How To Control Your Attention And Become Indistractable | Nir Eyal | Modern Wisdom Podcast 104

Nir Eyal is an author, business owner and Teacher at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Design. What would life be like if we didn't get distracted? What if we always followed through with the things we said we were going to do? That's the purpose of today's discussion. Expect to learn how internal and external triggers can combine to form a breeding ground for poor productivity, and how making time for traction is just as important as avoiding distraction when getting things done. Extra Stuff: Buy Indistractable - https://amzn.to/2Nfzsfh Check Out Nir's Website - https://www.nirandfar.com/indistractable/ Follow Nir on Twitter - https://twitter.com/nireyal Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Chris Williamson?

  I'm joined by Nir Eyal, all the way from the other side of the pond, and we're talking about how to be indistractable today. Nir, welcome to the show.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  Great to be here, Chris. Thanks so much.

• 0:16Chris Williamson?

  We've had a lot of your contemporaries and peers on recently. Tiago Forte, James Clear, Chris Sparks, Laura Vanderkam. So we've been circling around this stuff for a little while. The listeners will be, they'll have their appetite wet for this today. So before we get into too much to do with the book, what do you think life would look like if we followed through with our intentions?

• 0:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's exactly what I desire to know is to gain this superpower, if you will, what I call the skill of the century, to follow through with our intentions. I mean, how amazing would your life be if everything you said you would do, you actually did, right? You said you'd go to the gym, you go to the gym. You said you're gonna spend time with your friends, you make that time. You said you're gonna work on that big project and get that thing done that you've been procrastinating, and you do it. That, to me, was a skill I wanted. I wanted that skill so badly. And I realized that the problem was not that I didn't know what to do. There isn't, for most people, a knowledge gap. We all basically know, right? If you want to eat healthy, we know that chocolate cake is not as healthy as a healthful salad.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  If you want to excel at your job, you gotta do the work, especially the hard stuff that other people don't want to do. If you want to have great relationships, you have to be fully present with the people you love. We know what to do. The question is, why don't we do it? Why don't we do the things that we know we should? And so that's really the basis of this book called Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, is how to master this exact skill.

• 1:46Chris Williamson?

  So what does being indistractable mean? Apart from the fact that I've had to add it to my dictionary so that I can write it down. It keeps on trying to make it indestructible, which also would be good, but isn't the purpose of our discussion today.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Well, that was actually the word that I wanted to do a little bit of a play on is that when you are indistractable, you are indestructible. It is kind of like a superpower. And the good thing about making up a word is that you get to define it any way you want. So being indistractable means you are the kind of person who strives to do what they say they're going to do. You live with personal integrity. You know, so many of us, if we wouldn't dream of lying to our friends, to our loved ones, to our family members, and yet we lie to ourselves all the time, right? We say we're gonna do one thing, we don't follow through. And so that's really what being indistractable is all about. It's about breaking that. It's about not lying to yourself. It's about being as honest with yourself as you are with other people by living with personal integrity.

• 2:41Chris Williamson?

  There's a cool stat from LinkedIn that you may have seen or you may not that says "strategy" or "strategist" appears in the top 10 of all LinkedIn bio descriptions and "executor" or "execution" doesn't even appear in the top 1,000.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:59Chris Williamson?

  And I think you're totally right. We have a tendency towards talking rather than walking. And we tend to, we tend to think about the things that we want to do. But obviously, it's not always that we're, it's our fault in that like we didn't want to do it enough or that we're just lazy. There's a lot of things that get in the way, right?

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Right. That's right. And so that's why it's so important to understand that it's not a knowledge gap problem. It's an execution problem. And so what I wanted to do was to slough off this narrative that we have these days that technology is doing it to us, that we need to go on some kind of digital detox or 30 day program and the technology is the reason that we can't get anything done. It's ridiculous. You think that if Facebook shut down tomorrow if Zuckerberg said, you know what, I have enough money, I'm shutting it all down. I've had enough. You think people are gonna start reading Chaucer and Shakespeare in their spare time? Of course not. We're gonna go back to what people have always done. Gossip and look at the news and, you know, all kinds of, of things that we do to procrastinate and, and get distracted. And so that is, this fundamental truth, you

• 4:00Speaker 01

  know, I realized, we blame these things. We blame the technology, we blame the news, we blame social media, we blame something. And those all, those things play a role, certainly. But those are all proximal causes. They're not the root cause of the problem.

• 4:14Chris Williamson?

  What is the root cause?

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Well, the root cause is the root cause of all human behavior. And so maybe that's a great place to start. You know, if we're going to answer this question of why do we do things against our better interests? Which, by the way, that question was posed 2,500 years ago by Socrates and Aristotle. They asked, you know, they called it akrasia, this tendency that we have to do things against our better interests. I mean, 2,500 years ago, people were saying how distracting the world is these days. And so the fact that it's not a new problem should give us some comfort to know that this is part of the human condition. And so it turns out that in my five years of research, there's a lot of really simple, practical things that we can do to make sure that we can get the best out of these tools when it comes to modern technology without letting them get the best of us.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  And so the root cause is the root cause of why we do everything. So not only why do we get distracted, but why do we do anything in our life? And it turns out that the cause of motivation to do everything and anything is not what most people think it is. Most people will tell you, when you ask them, you know, what's the seed of motivation? Why do we do what we do? Most people will give you some version of carrots and sticks. We call this Freud's pleasure principle, that everything we do is inspired by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. It turns out, though, that neurologically speaking, that is not true. That it's not about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Turns out, everything we do, we do for one reason, and that is the avoidance of discomfort. That all human motivation is driven by a desire to escape pain.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Even the pursuit of pleasurable sensations, a state of flow, a good feeling, connection, friendship, all of these good feelings, the pursuit of those things is in fact driven by psychological discomfort. Wanting, craving, desire. There's a reason we say love hurts, because neurologically speaking, that's exactly what's going on. So this is really important to understand because what that means? If all human behavior is driven by a desire to escape discomfort, that means that time management is pain management.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  It doesn't matter what hacks, life hacks you read out there, what productivity gurus tell you, fundamentally, if you cannot master your, what's called an internal trigger, these uncomfortable emotional states that we seek to escape, if you don't take care of that stuff, if you don't have tools in your arsenal to deal with these uncomfortable emotional states, you're always going to get distracted, right? If it's not your phone, it'll be the television, it'll be sports, it'll be the news, it'll be radio, something is going to distract you in your life unless you address this fundamental reason why we get distracted in the first place, which is that we use distraction as an emotional pacification device. And so we have to either fix the source of the problem, or learn tactics to cope with that psychological discomfort.

