How to Beat Distraction and Still Enjoy Life (ft. Nir Eyal)

Why can’t we just do the things we know we should do? It’s a simple question with a very complex answer. To help us answer it, I sat down with my old friend, Nir Eyal, a behavioral design expert and author of the best-selling book, Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. I love Nir’s approach because he doesn’t linger on the surface of the problem of distraction by hocking the latest app or hack or fancy new time management method. Instead, he dives right into the thorny emotional realities we all face in trying to lead productive, meaningful lives. In this episode, we talk about what it means to be “indistractable” and how it’s probably the most important skill of the 21st century. We also get Nir’s take on the role of social media in our lives (his views on this might surprise you). And finally, he answers that timeless question: Why don’t we just do what we know we should do? Enjoy. About Nir Eyal Nir Eyal writes, consults, and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. Nir previously taught as a Lecturer in Marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. He is the author of two bestselling books, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. His books have resonated with readers worldwide, selling over 1 million copies in over 30 languages. Nir’s book, Indistractable: http://geni.us/indistractable Nir on time boxing: https://www.nirandfar.com/timeboxing/ Nir on values: https://www.nirandfar.com/common-values/ Nir’s free schedule maker: https://www.nirandfar.com/schedule-maker/ More articles by Nir: https://www.nirandfar.com/best-articles/ CHAPTERS Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction: The Writing Partnership That Solved Distraction 00:02:32 What Is Indistractable? The Skill of the Century 00:05:32 Traction vs. Distraction: The Power of Intent 00:08:41 Internal Triggers: The Real Source of 90% of Distractions 00:10:24 Self-Awareness and the Path to Mastering Internal Triggers 00:12:22 Everything You Do Is About Escaping Discomfort 00:14:18 Why We Can't Sit Still: The Evolutionary Purpose of Boredom 00:16:10 The Goldilocks Zone of Pain and the Recipe for Burnout 00:18:27 Make Time for Traction: Why You Can't Call Something a Distraction 00:19:56 Time Boxing vs. To-Do Lists: The Productivity Debate 00:22:00 Brilliant or Bullshit: The Social Dilemma Documentary 00:22:58 The Social Media Debate: It's All Media, Not Just Social Media 00:29:47 The Three Psychological Nutrients Kids Are Missing 00:32:01 The Real Culprits: Standardized Testing, Hyper-Scheduling, and Lost Play 00:34:14 Video Games as Protection and the Myth of Stranger Danger 00:38:19 Legacy Media vs. New Media: Who's Really Causing Division? 00:42:37 Audience Question: How Do I Do What I Know I Should Do? 00:43:43 The Four Strategies in Action: From Internal Triggers to Pacts 00:45:06 The Right Metric of Success: Did I Work Without Distraction? 00:47:05 Mark's Struggle: Time Boxing vs. Word Count Goals 00:49:34 Be a Scientist, Not a Drill Sergeant: Flexibility in Time Boxing 00:52:14 Productivity Is Personal: Finding Your Optimal Tools 00:53:43 The Problem with Habits and Flow: Not Everything Can Be Easy 00:56:37 The 10-Minute Rule: Surfing the Urge to Distraction 00:59:03 Wisdom of the Week: The Cure for Boredom and Repeated Mistakes Follow Nir on social media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nireyal/ https://www.youtube.com/user/nirandfar https://twitter.com/nireyal https://www.facebook.com/nirandfar/ http://instagram.com/neyal99 ⇨ Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: ⁠⁠⁠⁨https://markmanson.net/breakthrough⁩⁠⁠⁠ ⇨ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get started at ⁠⁠⁠⁨https://bit.ly/4w46FMH⁠⁠⁠ FOLLOW MARK Mark's IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/markmanson⁠ Solved IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://x.com/markmanson⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson Theme Song: Icarus Lives by @Periphery , used with permission from Periphery.

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

• 0:00Mark Manson?

