And this is something that all of us can start doing if we have bosses who, I hear this all the time, says, look, I'm indistractable, I followed all your techniques, but my boss keeps interrupting me, what do I do?

So one of the things you can do, one of the benefits of make time for attraction is when you have a time box calendar, you have an artifact.

You have something that you can physically print out and show to other people.

So what I want folks to do when they say, look, my boss isn't leaving me alone when I need to work with that distraction, what do I do?

What you wanna do is you wanna sit down with your boss for 10, 15 minutes.

You say, boss, hey, can we sit down for 15 minutes on Monday morning?

I wanna ask you something.

You sit down with them and you show them your time box calendar.

You take out the calendar for your working hours and you say, hey boss, okay, here's what I'm doing this week.

So here's my time for this meeting, here's my time for email, here's my focused work time, here's what I'm doing this week, here's the various projects you asked me to work on.

Now you see this other piece of paper here?

This is where I wrote down all the things that you asked me to do that I'm having trouble fitting into my schedule.

And what you're doing with this process is you're avoiding one of the worst pieces of productivity advice that we hear all the time, which is if you want to be more productive, you have to learn how to say no.

That is a kind of advice that only a tenured professor would tell you.

That is terrible advice.

You're gonna tell the person who pays your bills, no, you're gonna get fired, that's awful advice.

Instead of saying no, what you wanna do is to engage your boss in helping you do the one thing that they absolutely have to do as a manager, which is prioritize.

So you ask them, how can I make sure that I do what you asked me to do based on my schedule for the week?

And here's what they're gonna do, they're gonna look at them and say, you know what, that meeting, that's actually not that important, but that, this project over here that you put on the piece of paper, that's actually super important.

Can you swap those out?

And so by doing that, you're doing what's called schedule syncing.

You're making sure that their priorities are also reflected in your schedule.

And bosses will worship the ground you walk on.

And they love this, because every boss out there, every manager, we're wondering kind of what our people are doing, right?

That's what they wanna know, but they don't wanna ask you that because they don't want you to feel like you're being micromanaged.

So you're proactively doing that for them and you're showing them, hey, this is the time when I need to do focused work, this is when I'm gonna be indistractable.

So if you went to a baker, okay, and you said, hey, my kid has a birthday party, I need two dozen cupcakes.

Baker's gonna say, okay, I need flour, I need sugar, I need butter, I need all these inputs, I need these ingredients to make the output.

But when it comes to knowledge work, we only think about the output.

But what's our input?

Our input is just two things, time and attention.

Those are our ingredients, that's it.

So you can't just think about the output, you can't just think about the cupcakes, you have to think about the input.

The input is time and attention.

And that, just like ingredients for a cupcake, has to be budgeted for, you have to plan that ahead or it's not gonna work out.