• 6:58Chris Williamson?

  Interestingly, I did a podcast with a guy called Alex Hutchinson, start of the year, wrote a book called Endure. And in that, he said that his definition of endurance was the ability to continue against a growing desire to stop. And that cumulative effect of us wanting to get away from some discomfort, I think also rings true with my experience of distraction, right? You spend enough time focused, but then something happens. It's like this growing like snowball effect where after a little bit of time, you really realize, oh, hang on, I've totally lost what I was talking about here. So, how did you map moving

• 7:42Chris Williamson?

  from understanding that we need to get away from discomfort, and that's an innate biological imperative, I suppose? How did you map the way that all of the different triggers in our life work?

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. So if we think about how internal triggers drive us to these different behaviors, let's, the next step should be to define what we mean by distraction. And the best way to understand what distraction is, is to understand the opposite of distraction. The opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction is traction. So traction and distraction both come from the same Latin root, trahere, which means to pull. And you'll notice both words end in the same five letters, A C T I O N, which spells action. So traction is any action that pulls you towards what you want to do, things that you do with intent. The opposite of traction is distraction, any action that pulls you away from what you want to do. So this is really important for a couple of reasons. One,

• 8:36Speaker 01

  It frees us from, I think, this ridiculous hierarchy that people have, that some behavior, some pastimes, some actions are somehow morally superior or inferior to other actions. That, you know, me playing Candy Crush or checking social media is somehow morally inferior than watching a football game on TV. It's not. They're both pastimes. There's nothing wrong with them if you do them with intent. And if you don't do them with intent, if you're doing them for emotional pacification to escape your present reality, then they're distractions. So that's one thing, is to free us from this hierarchy. A lot of tech critics will say, "Oh, social media does this to your brain, and this is bad, and this is evil." Rubbish. That's silly. Anything you are doing with intent, something that's consistent with your values, is perfectly fine.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  The same rules apply. The reason, the second reason this is so important, is that distraction tricks us. That how many times have you sat down at your desk, this used to happen to me all the time, and I'd say, "Okay, I've got that big project I need to work on. I really need to focus. This is something I've been procrastinating. I'm gonna sit down, I'm gonna crank out that big project, right after I check this email." Right? Right after I just check this one thing on YouTube, or on Facebook, or the Slack channel, or something that feels worky, it feels productive, I'm checking email. Isn't email something I kinda have to do anyway, right? That's a work-type task. Well, that's what I call pseudo-work. Because if that's not what you plan to do with your time, it is just as much of a distraction as playing a video game. And you know what happens? The cost of this is that we don't get time, ever, to do that hard task.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  We keep procrastinating day after day after day. Because we don't realize that without defining your time, everything is a distraction, right? So one of the key lessons of the book is that if you don't plan your day, someone else will. And that you cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it is distracting you from. So we've got traction to one side, we've got distraction to the other, we've got internal triggers prompting us to either traction or distraction. The only other thing that prompts our behavior is what's called an external trigger. So internal triggers are these uncomfortable emotional states that prompt our actions. The other thing that prompts our actions are these external triggers, the pings, dings, rings, all of these things in our environment that prompt us towards... Either traction or distraction.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  And now many people think of these things as, you know, your phone, your computer, or some kind of technology. Turns out in my research that some of the most common forms of distraction have nothing to do with technology. It's meetings, it's open floor plan offices, it's, you know, your colleagues stopping by for a little gossip and chit chat. Those things can be just as much of a pernicious distraction. So how do you deal with those things? So now that we have these four key steps, we can map them out. Step one is to master the internal triggers. Step two is to make time for traction. Step number three is to hack back the external triggers. And the fourth step is to prevent distractions with pacts.

• 11:23Chris Williamson?

  One of the things that I was struck by when I was reading the book was I'd always lent so much weight towards external triggers. I wonder if that's representative for most people, but internal triggers, I just, I didn't think, I was like, maybe that's the,

• 11:41Chris Williamson?

  I guess, the self-supporting bias a little bit where I'm like, no, no, I'm fine, I'm fine. The problem's the phone, the problem's the computer. Like, maybe, maybe that's it. I'm not sure. What do you think?

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I think that's the, that's kind of the, the kindergarten stuff, right? You know, it turns out that two thirds of Americans with a smartphone never change their notification settings. I mean,

• 12:00Chris Williamson?

