At Your Best: How to Get Time, Energy, and Priorities Working in Your Favor

by Carey Nieuwhof

CHAPTER 8 IN A SNAP Average users touch their phones 2,617 times a day. Heavy users touch their phones 5,427 times a day. When technology runs us, it can ruin us. Technology makes a wonderful servant but a terrible master. If you’re like most people, you don’t need an enemy to interrupt you. You already have one: a perpetually distracted you. The opposite of distraction isn’t focus; it’s traction. Paying attention to the wrong things costs you your priorities. Your goals. Your productivity. Your health. Even your family. And eventually it costs you your potential and your dreams. In the same way that not all hours are created equal and not all tasks are created equal, not all environments are created equal. Find or create the most undistracted environment you can for your Green Zone. Notifications on your devices make you access content on other people’s schedules, not yours. Most things that present themselves as urgent aren’t urgent. The quality of your work is determined by the quality of your thinking. Early mornings can be especially productive, not because you don’t notice the distractions but because those distractions aren’t there in the first place. A focused you is a better you.