Good Morning. This is the Method. Every week we share useful things we’ve learned while building businesses.

This weeks focus is focus:

• Tools to eliminate distractions 🛑

• A framework to help you work with distractions 🤝

• Treating distractions like bugs 🛵

Our Top 5 Tools To Eliminate Distraction

Charlie Munger's son David Borthwick sums up his father's success like this, "Father's ability to Chinese wall of the most intrusive distractions from whatever he was engaged in . . . accounts as much as anything else for his success."

There are millions of ways we can spend our time, but very few of those take us where we want to go.

The opportunity cost of repetitive distraction is hard to quantify. Imagine getting back every moment you've wasted on phone notifications from the past year and investing that into a singular goal.

What else would you have achieved?

That's why we use a number of tools to fight this war against distraction.

1. BlockSite: This monitors all the sites you visit most often and then gives them back to you to decide which ones to block. Obviously, social media is step 1.

2. News Feed Eradicator: If we have a weak moment and still end up on, say, Facebook. News Feed Eradicator steps in. This tool eliminates your feed, reducing Facebook and others to just a shell.

3. Inbox When Ready: This tool blocks your inbox from being shown to you when you open it - you can still send emails but can't see any inbound.

4. Cyte: This AI screen recorder records everything you do on your computer. It takes all of your visual activity on your computer and turns them into text, and then becomes a searchable database. If you ever forget something and only have keywords to remember it, this will bring up the screen recording of your work. This tool saves hours of distraction-dense time looking through emails, messages and comments on social media.

5. Do not disturb mode: It's shocking how much more you can get done in the morning when not plugged into the outside world.

Notes:

There are a ton of useful tools out there that you can use to remove distractions, but they are all downstream of the weight-loss industry's best kept secret - It's a lot harder to eat chocolate when it's not in your cupboard.

If you need 12 tools to save you from social media, perhaps you'd be better off without it.

Goofing Off And Still Getting What You Want

And when software and AI can't save you from spending hours watching mindless cat videos, there's always good ole fashioned willpower.

The problem is, according to Daniel Kahneman, 30+ years of research, willpower suffers the fate of our muscles, fatigue. But that's fine because we don't need much willpower to get what we want.

Two hours a day of focused effort is enough.

If you knew that's all you had to do to get what you want and you could spend the rest of your time goofing off - surely you'd do it?

Very few people do.

Instead, they spend six, eight or even twelve hours of work doing all manner of things that don't matter.

This 2-hour rule is what Greg Mckeown proposed in his book Essentialism with the framework he calls your Top Goal.

All you have to do is schedule two hours every day (i.e., put an event in your calendar) to work on your Top Goal. Period.

The premise is stupidly simple, just set yourself or your business one top goal and spend 120 minutes each day working towards that goal.

Notes:

We're running three businesses which makes this framework a little trickier to follow. However, to the best of our abilities, we still do it.

Every Sunday, as we plan out our week, we review our top goal for each business and write down the 3 - 5 things (~10 hours of work) we can do that is most likely to move us towards it.

We should also be clear here. This doesn't mean we don't work on other things; it's actually precisely the point of following this framework. We can f**k off and do all manner of other meaningless shit - but if we get our top goal work done everyday - everything else takes care of itself.

Riding Scooters In Bali

Running a business is like riding a scooter in Bali at high speed. You'll have to deal with bugs and lots of them, getting into all sorts of annoying places.

But if you stop every time one gets stuck in your eye, nose, ear or hair, you'll never reach your destination.

Ignore them or swipe them aside and keep going.