  That statistic blew me away. Oh, my God.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  Complain? I mean, seriously, even if the problem is, uh, to some extent caused by these external triggers, absolutely. That, that does cause distraction, does lead you to things, do things you didn't want to do. Come on, take 10 minutes and change those goddamn notification settings. And I devote one chapter, there's, there's 38 chapters in the book, I devote one chapter to just that. You know, how to hack back your phone. Because, look, the phone is designed to hack your behavior. These products are designed to be engaging. I mean, is that a newsflash to everybody? We all know these companies make money based on selling our attention. So we can hack back. Uh, and so one of the things we should do is to hack back clearly these external triggers. So hacking back our, our feeds, hacking back our devices, hacking back email, all of these things. We can hack back the external triggers.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  And that is important to do. It's also relatively easy to do. I will say out of the four steps, the hardest is The internal triggers, managing and mastering those internal triggers is this icky sticky truth a lot of us don't like to face that we are using these devices as emotional pacifiers.

• 13:07Chris Williamson?

  I couldn't agree more.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  We check these devices and it's not just tech, right? It's the bottle. It's work for some people, right? It's all kinds of things. It could even be exercise. I mean, I, if I told you, hey, I'm going to start a habit of running, you would say, oh, that's great. Wonderful for you. And then if I said, actually, you know what? I need to get a little vulnerable here. I like to run because my marriage is falling apart. I can't stand my wife. My kids are driving me crazy and running is the only place I can escape. Well, then you might say, ooh, I don't know. That's such a good idea. It sounds like you maybe want to take care of that stuff at home. But then if I told you, actually, you know, I used to drink and that was terrible, but now I don't drink so much anymore. Now I, now I run instead. We say, oh, well, that's great again. So it's not.

• 13:47Chris Williamson?

  Everything's relative, eh?

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's not about the behavior. It's about doing it with intent. There's nothing wrong with enjoying a beer now and again and getting a little buzzed or tipsy. There's nothing wrong with using social media. There's nothing wrong with any of these technologies and tools. And don't let anybody tell you different. As long as it's consistent with your values and you're doing it with intent, go for it. But it's about learning how to use them properly as opposed to using them as emotional pacifiers.

• 14:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think the common criticism, obviously, of smartphones and technology is that the line between intentional use and slippery slope is incredibly quick. And before you know it, you've stumbled down a hole. So why don't we start before I want to get on to external triggers? Because I've got a couple of absolute belters that I'm excited to show you. But first, let's talk about these sort of nebulous, ephemeral, difficult to define internal triggers. What are the roadblocks people are coming up against here? It's obviously uncomfortable situations, but what else?

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Right. So it's figuring out the sensation that precedes the behavior. So that's the first step to mastering these internal triggers is reimagining the trigger itself. And so this comes out of acceptance and commitment therapy. By the way, Everything in this book, I don't know about you, but I hate it when I read one of these books that are all about personal anecdotes, you know, "I took a shower every morning and at forty degrees and it was great," or whatever, that's not supported by science. So, everything in the book is supported by peer-reviewed journals, and one of the research, some of the research that I cite has to do with acceptance and commitment therapy, which is all about reimagining these uncomfortable emotional states and then using them towards traction as opposed to distraction.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  So, one of the most powerful things you can do is to simply become aware of that sensation, and instead of what most people do, what I used to do is to experience it with contempt, right? Many of us, the self-talk that we have in our heads is so destructive. We talk to ourselves in a way we would never imagine talking to our friends, right? Telling ourselves we're lazy, we have a short attention span, I have an addictive personality, I used to tell myself all this mythology, and instead, what I do now, as opposed to contempt, I talk to myself with curiosity. "Okay, I'm feeling bored right now, this is difficult, this writing, you know, whatever it is that I'm working on, this is hard right now," and simply noting that sensation, writing

• 16:04Speaker 01

  it down, and then using various strategies to cope with that discomfort can take us very, very far. That's a very, very important step.

• 16:13Chris Williamson?

  Many people that are listening will know the sensation we're talking about, right? You go to the bathroom, you realize you're gonna be in the cubicle on your own, your phone comes out, it's a reflex action, hand goes into the pocket, phone comes out, you're stood at the bus stop, you're waiting at the water cooler at work, whatever it might be, that boredom or any other particular emotion leads towards a response.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  Right, and so this is something I call a liminal moment, and we have to be particularly careful about them. Not that they're, I don't know if it's necessarily the end of the world if you're commuting on a bus and you check your phone, I think that's totally fine, again, as long as you're doing it with intent, and as long as you have some kind of stopping cues. So, if I'm commuting somewhere, and I've got nothing else to do and I want to use my time to check email, that's totally fine. Where I think we have to beware of these liminal moments is when, you know, checking for a little bit between meetings becomes another thirty minutes, forty-five minutes at your desk when you plan to do something else. And so this is where the second step, after we've mastered these internal triggers, this is where the second step of making time for traction is so important.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Where people go overboard on checking email for a minute and then it becomes forty-five is when they don't have a clear next task on their calendar. So it turns out that the vast majority of people don't keep any sort of calendar. And that's ridiculous. You cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. And so I built this free tool that is very pared down. I'll give you a link for the show notes where you can build your own time box calendar. And this will change your life. Not only do we want to build a time box calendar for our, our work commitments. We also have to do that for our personal commitments and our relationships in our life, or else we can't live out our values. Right? I used to do this all the time. If you ask me, what's important to you? What are your values? I would say, oh, you know, my family, my friends, these things are most important to me, my health.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  But then if you looked at my calendar, you wouldn't see time for any of those things. And so that's why the second step is to make time for traction. And then I teach you how to synchronize your calendar with various stakeholders in your life. You know, I realize you have to synchronize with your boss, you have to synchronize with your family, with your friends in order to, to make sure that you can make time for the things that you value.

• 18:19Chris Williamson?