  So most people don't know this. Writing a book is almost impossibly hard. Like, it just requires an insane amount of focus over such a long period of time. Like, you're literally spending months and months and months by yourself, struggling, sitting by yourself. Nothing keeping you in that chair other than your desire to finish this impossible project. So as you would expect, distraction plays a really big role in book writing. And it just so happens, I was having such a hard time with my second book that a friend of mine, who was also writing a book and struggling with distraction, we decided to start getting together and co-writing together and holding each other accountable. And so it turns out, my accountability buddy,

• 0:45Mark Manson?

  who got me through my second book, Nir Eyal, is here. And irony of ironies, the book he was writing when we were writing together is called Indistractible, and it's about how to resist distraction. So Nir, I noticed in your book, there was nothing about me. And I clearly, you know, as the person who cured your distractions, I was a little bit hurt by that.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  That's actually not true. No, you need to give it another pass. Actually, in the section on pacts, we talk about price pacts. And price pacts are where you make this pre-commitment, where you decide in advance what the consequences will be if you don't do what you say you're going to do. It's the last step, very important. You don't do that first. But as the last line of defense, you can do these pacts. There's different kinds of pacts. And one of those pacts is a price pact. And I actually talk about in the book how we made that $10,000 bet that if I didn't finish my book by January 1st, I was gonna have to pay you $10,000.

• 1:45Mark Manson?

  Damn it, Nir, you're making me look like an asshole. All right, I'm in the book. Read the book, everybody. Read the book.

• 2:03Mark Manson?

  Welcome, my friend Niraj All, my old friend. For people who aren't familiar with him, Nir is an author, a technologist, a former startup founder, an investor. But most importantly, you're most well-known for writing about distraction, what you call behavior design, managing your focus, attention, and all the distractions in your lives. It is great to have you here. I feel like this is long overdue. You're beaming in.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 2:28Mark Manson?

  From Singapore. Thanks for coming on, man.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Oh, my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

• 2:32Mark Manson?

  Why don't we start out by just kind of getting into the core? Like, how do we want to take this? Do we want to take it like through the four factors in distractible? Like, do we want to go one by one? Or how are we going to do this?

• 2:44Speaker 02

  I think, yeah. Nir, if you want to take us, this first segment, we call it the fuck of the week. What are we giving a fuck about? What are we not giving a fuck about? We're having you on. We're going to be talking about giving a fuck about being and becoming indistractable. So if you could kind of frame this for us, what is indistractable to you? What is indistractability?

• 3:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  And how do we get there? Yeah.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Sure, sure. So I think, you know, becoming indistractable is the skill of the century. That for the first time in human history, we are inundated with so much abundance. And that's generally a good thing, right? It's the first time in history that more people die of diseases of excess from too many calories, like diabetes, obesity, than die from starvation. And so that's actually a great thing, right? The price of progress is that we have so much abundance. And we're seeing that same phenomenon happen when it comes to information, that we have so much entertainment, we have so much access. We can beam here, I'm in Singapore, you're in California, we have this free connection that we can have on our video screens. I mean, this would have been science fiction when we were kids. And yet, the price of all that progress is that we have to learn how to focus our attention.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Because even though you can have the world's information in the palm of your hand, if you can't focus long enough to turn that information into wisdom, it might as well not even exist. So I think that the critical skill of the century is going to be the power to be indistractible. Because if you think the world is distracting now, just wait a few years, right? Between AI and augmented reality and Virtual reality and all this stuff that's happening in reality, reality, the world is only going to become a more distracting place. So I think we're really bifurcating into people who allow their time and attention to be manipulated and controlled by others, by media interests, by their boss, by their kids, by all this stuff outside of them. And people who stand up and say, no, no, no, I decide how I control my time and attention because I am indistractable.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  And so that's, you know, I write books not because I have the answer. I write books because I need the answer. And I found that I was becoming incredibly distracted and not able to focus on the things that really matter to me. And so I really wanted to crack this code for myself. And the first thing I did was think, okay, well, I'll just go read other people's books on this. Right. And so I read a bunch of books that told me, you know, technology is evil and stop using social media and stop checking email. But that didn't work. It's really easy for some professor to say that because they have tenure. But, you know, the rest of us with real jobs, we actually need to use email. We need to use social media. We need to use these technologies. So I wanted a tech positive approach that allowed me to get the best of both worlds. And so that's what I came up with with indistractable.

• 5:17Mark Manson?

  So take us through, you have four keys of indistractability or four, four factors of indistractability. Like, take us through each one of those one by one. What are they? Why do they matter? Is there a specific order that we should go in? What's, what's your approach?

