How to Avoid Slipping into Busy Work

One of the biggest struggles, I think, that we have in our attempt to be high achieving, peak performers is this thing that I call the biological you. See, the biological you is the one, the version of you that has survived over the last 200,000 years. It’s the. That part of you that has evolved with no other goals than to simply survive and pass along your genes. Right. The problem with the biological you is that it’s inherently lazy. It doesn’t want the things that the modern you wants. It doesn’t care about a life of meaning, a purpose of fulfillment.

It doesn’t care about any of those things. All it cares about is keeping you alive while expending as little energy as possible, and hopefully, ideally, passing along your genes to the next generation. And so there’s this inherent conflict that occurs every single day between this biological you and this modern you. And determine, like, whichever version of that wins will determine whether or not you move towards your greatness in that day, or if you just don’t now. I spent so much of my life not moving towards my greatness, and I was losing that battle to the biological you. And for me, a lot of that manifested as a result of my ADHD. My biological you is particularly tricky to deal with, and it wasn’t something that I was trained on how to manage when I was a kid, so I just was kind of left to my own devices. And it didn’t go well for a really long time.

But in recent years, in the last twelve years or so, I’ve started to land on some systems and routines and processes that did serve me, that helped me win that battle against my biological self more often than not. Now, that’s not to say that I win it all the time, though. I gave a speech this weekend in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, at my friend Julie’s event called the conscious investor. And the speech was all around how to unlock hyper focus. And it’s really talking tactically about what are the things that we need to do in our lives to design our environments in a way that is conducive for focus to appear, and how we can be our most effective selves, not necessarily the most productive. Because, again, the goal is never to be, never about how much you get done, it’s about what you get done. And so one of the structures that I talk about in that speech is this idea of intention maintenance. So the biological you, I find one of its most potent weapons is its ability to draw you mindlessly into complacent tasks or into going through the motion or into focusing on tasks that might be urgent but not terribly important.

And often when this happens, we don’t even realize it. That’s how good the biological you is. We lie to ourselves. We convince ourselves that what you are doing is important in that moment, and thus you should give it your attention. You think you’re being productive, but at just a simple moment of reflection, you would realize, oh, no, I’m just over here watering fake plants. And to water a fake plant is to do with excellence that which shouldn’t be done at all. So obviously we shouldn’t do that, right? I did a video on this very recently, but I wanted to talk about this because today I found myself after having sat down and putting together my priority management system, having done my three to three, writing out my goals, writing out my anti goals, doing all the things that productivity gurus like myself tell you you should do, and if you do it, you’re going to be unable to unlock this heightened level of focus. Right? It did all the things.

And then within 30 seconds of completing that, I sat down, I looked at my calendar of what I was supposed to focus on next, and I immediately dismissed it. It was remarkable. I caught myself about two, three minutes later. So I was supposed to sit down and write for the next hour. I was supposed to write my social media post for the day, and then I was supposed to start writing my newsletter, which doubles as part of my YouTube script for the next video that’s coming up. That’s what I was supposed to do. That is the work that was important and also urgent. But for whatever reason, in the gap between looking at my calendar and then sitting down to do the work, my biological self inserted itself into the equation and derailed me.

And suddenly I found myself in my inbox, in my emails, responding to this gentleman who is helping me optimize my website for speed. And I was like, this is an important thing. I need to get back to him. And all of a sudden, I caught myself. I caught myself because I’ve been doing this for so many years now that I’ve started to train my brain to notice when I am watering fake plants, that is doing something that’s urgent and maybe is important to a certain degree, but it’s not the most important thing. It’s not the highest priority that I should be doing in that moment. So I’ve gotten really good at catching myself relatively quickly, but not always. And I caught myself in that moment.

I realized, holy crap, I just totally lost that battle against the biological me. It derailed me into something that was urgent but not terribly important at the expense of the thing that was important. And it happened so fast and within such a short period of time of looking at my calendar, it was remarkable. And I wanted to share this with you, this experience, because it’s very easy to look at people like myself and how we talk about productivity and managing our hyper focus and all these things and be left with the wrong impression that we have it all figured out and that every day we are just these hyper focused monsters who are just destroying to do lists left and right. And it’s not like that. Some days it’s easier than others, but every single day is a battle. And I wanted to share that because the biological you is insidious. It’s very sneaky in its ways of getting working its way into the equation and stopping you from focus on the things that are actually the highest priority.

So I wanted to share that with you so that you wouldn’t feel so lost and alone if you’re going through something similar. Because, hell, I just went through it. So hope this brings you guys some value. I’ll catch you in the next episode. Until then, stay happy, focused, my friends.