  Two of the guys that work for my company have just come on full time. They started, although they've been working for us for a while, they started today full time. And the first thing, this isn't, doesn't just happen to be a plug. The first thing I got them to do was to read that blog post that you put on and get them to put a, a weekly schedule in. So I'm like, look, I want you to tell me what you think your week is supposed to look like. And you're totally right, especially any professionals or entrepreneurs who are listening. If you do not have a direct line manager that is dictating to you what you should and should not be doing throughout your days and throughout your week. What you end up having is this really sort of fluffy nebulous, difficult to define work to be done.

• 19:01Chris Williamson?

  And there's no defined criteria for success or failure because you don't actually know what you should be doing at each time. If you go back and listen to the episode that I did with Laura Vanderkam, um, who wrote Off the Clock, exactly the same stuff. Parkinson's Law suggests that work will expand to fill the time given for it. And if you do not time box your tasks, that work is just going to keep on steamrolling through all of your day.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  That's right. I mean.

• 19:26Chris Williamson?

  It's pernicious, man. It's dangerous. This time management should be taught at five years old.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  I couldn't agree more. I mean, it's so important to time box your day. And if you do it on your own, that's one thing. You can only get so much benefit out of this practice. I mean, it will change your life in particular. I mean, this changed my domestic life quite dramatically in that now my wife and I could coordinate around these various domestic responsibilities. You know, most women in heterosexual relationships, even when both people work outside the home, still take on more tasks. And so, you know, this would cause countless arguments between my wife and I. And she would say, you know, "Why aren't you doing this stuff?" And I'd say, "Well, just tell me, honey, right? If I miss something, just tell me what to do." What I didn't realize was that her telling me what to do was itself work. So, we do this at home.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  I mean, I have time in my calendar for all those domestic responsibilities as well. And it's revolutionized my marriage. We're so much happier for it. But in the workplace as well, I can't tell you how... Nothing short of life-changing. I mean, the fact that, you know, most managers, with the best of intentions, we think as managers, "You know what? I'm just gonna tell people what needs to get done, and they'll figure out when they do it." Okay? And we think this is a good thing. We think we're being, you know, we're giving people autonomy and freedom. And to some extent, that is right. But if you don't sync up your schedule with your colleagues, and you just keep throwing output at them, meaning, you know, "This stuff on the backlog, this stuff on the to-do list." These are forms of output. "This is what I want you to do with your time."

• 20:56Speaker 01

  But I don't tell you when the input needs to happen. The input for knowledge workers is time. That's their only form of input. So, what happens to most people is we just keep lobbing over task after task after task, and then it just keeps bloating on their calendar. They don't find time to do everything. And then afterwards, they say, "Oh, I'm sorry, boss. I didn't get everything done." Or they take home stuff on nights and weekends, which leads to burnout and churn and all kinds of other bad things. So, if you just sit down with your colleagues for literally 15 minutes a week for most people, and say, "Okay, here's my calendar. Here's all the output. Here's my to-do list, and here's how I basically plan to do it." Now, as a boss, it's difficult to require people to do this, but you can invite them to say, "Look, I've noticed that I don't want to give you more than you can handle, more than you have time for.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  So, can you just sit down and do this little time-box calendar if it's helpful for you, so that we can schedule sync, so that I know how much you have capacity for?" And that is huge. Because if you don't do that, here's what happens to most people. They spend all day responding... And they have no time for reflecting. And it turns out that our best work requires reflection. If you think about what do we do as knowledge worker? What's our work output? We only make one thing. We make solutions to hard problems. That's our job. And to do that, you have to have time to think. And most people don't have that time to think in their day. So they do it on nights, they do it on weekends. And their entire workday is spent in meetings on and on emails or Slack channels. And that's not where people do their best work.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  So you gotta have time for that reflective time as well as schedule time for emails, for meetings, or whatever. But that schedule syncing is a really important process.

• 22:32Chris Williamson?

  For sure. So we've had a look at the internal triggers. We've started to have a bit of a mindfulness gap. We've realized when we are being distracted, when we are being bored and we're, as opposed to treating ourselves with contempt, we're genuinely inquisitive. We want to know why is this happening? Trying to step in between. Then we've also started to look at time boxing. We've thought, right, I need to define some criteria for success and failure, taking it forward. Now we need to make time for traction, right? How do we do that?

• 23:04Speaker 01

  So making time for traction is the time boxing. Maybe you mean the step three, the hacking back external triggers.

• 23:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, hacking back external triggers.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  Right. So the third step is hacking back external triggers. And so this starts with asking ourselves this fundamental question of, is the external trigger serving me? Or am I serving it? It doesn't make sense to take on this attitude that, oh, all of this technology is bad and all the triggers are evil. No, that's not true. If an external trigger prompts you to do something you intended to do, let's say your phone sends you a notification that says, okay, now it's time to go to the gym. Now it's time for that meeting. Now it's time for that phone call. Great, it's moving you towards traction. If that's what you plan to do with your time on your time box schedule, wonderful. So we have to ask ourselves, is this external trigger serving me? Or am I serving it? And not only think about in terms of the digital environment, and of course, I give

• 23:53Speaker 01

  you ways, how do you hack back your phone, hack back your computer, hack back email, hack back group chat, but also the physical environment. You know, open floor plan offices are a tremendous source of distraction for the modern worker. So every copy of Indistractable comes with a cardstock cutout that you pull out of the book. You fold it into thirds and you put it on your computer monitor and it says on it, "I'm indistractable at the moment, please come back later," so that your colleagues know you're doing focused work right now, "please leave me alone." And this is incredibly important because again, you know, just, most of us work in these open floor plan offices where people can just interrupt us at any time and that's, that degrades our work output.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  And so it's not only about, about hacking back these digital devices, it's also about hacking back our physical environments as well.