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Sure, sure. So let's, let's start with, okay, let's back up. What is distraction? Let's start with some definitions here. So the best way to understand what distraction is, is to understand what distraction is not. What is the opposite of distraction? Most people, if you ask them, what's the opposite of distraction? They'll say focus, right? I don't want to be distracted. I want to be focused. That's not exactly right. The opposite of distraction is not focus. If you look at the origin of the word, the opposite of distraction is traction. Of course it is, right? Traction and distraction, they're opposites. So traction and distraction both end in the same six letters, A C T I O N. That spells action, reminding us that distraction is not something that happens to you. Okay, it is an action that you yourself took.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  So traction, by definition, is any action that pulls you towards what you said you were going to do, things that you do with intent, things that move you closer to your values and help you become the kind of person you want to become. Those are acts of traction. The opposite, distraction, is anything that is not what you plan to do in advance, something that pulls you away from your values, further away from becoming the person you want to become. So this isn't just semantics. This is really, really important because the difference between traction and distraction is one word, and that one word is intent. As Dorothy Parker said, "The time you plan to waste is not wasted time." So I think we need to stop vilifying and moralizing and medicalizing what people do with their spare time. Like, let's stop harping on, "Video games are melting your brain," and "Stop using social media," and

• 6:57Speaker 01

  "Stop doing this, stop doing that." Look, anything you want to do with your time and attention is fine, right? Why is playing video games morally inferior to watching golf on TV? I don't know the difference. If that's what you want to do with your time, fine. Stop worrying about, you know, how other people spend their time. Ask yourself, "How do you want to spend your time in accordance with your values?" So if you plan for that, if that's what you said you were going to do in advance, is play video games, or go on social media, or watch YouTube videos, awesome, do it, enjoy it, don't feel guilty about it, but do it on your schedule and according to your values, not someone else's, certainly not the tech company's schedule. Conversely, just because something is a work-related task doesn't mean it's not a distraction. So I'll give you a perfect example in my

• 7:41Speaker 01

  own life. For years, I would sit down at my desk, and I would say, "Okay, I'm gonna get started, I'm gonna work on that big, important project that I've been delaying and procrastinating on, nothing's gonna get in my way, I'm not gonna get distracted, here I go, I'm gonna get started. But first, let me check some email, right? Let me just scroll that Slack channel, let me just catch up on industry news, because that's a work-related task, I'm being productive, right? But if it's not what I said I was gonna do in advance, it's just as much of a distraction as playing Candy Crush or whatever, you know, stupid activity might distract you." So if it's not what you said you're gonna do in advance, it is by definition a distraction. Okay, so now to frame this model, you've got traction, you've got distraction, now what prompts us to take These actions, we have two kinds of triggers.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  So think of them as two arrows bisecting here. So the usual suspects are what we call external triggers. External triggers are the pings, the dings, the rings, anything in our outside environment that can lead us towards traction or distraction. Now, that's what people tend to blame, right? They tend to say, oh, I was planning to do something and then my phone rang and I got distracted. Those are called external triggers, but they only account for 10% of our distractions. There's been many studies on this. Only 10% of the time that you check your phone is it because of a ping, ding, or ring, an external trigger. So what's the other 90%? Turns out, studies find, that 90% of the time that we get distracted, it's not because of what's happening outside of us, it's because of what's happening inside of us.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  These are called internal triggers. What are internal triggers? Internal triggers are uncomfortable emotional states. Boredom, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety. That is the source of 90% of our distractions. Because what I discovered, the thing that most impacted my life, looking at the research, was that distraction is not a moral failing. It's not some kind of broken brain syndrome for the vast majority of people. They don't have anything wrong with their brains. And even those who think they do, most of them are misdiagnosed, to be honest. It's simply that we haven't learned this skill set. We haven't learned how to deal with discomfort in a healthy way that moves us towards traction, rather than trying to escape it with distraction. So whether it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook,

• 9:53Speaker 01

  if you don't know what's really driving your distraction, that it's these uncomfortable emotional states you don't know how to deal with, you are always going to get distracted. So now we have the four points of our compass. Number one, master internal triggers, or they become your master. Number two, make time for traction. Number three, hacking back these external triggers. And then finally, as the last line of defense is to prevent distraction with PAX, that's the four strategies we have to use to become indistractable. And using those four strategies, in concert, anybody can become indistractable.

• 10:24Mark Manson?

  I find there's like an interesting, common thread that I see in a lot of those, which is self-awareness. Because, A, I think a lot of people aren't aware of their own internal triggers. I know that, you know, a big story of my adult life has just been becoming more aware of my internal triggers, of what has led to bad habits and bad behavior. But also, I think there's There's a question of being aware of what your intent is, of what you actually want to accomplish. I think a lot of people, if you're muddy on where you're trying to get, then you're more susceptible to all the distractions because it can actually be a way of hiding the fact that you don't have clarity around what you want out of your life.

• 11:07Mark Manson?

