Dear Fabulous Traveler ,

Has this ever happened to you?:

You finally decide to stop procrastinating and learn something new. You sit down, brush the dust off your books and sharpen your pencil, when suddenly you hear a fun little chirp. It’s Instagram calling your name, and you also can’t remember the last time you checked your friend’s Snapchat stories!

Whether you realize it or not, you were standing at a fork in the road. The decision you made determined the fate of your learning session.

You are at a fork in the road right now too. You’ll remember the enjoyable feeling of checking something new, but you’ll also remember something you learned from Fabulous:

The worst interruptions are those which we act upon.

Escaping the Habit of Distraction

It is not the new post on Instagram that reduces your productivity, it’s the choice you make to pay attention to that distraction that derails you.

And the real danger in this choice isn’t that you’ve allowed yourself to be distracted once, it’s that you are building a habit of distraction every time you make it. Soon you find yourself switching from Instagram to Facebook to other social medias to the New York Times, reading article after article, checking one new beautiful picture after another. Soon this reflex becomes the habitual pattern that emerges time and time again, whenever you have something to concentrate on. This one habit has the power to destroy the strongest willpower, hours of planning, and weeks of productivity. How do you stop it in its tracks? With a clear and actionable plan for your day, and the rituals necessary to support it.

Navigating the day

Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, is also the author of Lean In and a strong advocate of healthy and caring culture in the workplace. She is also famous for a habit that few self-proclaimed productivity gurus would wear with pride: she leaves her job every day at exactly 5pm to be with her family.

Sheryl has another habit that may seem peculiar. Every day, Sheryl navigates through a flurry of meetings with the help of her deliberately analog spiral notebook. She carries a list of discussion points and actionable tasks to each conversation and crosses them off one by one as they are addressed. If she enters a meeting scheduled for 1 hour and crosses off every item in 10 minutes, she simply rips out the page and the meeting is over.

The power of ritual

Hold on a minute. Did you catch that? There is a glimpse of genius in her strategy: she rips out the page.

Did you recognize this for what it is? A ritual: a meaningful action that triggers a sense of reward.

This is why, even though we are a digital app, we always encourage using pen and paper in Fabulous. It’s much more effective to create rituals in concrete physical form. Rituals create a sense of familiarity and progress that help us feel in control. This is why most weddings share similar traditions, or why it is common to cut your hair after breaking up with a lover.

In our pursuit of Mental Fitness, rituals will be our strongest tool.

Your to-do list notebook

You may already have a To-Do list notebook. If you do, you’re going to learn to use it a little differently.

Create some active, intentional rituals for your notebook. For example, when you’re completing an item, take time to scratch it vigorously, enforce that action, and enjoy that great feeling of completing an item in your To Do list.

In the future, treat the completion of a task as a mini-ceremony. Have a mini-celebration and revel in the act of crossing off a completed task.

You will also be adding a new habit this week: after you write your To-Do list, create a timeline where you specify exactly when and for how long you will work on each task.

Here’s an example from Fabulous:

09am -> 11am: Work on the next Letter

11am -> 12am: Think about the Ambassador Program

2pm -> 3pm: Answer Fabulous user's questions

In this way, your whole day is planned out and each moment is committed. Creating such a plan before you begin your work day can prevent you from mindlessly wandering from one task to the next without a real goal. This will help you avoid the habit of distraction, because when you finish one task you will always have a plan for what comes next.

This Week’s Plan

Your one-time action

Purchase or locate a new notebook to use as your To-Do list notebook. Even if you’re accustomed to using electronics, create a new To-Do list on paper.

You can definitively supplement the paper list with an electronic To-Do list as well, but each morning you should physically write down your daily timeline.

When you complete an item, check it off in a unique way. You could use a special red pen, or maybe cross off the entire item with dramatic force, or you could even snap your fingers each time you cross off an item.

Each time you complete a page of your To Do list, rip it out. If you don’t want to ruin your current notebook, get a new one that you don’t care as much about.

Your goal

Every morning this week, write down your To-Do list, choose the most important task/s, and then create a timeline for how you will accomplish this task. Schedule your entire work day hour by hour.

Practice this new habit at least 5 times in order to register it in your physical memory.

Once you’ve accomplished a To-Do list item, cross it off using your own mini-ceremony! Take your time and enjoy the process.

Once you’re done with a page of To Do list, rip the page out with a sense of victory. Savour the feeling of completeness each time you conquer a new list.

We will add the habit “Create your Timeline” to your Morning Ritual, but I suggest you create a new custom ritual titled “Deep Work” or “Start of Work Day” and move the habit “Create your Timeline” there.

Bonus action

We have a Guide in the Deep Work section called Productivity Beeper. Peter Bregman, a productivity guru and blogger for the Harvard Business Review, recommends that you set a timer to go off once every hour, and when it beeps ask yourself, “Am I doing what I most need to be doing right now?” He calls this a “productive interruption”, one that reminds us of our priorities and aspirations.

Use this as another tool in order to spur yourself back into action.

What We Are Doing

An important aspect of Mental Fitness is being able to get things done. We’re creating two new rituals that are directly correlated with your productivity. If you continue this practice, you’ll be well-equipped to handle possible interruptions and distractions. When faced with an interruption, you will remember the good feeling of completing an item on your list as well as the satisfaction of conquering an entire list. This will steer you back toward productivity.