• 24:41Chris Williamson?

  I've got a friend and a guest, regular guest of the show, George, who was working at a very trendy social media marketing agency in Manchester. They're incredibly successful, they're fantastic at what they do. But George, similar to myself, he does his best deep work when he's very, very undistracted. And he'd managed to find a office room, an unused office room upstairs, which had nothing in it except for a two meter by two meter Harry Potter jigsaw puzzle, which was half finished. And he was electing to go upstairs and take his laptop upstairs and like lock himself in this Harry Potter jigsaw world, just so that he could avoid the open floor plan distraction.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  There you go, there you go. So that's what, that's what this screen sign hopes to, hopes to solve. And you know, many people say, "Oh, I'll put on headphones and people will know I'm busy." No, they don't. They think you're watching YouTube videos or listening to a podcast. So make it explicit, right? And, and what's good about this is that, you know, distraction has this secondhand smoke effect, that when a company culture has a norm around constantly interrupting people, that's exactly what happens. People perpetuate that norm. Well, that's what we do here. So by have, making this statement and saying, "Look, not all day, but for 45 minutes, an hour, whatever it is that you need in your day to do some focused work, just to think for a little bit, you need to be left alone. That's where you do your best work." And that, this is the kind of thing that can catch on like wildfire within an office setting. It's, it's really important.

• 26:06Chris Williamson?

  What do you think Cal Newport would have to say about us squeezing out just 45 minutes of deep focused work per day? He'd be, he'd be walking into that, that office with a shotgun, wouldn't he? Or a paintball gun at least.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  Well, it really, it really depends on what kind of work you're doing. I, I think, you know, I love Cal. He blurbed my book. I think he's, he's, he's terrific. But I, I think we, we have to make sure that we are finding the right tool for the job for our particular circumstance. I mean, can I really tell someone who is a social media marketing manager to not be on Facebook? That's ridiculous. That's their job.

• 26:40Chris Williamson?

  It would be difficult.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  But what I would advise, what I would advise is, is to do whatever is consistent with your values, whatever is consistent with the job that you're doing. I, I wouldn't even tell people to, to work fewer hours. You know, if what's consistent with your values, if you want to go be an investment banker or work at a startup, guess what? You're going to have to work a lot of hours and you need to know that that's the case. You know, I like to say, don't be a forest ranger if you have allergies. You need to find something that's consistent with your values and your temperament. Now, what I think though is unethical and where I think people get into trouble is when they think they're going to a particular type of job, one that requires 40 hours a week or whatever it is, and then they get there and they realize, hmm, it's 40 hours in the office, but then it's another 20 hours outside of work.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  And that's a lie. That's just, that's just, you know, a bait and switch because the central trust pact between employer and employee is I give you money, you give me your time to create this, this output of solving hard problems to, providing novel solutions to hard problems. And so when that trust pact is broken, people find all kinds of ways to cheat or they leave. And so that's where syncing up with your calendar, syncing your calendar and having a workplace environment, this is another chapter in the book where I talk about why distraction at work is a symptom of cultural dysfunction. Why it's actually not the technology doing it to us. It's this sick culture that many companies have. And that's, and that's really the source of the problem.

• 28:08Chris Williamson?

  Sticking with the external triggers just for a moment because I know that there will be some listeners who are chomping at the bit to just do something right now. Turning off notifications, I mean, you actually take, I would call it a moderate approach, whereas we're probably a bit closer to fundamentalists on this particular show. But if you're on an iPhone, settings, notifications, and just start purging. Like, go through, like, you do not need Amazon or like eBay to be able to just send you offers via push notifications. Like, get rid of them.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I don't, I don't get that frankly. I mean, it's so easy to do. I mean, I devote actually not that much space to that stuff because that's, that's really kindergarten type stuff, right? Turning off your notification settings, duh, of course you're gonna do that. And, and you definitely, definitely should. But I think what's less obvious is how many other external triggers we, we suffer through throughout our day. So of course you should change notifications on your phone, you should change notifications settings on your computer. You know, but that kind of stuff will take you like 45 minutes to totally purge your, your phone and make it Indistractable. I'll show you exactly how to do that. But I show you how to do that in just a couple of pages. I think what most people don't really realize is, is the other sources of distraction, right? The meetings that we spend countless

• 29:24Speaker 01

  hours in that didn't need to be called. Email, oh my God, how much time did we spend on pointless emails that we didn't need to receive or send? Those kind of external triggers, I think, are probably a much bigger source of distraction than just the pings and dings on your phone.

• 29:38Chris Williamson?

  Couldn't agree more. Meetings for me thankfully are always called by me, but I'm going to be implementing a couple of the strategies which you suggest, namely the one where everyone's going to have phones down and laptops shut for the time that we have the meeting. We have one weekly meeting per event and we have three events that we need to run. So it's only three hours a week-ish, but those three hours honestly could be like.

• 30:01Chris Williamson?

  Probably one hour, 20 minutes each, easily. But I do a little thing, get an email up, I do this, that and the other. So yes, not responding to emails instantly, not realising that they always need to have that instant response. There's also a great addition to this. Tiago Forte's episode, which I did with him, has a lovely breakdown of the four steps of four to five steps that he says you can do with every email to work at inbox zero as well. I think that's a lovely companion to what you suggest in Distractible. And yeah, man, the group chat thing, you did a whole chapter on group chats. I am in, anyone who knows the job that I do will appreciate how many messages I get on WhatsApp, but it is brutal.

• 30:45Chris Williamson?

