Overcoming Distractions with the 68-Second Alignment Exercise

Posted by shooperman on Feb 11, 2008 in Life Hacks | 0 comments

Photo by peasap

The average person today are bombarded by hundreds and thousands of distractions every day as they live their lives. I know it because I’m a self-proclaimed high-productive multi-tasking over-achiever – or, not. We all know this – there’s no such thing as true multitasking, just half-hearted work passing off as ‘my best effort’.

Distractions have plagued me for years. This article proposes a technique that I am using to overcome them.

In the past I’ve tried many many ways of circumventing distractions that lead to my procrastination. Here’s some of them:

1. My mobile phone is on silent mode, permanently.
2. I use WriteRoom to write so my multi-screen MacBook setup is completely black when I write.
3. Sometimes, I use Flextime to set chimes at intervals of 17-3-17-3-17-3 (3x 3-minute breaks for total 60 minutes per hour) so I can trick my mind into working on something for extended lengths of time.
4. I tried listening to music but it distracts me all the more.

After a while, nothing seem to work extensively for me and I started to wonder if I’ve been barking up the wrong tree. Could this be one of those things where it’s not about the ‘action’ but something else.

Today, I chanced upon Abraham Hicks (by Esther and Jerry Hicks) and his teaching of the 68-second thought exercise (let’s call this E68).

E68 is a process one can use to get into ‘alignment’, i.e. alignment of your energies with whatever it is you want to achieve. All of us know what it is like to be misaligned – watching a comedy after a breakup, going to a party after a bad fight with your spouse.

When you are aligned, you get more results than what your physical action warrants. With E68, you can achieve alignment by focusing pure positive thoughts about your goals in 4 segments of 17 seconds. In terms of results (expressed in hours of physical action), here’s what you get:

1 – 17 seconds: 2,000 hours
18 – 34 seconds: 20,000 hours
35 – 51 seconds: 200,000 hours
52 – 68 seconds: 2,000,000 hours

On one hand, you have 68 seconds of your time that can pass in a quick IM exchange. On the other, you can get about 250,000 days of action completed on your behalf. To me, this is simply an offer that I cannot refuse – the payoffs are just too wonderful.

So why not try it?

I did. I did the E68 Alignment Exercise before writing this entry. I’ve been mulling about what to write for the first entry of this new blog for some weeks now. And here it is, barely 10 minutes after I’ve done the exercise.

So why not give this a shot?