Dave Hazlehurst

Before a big decision, most people ask friends. Friends tell you what you want to hear. Books don't. Here are 20 sentences I re-read before any decision that matters: 1. The obstacle is the way. 2. You suffer more in imagination than in reality. 3. We are what we repeatedly do. 4. Memento mori — remember you will die. 5. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best is now. 6. Fall seven times, stand up eight. 7. Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life. 8. If it's not a hell yes, it's a no. 9. The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. 10. First, solve the problem. Then, write the code. 11. The quality of your life is the quality of your questions. 12. Comparison is the thief of joy. 13. What you resist, persists. 14. Discipline equals freedom. 15. Between stimulus and response, there is a space. 16. The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it. 17. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. 18. Everything you want is on the other side of fear. 19. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. 20. This too shall pass. I don't follow all of them. I don't even agree with all of them. But re-reading them forces me to notice the discomfort I'm trying to decide my way out of. Most big decisions aren't information problems. They're emotion problems in disguise. The sentences slow me down long enough to see which one I'm actually facing.

The opposite of distraction isn't focus. It's traction. Both words come from the same Latin root — trahere — meaning "to pull." Traction is any action that pulls you toward what you said you'd do. Distraction is any action that pulls you away from it. Which means you can't actually say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from. Here are the 4 steps to becoming Indistractable: 1. Master internal triggers. Most distraction doesn't start with your phone. It starts with discomfort — boredom, anxiety, loneliness, uncertainty — that you're trying to escape. The phone is the cope, not the cause. Learn to sit with the feeling for 10 minutes before acting on it. Most urges pass. The ones that don't, you can honor on your own terms. 2. Make time for traction. If it's not on your calendar, it isn't real. Timebox your values — work, relationships, your own body and mind — into a weekly schedule you actually keep. Be a schedule builder, not a to-do list maker. A to-do list tells you what you didn't finish. A calendar tells you whether you lived the day you planned. 3. Hack back external triggers. Every ping, badge, and notification is a question your phone is asking you. Most of them don't deserve an answer. Turn off anything that doesn't serve you. The research on interruption recovery is brutal — it takes an average of 23 minutes to return to a task after a single interruption. 4. Prevent distraction with pacts. Pre-commit before the moment of weakness. Effort pacts (a website blocker), price pacts (money on the line), and identity pacts ("I'm the kind of person who doesn't check email before 10am") work because they make the distracted choice harder than the chosen one. Time management is pain management. You don't need another productivity app. You need to notice what you're running from.