  Like it's just, it is just savage. So what was your solution? There'll be lots of people listening who are, that maybe use them for work, that maybe use them for social enjoyment. How do you solve the curse that is group chats?

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it depends if it's if it's social or for work. I think for work life, the solution, this comes from Jason Fried. Jason Fried says to treat group chat like a sauna, right? You wouldn't want to live in a sauna all day. Being in a sauna is very nice and comfortable and warm, but you don't want to sit in a sauna all day long and get pruney and wrinkly and that's not fun. So what you want to do is get in and get out. And so you want to schedule time when, okay, if we're going to have a synchronous meeting, synchronous meetings need to be scheduled. I wouldn't sit on a conference call all day long at work. That's ridiculous. I can't think, I can't focus because I'm always listening to what's going on. And the same thing happens with group chat. You do not want to leave that on all day long. That's just a simple, quick fix. What you want to do is to say, okay, I will be checking in at this time of day and no

• 31:44Speaker 01

  more, so I can do my other work tasks. And the same thing goes for social channels as well. If you're using group chat for social reasons, you know, we can turn distraction into traction. The way you turn a distraction into traction is you make time for it. So on my calendar, it says, "Social media time." I have time in my day to go through all that stuff. So I'm not doing it as, you know, a emotional pacification device when I can't think of anything better to do. I know, okay, I can get all those messages, no problem. First of all, turn off those little notifications or they're not constantly pinging and dinging you. But then at the end of the day, you have time in your schedule for exactly that. You'll get to it.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  It's gonna be whenever you say you're going to get to it, not based on somebody else's schedule, but based on your schedule.

• 32:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the analogy that Johnny, one of the co-hosts of the show uses is he says that when you have your phone out, you allow somebody else to control what you're doing with your day. It's like, would you have picked the phone up if that person hadn't messaged you? Well, no. Right, okay, so why have you picked the phone up? Well, because they've messaged me. Is that right? That person is literally remote controlling your day. So, yes, hopefully, we will have opened a few people's eyes to what you can do with group chats. Definitely, I like the idea of timeboxing for group chats especially, because it's so easy to just get into this back and forth conversation. Whereas really, the good stuff in a group chat, like, I'm not even lying, I must be in 20. I must receive 1,000 group chat messages a day.

• 33:14Chris Williamson?

  I've had more than a million WhatsApp received messages since I've had this phone. So it's a lot, it's a serious amount. And I promise you, across all of those, I have a good-sized sample, one good thing appears per group chat per day. Like, that's it, that's the top end. And then after that, it drops off.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  And you know what you want to do is to break that stimulus-response loop. What's happening and the way these products are designed is to constantly put you through this hook, right? That's what my first book was about, "How to Build Habit-Forming Products." The book was called "Hooked," I know exactly how they're designed. So what you want to do is to break that stimulus-response loop and not stop altogether. But what you want to do is to stop this association with whatever I'm bored, whenever I can't think of anything else better to do, whenever I'm trying to avoid having to do the work I know I need to do, that's when I'll pick up WhatsApp, that's when I'll just see, just for a second, what's going on. That's what you have to break. And the best way to break it, you'll see, when you schedule time for it. It actually becomes more of a chore, which is good, right? Which is good because it's, oh, God, I gotta go through all my WhatsApp messages. Do I really have to do that?

• 34:16Speaker 01

  And that's very healthy because now you're using it in a cold state as opposed to an emotional hot state. You're not using it to escape, right? You're not using it for psychological relief because you don't feel like working on that big project. You're using it because, oh, you know, I really should do it. And you'll find you'll use it, not only will you use it less, you'll use it more thoughtfully as well.

• 34:34Chris Williamson?

  Hundred percent. Doing things with purpose is a great way around it. So we're talking about preventing distraction next. How are we going to prevent distraction?

• 34:42Speaker 01

  Okay, so we talked about, we talked about mastering internal triggers. Step one, making time for traction. Step two, hacking back those external triggers. Step three, and then finally, the last step is to prevent distraction with pacts. Now, pacts, this is the fourth and final step. You have to do this after you've done the other three steps. And many people jump to this step and then it usually backfires for a few reasons. So we want to make sure we do this last. But this idea is to take steps today so we prevent getting distracted in the future. Because one thing that our species does better than any other animal on the face of the earth is to see the future with higher fidelity. One thing, another motto of this book that I want folks to remember is that the antidote

• 35:26Speaker 01

  to impulsiveness is forethought. Right? So as, as amazing as these algorithms are, as psychologically manipulative as all of these tech companies build their products to be, there is nothing that they can do as long as we take steps today to prevent getting distracted tomorrow. So the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. If the chocolate cake is on its way to your mouth, it's too late. You've lost. If the cellphone is next to you when you sleep, that's too late. You're gonna lose, right? They designed those products to be engaging. So you have to take steps now with forethought to prevent being impulsive and doing something you don't want to do later. So how do you do this? Well, there are three types of pacts. We have a price pact, effort pact, and identity pact.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Effort pact are when you put some bit of work between you and something you don't want to do. So for example, in my household, uh, well, we can, we can get a little personal here, right? I can, I can tell you, I can be a little vulnerable with you, Chris.

• 36:20Chris Williamson?

  Sure thing.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  So I've been married for almost 20 years and a few years ago, my sex life was really suffering. Uh, because every night, my wife and I were going to bed and we were fondling our phones and our iPads and our devices as opposed to being intimate. And so we, we decided we had to do something about this. And so we went to the hardware store and we bought a $5 outlet timer.

• 36:41Chris Williamson?

