

There is another layer to the ego.

The risk of humiliation. Shame. Ridicule.

We all understand this. Nobody wants to be laughed at. Those of us with kids know how sensitive and fragile little children are and we try to equip them with the tools to identify and combat bullying behavior.

But as adults we’re not much better.

And the reason most of us turn to distractions is to avoid doing the hard work we know is necessary out of a fear of failure.

Because with failure comes the heightened risk of ridicule.

By putting off our dreams to just watch a little more TV, or just scroll a little longer, we know there’s always tomorrow and what harm is it if I just delay this by one more day… you should see where this train of thought is going by now. Chances are you’ve thought this way more than once.

3 Tools To Combat Egoic Distractions

The goal isn’t to become a monk with perfect stillness of the mind.

That wouldn’t be an enjoyable life for most of us.

But we do need specific tools to both identify and neutralize distractions so that we can do our best work.

Reading these tips isn’t enough.

You need to put them into practice.

Once you’ve experimented you can pick and choose which work well for you.

1. Cultivate Mindfulness and Awareness

Harvard Professor of Psychology Ellen Langer has been studying mindfulness for over four decades.

Contrary to popular, her studies prove that mindfulness can be achieved without meditation.

“Mindfulness”, Langer believes, is “the simple act of actively noticing things.”

Her studies prove what neuroscientists are only now learning—that our experiences are formed by the words and ideas we give them.

For instance, instead of viewing work as “work”, we can choose to label it as play. Vacations largely feel like vacations because we let go of the mindless illusion that we are in control.

It is the illusion of stability in our lives that causes us to drift into mindless behavior.

People seem to come alive once they get diagnosed with some terminal form of illness. Why wait till that that day?

2. Setting Clear Goals and Intentions

We may take this for granted at this point but there is abundant research into how (and why) goal setting improves our mental well-being.

In the 1960’s, Dr. Edwin Locke pioneered the idea of motivation in goal-setting and set out to demonstrate that for goals to be effective, they should be clear, challenging, include 3rd party feedback, include deadlines, and be focused more towards learning than strictly petrformance.

I’ve written before about the importance of SMART goals (specific, measurable, assignable, realistic, and time-bound). These are all sort of the same idea.

The problem is most people don’t do this for themselves.

Unless it is part of their job, they rarely apply intentional goal-setting to their own lives outside of work.

And if you want to achieve anything for yourself you need to develop this muscle.

It is through the development of active and intentional goal setting that we allow ourselves a framework to avoid distractions.

3. Environmental Control and Simplicity

ֵEver since reading Goodbye, Things by Fumio Sasaki, I’ve become convinced that physical clutter leads to mental clutter.

Clutter isn’t just stuff on our counters or on our shelves.

It’s apps on our phone we don’t use often, or use too often (but aren’t good for us).

It’s maintaining connections with people who no longer serve us.

It’s continuing to do certain things way past their expiration date because “that’s how it’s always been done”.

Minimalism is the simplification of our environment.

With less stuff crowding our judgement, we can finally tap into the mental clarity needed to reason and weigh decisions accordingly.

Some areas in my life I’ve simplified (and/or reduced):

1. Wardrobe - I’ve donated clothes I haven’t worn in years and mostly wear black, grey, or olive green. It’s not as intense as Mark Zuckerberg only wearing grey t-shirts or Obama only wearing two suits, but it allows me to spend less time thinking about how I dress while giving me enough flexibility so that I don’t look like a robot.
   

2. iPhone apps - I turned off all notifications on my phone and use Opal to block certain apps during time where I need to focus.
   

3. Friend group - I keep a small circle of close friends around me that I know well, trust, and love. When I was younger I thought it was a badge of honor to have lots of “friends”, really nothing more than acquaintances, which just dilutes the time and energy you can dedicate to each person. By reducing this group down over the years I’ve found I can cultivate deeper, more meaningful relationships. Don’t underestimate how much of your energy is sapped by weak relationships.

Consider how your relationship to the things around you impacts your ability to get things done. To cross off your todo list. To make progress on your goals.

I suspect, if we examine it closely, there are more distractions than we’d like to admit.

Until next week,

Tom

Article: The Dawn of Everything

David Graeber was an amazing writer who I first heard about when I picked up his book Debt: The First 5,000 years. In this article, Cory Doctorow examines David’s last book, The Dawn of Everything, and reminds us that we are in charge of our own destiny. A wonderful weekend read.

Quote: Sadghuru On Finite Time

Tweet: How To Legally Own Another Person

Daniel was a software engineer for many years at Amazon before leaving corporate life to try self-employment. His tweet below, a commentary on Sahil’s pithy comment about full-time employment, linked to an article which is really just a chapter from one of Nassim Taleb’s books. A good reminder on the nature of work, full-time employment, and the scripts of life we ascribe to, whether we understand it or not.

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