  And so, talk a little bit about how self-awareness fits into all these components and what the process around that looks like.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely. So I think, you know, a big part of it is that people don't have that self-awareness around what they're feeling in the moment. Because remember, you know, the brain is a cognitive miser. The, we used to think about human motivation as carrots and sticks, right? That everything we do is about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Sigmund Freud said this, Jeremy Bentham said this. Turns out neurologically, if you actually look at what's happening in the brain, it's not true. That metaphor doesn't apply. That in fact, everything we do, everything we do, it's not about carrots and sticks. It's that the carrot is the stick. The carrot is the stick. What am I talking about? Meaning-

• 11:56Mark Manson?

  I'm imagining a very long, thin carrot that you are beating people with, so please explain yourself.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Kind of, yeah. That's actually would be a better metaphor. It's almost like, remember that scene in The Matrix? That Neo goes into that room where that kid is bending the spoon and the kid says, "Imagine there is no spoon." And then Neo realizes there's something else going on. And that's exactly what's happening with human motivation. That it's not about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, but in fact, all human motivation, everything you do, everything you do, is about one thing, and that is the desire to escape discomfort. So even pursuing pleasure, wanting, craving, urging, desire, hunger-

• 12:42Speaker 01

  All of those feelings to get the pleasure are driven by the desire to extinguish the wanting of that pleasure. So, everything we do is about pain management. So that must therefore mean that time management is pain management. Money management is pain management. Weight management is pain management. That's all it is. And so, when you look at that as the very first, most important step, which is mastering these internal triggers, becoming aware of the fact that our processing, our rationalization of why I can't do something, "Oh, I just need to check email for a minute," or "Let me just watch that YouTube video," or "I just need a quick break," or "I need a cigarette,"

• 13:22Speaker 01

  or "I need a drink," or "I need a..." whatever it might be, they are just maladaptive habits around dealing with discomfort. That's all it is. It's just training ourselves to find the path of least resistance to alleviate discomfort. So for me, that was incredibly liberating, because that meant if I was having trouble writing my book, if I wasn't spending time fully present with my family, if I wasn't exercising, if I wasn't eating right, it's just about learning how to manage discomfort. And once you have that skill set, once you have those tools in your toolkit, doing what you say you're going to do becomes much, much easier.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  Nir, there's a particular kind of discomfort that I want to ask you about, and it's something that keeps coming up. It's a simple question, but I haven't found a good answer for it. What is boredom? Why are we so uncomfortable with boredom? It seems like it's like, "Oh, it's just this, you know, we're not doing anything, so we should be fine," but we're not. What is that all about?

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you're right. I mean, I don't know if you know how right you are, but there's actually been some amazing studies where they actually put people in a room and tell them, "Don't do anything, okay? Just sit here." And all you can do is either sit here or give yourself... They tie them up with this band around their arm. They say, "Here's a button. You can electrocute yourself, or not, but just sit here." And it turns out that something like 2/3 of men, I think it's a much smaller proportion of women, and they're much more rational than men apparently, will electrocute themselves just to feel something to avoid boredom. I mean, how crazy is that? But actually, this is... An evolutionary attribute that we have this on purpose. Because if you think about it, you know, one of the goals of many world religions is to transcend wanting,

• 15:02Speaker 01

  to transcend desire, like that that becomes the ultimate nirvana is not to want things, not to be attached to things. But if you think about it, evolutionarily, if there was a tribe of humans who were blissed out, who were contented, who were happy all the time, and they encountered our ancestors, right? People who are constantly bored, constantly wanting more, constantly seeking. Our ancestors would have met them, killed them, and eaten them. Right? Because it's not evolutionarily beneficial to be blissed out and not want. It's in fact our wanting, our boredom, our anxiety to do better that helps us invent world-changing medicine, that helps us overturn despots, that helps us make a better world.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  So that's an evolutionary attribute. The fact that we're antsy is what made our species so fantastic, is that we want to improve that, right? That's why we dominated the earth. And so the reason we have that that aversion to boredom is because it's spurring us to go do something to make our lot better.

• 16:02Mark Manson?

  I think I talked about this in my book, that there's like a Goldilocks level of pain. Like, the optimal amount of pain in life is not zero. It's it's kind of a U-shaped curve, right? Like, if there's too much pain, then you it results in trauma and overwhelming feelings and it like just cripples people. But if there's not enough pain, if there's not enough stimulation, that is also a form of suffering. It's almost like we there's like this perfect Goldilocks amount of struggle and challenge and irritation that we thrive on, that it's like this perception of surmountable pain, of just enough pain that we feel like we can get over the hump.