  I wasn't sure what you were gonna, sorry, sorry, Neil. I really wasn't sure what you were gonna say you got from the outlet store there, mate.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  So this, okay, it's nowhere near as, as exciting as you thought it would be. It's basically this outlet timer turns on and off whatever you plug into it.

• 36:56Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  And so what do we plug into it? Our computer monitors and our router. So every night at 10:00 PM, the internet router shuts off. And so that's a form of an effort pact. Now I could go behind my desk and unplug and replug it in, but it's a bit of work to remind me, wait a minute, is this really what you want to do right now? And so that would be an example of an effort pact. A price pact is when we have some kind of cost to getting distracted. So for example, uh, I used to be clinically obese, uh, no longer, I no longer am.

• 37:26Chris Williamson?

  You look fantastic, man. For the people that are just listening, Neil, you, you look very trim, man. You've got the indestructible t-shirt, you're looking jacked.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  I appreciate it. Thank you. Well, let me tell you, I, I've always hated exercise until very recently. I, I just hated it, uh, but I knew, I knew it was good for you, right? It's something I wanted to do. It's one of my values is to take care of my body. Um, and so I wanted to find a way to put that in my day. That's, that would be part of being consistent with my values. And so what did I do? This is called the burn or burn technique. And for some people listening, it's going to sound absolutely crazy, but let me tell you how effective it is. The idea is that every morning I wake up, I go into my closet to get dressed and the first thing I see is a calendar. And on today's date, every day is taped a crisp $100 bill. And above this calendar on a shelf is a lighter. So every day I have a choice to make.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  I can either burn the $100 bill or I can go burn some calories by going to the gym, going on a run, doing some kind of physical activity. Okay. Now I've done this for the past three and a half years and I've never had to burn the $100 bill. Right, because I put a cost, it's a price pact I've made with myself, that I have to burn that money, or go burn some calories. So when push comes to stuff, I say, okay, fine, I'll take a quick walk, I'll do thirty pushups, I'll do something, so that I don't have to burn that hundred dollar bill. And there's other forms of price packs I talk about in the book, several others you can demonstrate. And then the last type of pre-commitment is called an identity pact. An identity pact says that we are much more likely to stay

• 39:00Speaker 01

  consistent with an identity, with a self-image. And so this is why I'm wearing this shirt that says "Indistractable" on it, is because this is my moniker. This helps me remember my own identity. This research comes from studying religion, that we know when people identify with a certain type of faith, they don't have to struggle with doing or not doing certain things every day. An observant Muslim doesn't say to themselves, hmm, I wonder if I'll have a beer today. No, because a devout Muslim doesn't drink alcohol. It's just part of who they are. A vegetarian doesn't say to themselves, hmm, I wonder if I'll have that hamburger right now. No, it's just something they don't do, it's part of their identity. So if it can become something you don't do versus something you can't do, and that language, just those simple two words, can have a profound impact on staying

• 39:45Speaker 01

  with our, sticking with our goals. So the new moniker becomes "I am indistractable." So you see the reason I don't answer emails right away? I'm indistractable. You see the reason I use this screen sign that tells people I'm busy right now? I'm indistractable. These techniques, they're not so crazy, they're not so different, and we can explain them to people based on our identity, and that actually helps us stay consistent with what we want to do.

• 40:07Chris Williamson?

  James Clear, in the episode I did with him earlier this year, uses the same study, I think, in Atomic Habits. And what he talks about is, how many times do you need to kick a football to become a footballer? It would be soccer player, I guess, for you guys, but how many times do you need to kick the football to become a footballer? He says, well, if you kick a football once, are you a footballer? Probably not. If you do it like a hundred times, still probably not. If you play every weekend for a year, yeah, you probably are. And chasing after that identity actually allows you to ensure that the actions you are doing now... Are in alignment with the goal or the end result that you want to be in the future. So Nir is saying, I am the sort of person who always goes for a run. I am a runner.

• 40:52Chris Williamson?

  I am a, I am an exerciser. I am a fit person. I am someone who maybe doesn't like fitness, but does fitness.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  Who values it.

• 40:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  Right. I am, I am a, the person I am is defined by this trait. And the good news is that we can call ourselves Indistractable right now. Right. Whether you read the book or don't read the book or implement these techniques, all of them, some of them, it doesn't matter. You can call yourself Indistractable. And it's nice because not only does it reinforce your identity, it helps provide a reason. It's speaking to others about why you're a little bit different. And remember, being a little different, if you want to have the kind of life that other people don't have, you have to do things that other people don't do. So being different is a good thing. Right. And so we want to define ourselves by the person we want to become. And why wouldn't you want to become Indistractable? I think all of us strive to do what we say we're going to do, to live with personal integrity. And so that's why the book is titled Indistractable.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  And that's why I want to create this new moniker around this identity.

• 41:46Chris Williamson?

  Couldn't agree more. I tweeted last night, a tweet that said extraordinary workloads equal extraordinary results. Ordinary workloads equal ordinary results. And it's just the same, man. Like if you want to, if you want to be able to achieve things that other people aren't, you have to be willing to do things that other people aren't. And you, you know, if, if it means that I gotta put a sign on the top of my, my laptop and, and people think, why have you got that bit of card up there or whatever it might be? So before-

• 42:16Speaker 01

  I mean, this is, this is the hack, right? We have to, if we don't do this kind of stuff, we know what the result is. We'll be constantly pulled from one thing to the next, to the next. I mean, there really is a bifurcation of people out there. One group of people is going to let their attention, their lives be controlled by others. And another group of people is going to stand up and say, nope, I want to control my attention. I want to control my life. I am Indistractable.

• 42:36Chris Williamson?

