YouTube Video Notes: Why you’re always distracted by Ali Abdaal

Photo by Devin Avery on Unsplash

Recently, when I was looking for help with my distraction problem, I stumbled upon a video from Ali Abdaal on YouTube. This is the first video in his series on getting free from distractions. Here are my notes from this video.

Notes & Highlights

• It’s easy to get distracted these days. Because of this, it’s so incredibly important to cultivate the ability to focus.
• The quality of my life is directly proportional to my ability to focus

Distraction v/s Traction

• The opposite of distraction is traction
• Traction — Doing something intentionally to move you towards where you want to go
• Distraction — doing something that takes you away from where you want to go

Mistakes that cause distraction:

1. Not having a plan

• Distraction happens when we intend to do one thing and then we find ourselves doing something else
• When you go on a social media platform you don’t usually go on it with a particular goal in mind it’s like someone who’s just browsing I’m just going to go on YouTube and I’m going to see what’s up.
• Outsourcing the decision of how I’m going to spend my time which is the single most valuable resource
• Practical Solution: Use Calendar and Time Blocks. It tells you what you should be doing in that time block.

2. Telling yourself identity-type statements that you are a distracted person

3. Just blame the social media companies

4. Ignoring how you feel

• Generally when once we’ve got a plan we get distracted it’s because we are it’s it’s because there’s some sort of negative emotion that’s at the root of our distraction
• Normally dudes are really bad at understanding how they feel about stuff you might not even be aware that there is some sort of negative feeling that you’re trying to avoid
• There are broadly three categories of negative emotion that we try and avoid: boredom, anxiety, and self-doubt

5. the task that we’re trying to do is just really really really boring

• A Post-It note on my computer monitor: what would this look like if it were fun

6. Ignoring your body and brain

• One of the biggest things that ruin our focus and causes us to get distracted is problems with our Hardware I.E our body and our brain in terms of diet and exercise and particularly sleep
• It becomes a lot easier to stay focused and not get distracted when you have taken care of the hardware stuff
• There is no such thing as a loser who wakes up at 5:00 a.m. and does a workout. if you wake up an hour earlier and just exercise you are going to be taking care of yourself in a way that you might not be doing otherwise

Attention Residue

• When you switch from task A to task B your attention doesn’t instantly follow there is a residue of your focus that stays stuck on task A and this residue on the previous task can completely ruin your performance on the current task because your brain is not yet fully transitioned to the next task
• Our brains are not designed to keep parallel tracks of attention going it is a lot easier for us to focus on one thing at a time
• When you are doing something do one thing at a time
• The practical thing here is for example turn off notifications and turn on the focus mode on your phone and all your devices
• Setting yourself an intention that for the next 45 minutes to 50 minutes, you time block where you intend to be focused on that one task and you don’t deviate from that task
• The key thing to remember is that the thing that you do during the break should not generate any additional obligations because if for example, you use your brakes to check your messages now checking messages is going to generate a bunch of random tasks for you to do and then that’s going to cause you to get distracted from the thing that you are actually trying to do next so take a break take a proper break

I hope this video helps you with your distractions, the same way it is doing me. Make sure to give me a follow, if you are interested in these kinds of blogs.