• 16:42Mark Manson?

  And that seems to be the the hamster wheel that like generates a sense of meaning and purpose.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it turns out what moderates what is the right level of discomfort is one thing.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  And that's control. There's some amazing research that came out of Oxford a few years ago from the work of Stansfield and Candy that found that we exactly know what is the recipe for burnout. Do you guys know the recipe for burnout? The recipe for burnout is a confluence of two factors. It's not what kind of job you do. It's not depressing work. If you ask people what kind of work causes anxiety and depression and burnout, you would think it'd be like a sad job or a hard job. No, no. Turns out, it's jobs that cause burnout are ones where you have high expectations coupled with low control. It has to be that confluence. If you have high expectations and high control, no problem. People can cope with the discomfort, with the pain in life, as you said, Mark, as long

• 17:41Speaker 01

  as they feel they have agency and control over modulating their behavior, like doing something about that. That's why you hear people's best experiences in life are when they were in that super hard game that they managed to rally the team, when they went to war with their fellow comrades. What these life-changing experiences are, when they had hard experiences and high control, people rise to the occasion. It's when we have high expectations with low control, that's when we burn out. That's when we get distracted. That's when we have all kinds of anxiety and depression issues, is when we lack agency and control. So step number two to becoming indistractible, and this is a game changer. So step number one, again, is mastering those internal triggers, having those tools ready to go so you can deal with that discomfort in a healthy way.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Step number two is about making time for traction. And this is such a huge opportunity that most people don't take. When you ask most people, you say, "I'm struggling with distraction. I probably have ADHD. I can't get anything done because look at what's happening in the news and the elections and social media, blah, blah, blah." And then you say, "Okay, but what did you plan to do today? What did you get distracted from? Show me your calendar."

• 18:51Speaker 01

  I don't know, it's blank. Maybe I got a dentist appointment or a meeting here and there. Right? But here's the fact, you can't call something a distraction unless you know what you got distracted from. I'll say it again, it's so important. You can't say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from. So if you can't show me on your calendar, what is it that you wanted to do? What is traction? You can't say you got distracted. Everything is a distraction unless you know in advance what you want to do with your time. So that's where this whole technique of time boxing, which I didn't invent, it's been around for decades. It's actually the most studied, well researched time management technique that blows to do lists out of the water. To do lists suck for your personal productivity in comparison. There's a way to use to do lists, which we can talk about, but for most people, to do lists are really sinking their personal productivity.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  As opposed to a time box calendar where you say, hey, according to my values, and I show you exactly how to do this in the book, how do I turn my values into time? So now I can look back at my calendar and say, okay, that's what I plan to do. Whether it's being with my kids, whether it's working on that project, whether it's playing video games, that's what I plan to do. That's traction. Everything else would be a distraction.

• 19:56Mark Manson?

  I'm on team to do list. We could argue with Mark. We'll have to, we'll have to.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's talk about it.

• 20:03Mark Manson?

  We'll have to fight about it next time we see each other.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  No, you know, I've converted a lot of people, people, people used to say like bring up people like you, or they would say like Mark Andreessen, you know, Mark Andreessen from Andreessen Horowitz, he wrote this very famous article that said, you know, I don't keep a calendar. Uh, you know, if you need to see me, you need to see me, that's fine. I don't keep a schedule. And then, uh, and people would talk to me about this and say like, hey, look, here's a super successful guy. Look, he doesn't keep a schedule. And actually a couple, like about a year ago, he said, okay, I give up. And now I use a time box calendar.

• 20:31Mark Manson?

  I do, I do use a calendar, but, um, I do love to do lists. They make me very happy.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  So, so there's, just to be clear, there's nothing wrong with taking things out of your brain and putting in them on a piece of paper. I do that as well. That's great. What you don't want to do is run your life on a to do list. So if you wake up in the morning and you say, ooh, what should I do with my day? And you look at your to do list, you know what you're gonna do? You're gonna do the easy stuff. You're gonna do the urgent stuff. You're gonna do the fun stuff on the to-do list. You're not gonna do the stuff that is, that you, that requires your full attention. That's oftentimes difficult to do. You're gonna delay on that, right? Because a to-do list doesn't tell you when to do what you say you're going to do, because it has no constraints. It just goes on and on and on. So, so it's not that a to-do list on, i- is a bad idea. It's that people don't use to-do lists properly by putting that, those tasks inside their schedule as well.