  Man, I love it. So before we finish up, Nir, you mentioned, and I thought this was really interesting, actually. The first, the first sort of half to three quarters of the book was stuff that I'd kind of expected. But then you actually went on to talking about Indistractable relationships. And I thought that that, that, um, a very different angle to what I would have usually read in this sort of a book. Can you briefly just explain to us about what an Indistractable relationship looks like?

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it has to do with the domain of our friendships, our family. And so this is what I talked a little bit about this, how to be an indistractable lover with my wife, about how we use the model of these four steps in our relationship to make sure we had time for each other. And then when it comes to spending time with our friends, you know, we know that there is a crisis of loneliness. In America, at least, it's very much a huge problem because as social institutions have degraded, and we know this is a multi-year trend, this didn't start with social media. Robert Putnam talked about this in the 90s with his book Bowling Alone, how as fewer people are part of church groups, of civic organizations, loneliness has become a huge problem.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  And so the way to fix this is to bring back some of the aspects that kept people seeing each other. And that requires scheduling. It requires making time for the important people in your life on your calendar and doing this in advance. So we started a group with my friends that we called the kibbutz. And we do this every two weeks, same time, same place. Kids can come, but they can't interrupt. And it's time for friends to interact. We need that. We need, not only for ourselves, we need to know that we are cared for, that other people care for us, and that we care for other people, but also, we need our kids to see what adult friendships look like. And so we have to make time for those relationships as well. And then a question I oftentimes hear is what happens if I'm indistractable, but then

• 44:30Speaker 01

  someone at the dinner table decides to take out their phone and start using it in the middle of a conversation? And so the idea here, you know, I thought about this for a long time, and it turns out that there is precedent for this. We call this a social antibody. A social antibody is when we learn, we adopt our behavior, we adapt our behavior, sorry, so that we prevent the harm of a particular social experience. And so here's the answer. Here's what you do. When someone is using their device at the dinner table when they shouldn't, you don't want to say, "Hey, put your phone away," right?

• 45:01Chris Williamson?

  You don't want to be that guy.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  You don't want to be that guy. Here's what you do. It's pretty simple. You want to ask them this one question. And the question is, "Hey, is everything okay?" And what this question does is allow you to, if it really is an emergency, sometimes it might be an emergency, right? Maybe something is happening on their phone that really does require their attention. Well, they'll say, oh, you know what? I'm sorry, this thing is blowing up at work right now. I gotta go take care of it. Let me go excuse myself and take care of it. Or nine times out of 10, they'll just say, oh, I'm sorry. And they put it away because not everybody has gotten the message. Most people have gotten the message that that's a rude thing to do at the dinner table, to use your phone. But for those who haven't gotten the message, this is a subtle way to spread this truth.

• 45:41Chris Williamson?

  It's a very tactful delivery.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  Thank you. And it works.

• 45:46Chris Williamson?

  It is. Weirdly enough, so I was talking to, like I say, I was talking to Chris Sparks recently, and he refers to himself as tool agnostic when it comes to life hacks, which I really liked. Very principles based. What is the environment that I need myself to be in in order to be productive? But there is absolutely a place for things like that, for very specific tools, which can be used in those sorts of situations. And that's, you know, it's not an app. It's not anything else, but is everything okay? Is, and there's, you know, there'll be some equivalents, but there's got to be a finite number of ones that work like that. So.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. And we've been here before, remember? You know, I grew up in the 1980s. I was born in the 70s, but I grew up in the 80s. And I remember in my home, we had ashtrays all over the house. And my parents didn't smoke at the time. My dad quit smoking years before. My mom never smoked. And yet we had ashtrays in the house. And the reason we had ashtrays is because back then, in the mid 80s, if you went to someone's home, they just expected to light up in your living room. Right? Well, that was when the US population, 60% of the US population smoked. Today, it's about 14%. Well, you know, what changed? What precipitated this change? If someone came to my home and decided to light up a cigarette in my living room, I'd kick them out. They wouldn't be my friend anymore. Well, was it a law that did that? No, there's no law that says you can't smoke in someone's living room.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  What changed were these social antibodies. These rules, these manners, these norms are things that we ourselves decided to change. That if someone smokes, they say, oh, let me just go outside for a minute on the balcony or in the living or in the, you know, outdoors to smoke as opposed to doing it with this expectation they could do in your living room. And that happened not because of laws. It happened because of norms. And so that's what we can actually change in our society ourselves.

• 47:33Chris Williamson?

  So bit by bit, we're going to make the dinner table an increasingly tech-free zone if we can just keep on getting the right questions asked.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, this for me is really a very personal mission. I really do believe that we all can become indistractable. I don't think we have any other choice. The technology is not going away. Swearing off it for a 30-day digital detox or whatever, it doesn't work. For the same reason fad diets don't work. We need these tools for our livelihood and we can get the best of them without letting them get the best of us.

• 48:05Chris Williamson?

  That's awesome, man. Nir, I've absolutely loved today. Everybody who is listening, I highly recommend that you go and pick up a copy of Indistractable. For me, it is if Atomic Habits had a child with digital minimalism, that's probably not far wrong from what we've got here. For the listeners who want to find you online or get some of the resources, where should they head?

• 48:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you can go to indistractable.com and that's I-N-the-word-distract-A-B-L-E, indistractable.com. And there's an 80-page workbook there that's complimentary. There's all kinds of tools and resources that you can get there. And yeah, that's all at indistractable.com.

• 48:48Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. Link will be in the show notes below, along with the link to Indistractable, available on Amazon. Obviously, if you follow that link through, it will be supporting the podcast at no extra cost to yourself. Nir, man, thank you so much for your time. It's been awesome today.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  My pleasure. Thank you so much.