If only you were not easily distracted, you could make yourself into a genius. The world has been full of people who were highly intelligent–geniuses, even–but who failed to make great use of their talents. If you sit them in front of a computer game, they can’t stop themselves from playing it for hours and hours. They don’t do their homework. Their minds are so good at making up excuses that they manage to believe the excuses themselves.

The problem is not intelligence; the problem is distraction. So if you want to make yourself smarter, what you need is a way to reduce your tendency to get distracted.

Rule 1: Don’t Multitask

One thing everyone knows about geniuses is that they concentrate intensely on one thing at a time. But most of us can’t do this without training. If I leave my phone on while I’m trying to work, I’ll look at it every few minutes, even though nothing important ever seems to be happening when I do. If I have email on in the background, I’ll check it every few minutes too; again, nothing interesting ever seems to happen, but somehow that doesn’t stop me from checking.

When people try to multitask, as when they drive while talking on cell

If you’re looking for a Mickey Mouse costume, it’s easy to find one. Just walk into any store selling Halloween costumes and there it will be. But if you’re looking for a costume that looks like an actual mouse, that is much harder to find.

Even more surprising: If you visit the websites of companies that make mouse costumes, they don’t even have pictures of their mouse costumes! They have pictures of other mice and rats, but not the one you want. I’m sure they are capable of making one and in fact I’m sure they sell many of them every year, but when they post photos on their website they choose photos of their most popular models. A mouse costume is not a popular model.

But if only you were easily distracted! Once you start looking at costumes other than mice and rats, there are hundreds to choose from.

There are costumes for gerbils and hamsters and guinea pigs…

For example, the only reason you can’t get anything done is because you’re easily distracted.

You probably think you’re reading this article on procrastination out of curiosity. But that’s not true. The real reason you’re reading this article is because you’re procrastinating.

I know this because I’ve been to your house. I saw how many articles you have in your browser that you never got around to reading. I saw how many YouTube videos were still playing in a tab in the background, and how many times you switched over to Facebook to see if anyone had posted anything new since the last time you checked, which was about five minutes ago.

I know it’s not your fault. You want to get things done. You really do. But there are so many distractions around you—so many things clamoring for your attention! If only there were fewer things vying for your attention, if only we could just eliminate all the distractions that might lure us away from our work, then we’d be able to buckle down and make some serious progress!

The problem is, it would take too long to eliminate all those distractions one by one—and besides, who has the energy? Let’s just block them all at once and be done with it

If you’re easily distracted, it can be hard to resist the urge to check your email or browse the web. But if you want to work more effectively, then you need to make sure your attention isn’t being hijacked.

One way to do this is to avoid multitasking as much as possible. Instead of checking your email whenever a new message arrives, for example, set aside a specific time of day when you’ll read and respond to all of them. This will help you stay focused on what’s important now rather than get sucked into a series of less important tasks that aren’t urgent.

Another strategy is to schedule blocks of “deep work” into your calendar. These are periods of time where you turn off distractions, such as email and social media, so that you can focus on tasks that require intense concentration. You might start by blocking out an hour or two each day for deep work and gradually extend the duration over time as your ability improves.

One of the things that causes people to be bad at estimating how long things will take is their habit of making vague plans in their heads, instead of writing down explicit instructions to themselves. If you write a recipe for bread, you can’t make the mistake of deciding to raise the dough first and bake it later; the recipe makes it clear what it means to raise the dough.

One way to compensate for this tendency is to make your plan more detailed. The more specific your instructions are, the less likely you are to be misled by vague thoughts about doing whatever seems most obvious at each step. For example, when I learned how to program a computer, I found that writing a list of instructions for it helped me avoid silly mistakes like thinking I could divide two numbers when one of them was zero. At a certain point I realized that this was because computers don’t know how to do anything unless you tell them exactly what to do. It’s not just a matter of picking which operations are useful; you have to specify exactly what they mean in every case.

We were designing a new product and wanted to take it out into the field to get customer feedback. We wanted to see if the product would really help people, and if they understood what we meant when we said x y z.

We had three potential customers lined up, but all three cancelled at the last minute, leaving us with no one to talk to. We were disappointed, but only for a second. In our minds, we could hear Marc Andreessen’s voice saying “I’m not sure it’s possible to overstate how big of an advantage this is.”

We asked ourselves “how can we learn about our customers’ needs today?” And then spent the day talking to non-customers.

We learned that most people are using products like ours in ways we never considered. We learned what seemed to work well with those products, and what didn’t work so well. It was like discovering a whole new world of pain points; a whole new set of reasons why customers might want our product.

You can’t get to the moon by climbing successively taller trees. If you’re doing something that’s really hard, you should be working on it full time.

As a rule, you should only work on one thing at a time. The way to become world class is to work on one problem for years. In the case of programming, that means working at least 10 hours a day on programming, every day, for years.

But there are some exceptions:

You should always be learning new things.

If your job is to learn things as quickly as possible, you’ll end up learning a lot about different things. You might even end up being an expert in one of them. But you’ll have trouble staying focused on any particular problem for long enough to solve it.