• 21:18Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I've had a lot of conversations with people. Like, to-do lists are very similar to goals, which is, I think, the way to, to do them well is to be flexible with them. So, like, I'll set a to-do list for the week and I'll, like, roughly kind of plan out, here's what I'm gonna do Monday, here's what I'm gonna do Tuesday, here's, you know, everything on Wednesday. But then every, things start to get shuffled, right? Like, it's, it's like, actually, this is way more important than these three things. So I'm gonna move these three things to Thursday and then I'm gonna do this this afternoon. And, like, I think you need to, like, critically think about your to-do list as you're going through it. If you just go through it mindlessly, then, um, yeah, it's probably not gonna end well. Let's take a quick break. We'll be right back.

• 22:00Mark Manson?

  All right, we're back. I'm really excited for this Brilliant or Bullshit, because you have developed a bit of a reputation, Nir, as the social media defender. Uh, you know, it's, and social media has become everybody's favorite punching bag and scapegoat for all of the problems of the last 10 years. Uh, and you, you have been one of the few people that has, like, vocally stood up and said, "Hey, it's not as bad as everybody thinks." So Drew, lead us into, to Brilliant or Bullshit.

• 22:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, for Brilliant or Bullshit, um, we're gonna be doing is The Social Dilemma, the documentary, the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma. Is it brilliant or bullshit? And, um, Nir, I don't know what your thoughts are on this, but, um, why don't you take us through both your relationship with the documentary? And then your, your thoughts on it as well.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Well, okay, uh, you said brilliant or bullshit. I wanna create a, a third B, which is both.

• 22:56Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Brilliant and bullshit.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  What do I mean by that? That, you know, I think what's oftentimes lacking in our conversation around these complex topics is nuance, right? That we want dichotomies. We want good guys and bad guys. We want, you know, black and white thinking. And that's not reality, right? That's Star Wars. I don't know. That's not reality. Even Star Wars is more complex than good guys and bad guys. And so certainly, these complex social issues like social media. Social media, good or bad? The answer is yes. It's good? Yes. And it's bad? Yes. Many things are both. And so it's about this much more complicated look at social media in terms of who is using it, how much they are using it, what they are doing when they're using it, and what they would be doing instead of using it. So it's a much more nuanced question.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  But if you want to focus in on that film specifically, it's more bullshit than I think. Because while I respect the fact that the movie focused attention on how people can waste their time on social media, I think the aperture was way too small. That I don't think the problem is social media per se, as much as it is all media being a source of distraction. I mean, let's call a spade a spade here. You, right now, are watching this on a form of media, right? Which Mark and Drew are benefiting from by getting sponsorship that you probably saw an ad that pays their bills. And that's great, right? They are monetizing your attention. They are turning your eyeballs into money, just like the New York Times, just like Fox

• 24:27Speaker 01

  News, just like Facebook, all these companies do. That's their business model. Does anybody not know that? Like, did we really need a movie to guilt us into thinking that watching something on YouTube is so bad for us? When, if that's how you want to spend your time, fine. There's nothing inherently evil about that. What's evil is when we do these things instead of living our life. When we look back in regret and say, ugh, why did I spend so much time watching Fox News, or CNN, or whatever, social media, when I really want to spend time with my kids, when I really wanted to work on that big project, when I really wanted to go get in shape? That's when it's harmful. So if you do it with intention, there's nothing wrong with that. But that message was never communicated.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  So I sat down with the Social Dilemma people. I sat down with them for three hours and I gave them the entire summary of my book and I wasn't in the movie. Now, I'm not bitter about that. What I'm bitter about is that nobody offered solutions of what to do with the problem. So it's as if, imagine you go to a doctor, right? You go to a doctor and the doctor says, "Oh, I'm so sorry. Mark, you have a terrible disease. It's probably lethal. It's probably gonna kill you. I'm so sorry. Oh, my God, doctor, well, do you have a cure? In fact, I do have a cure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have the cure. Well, can I have it? No, I'm not gonna give it to you." Which is, that's malpractice. And so what the Social Dilemma movie did was freak everyone out using the very psychology they derive.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  It was on Netflix, for God's sakes, right?

• 25:57Mark Manson?

  Algorithmically driven, sensationalized, full of hooks and slithers.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  All the psychology of scaring the shit out of people with, "Oh, my God, you're a puppet on a string." And what's ironic is if the social media companies wanted to create a movie to get people to use their products more, they would have created the Social Dilemma movie. Why? Because the reason people can't stop using social media is because they think they can't stop using social media. It's called learned helplessness, that when you believe there's nothing to be done about a problem, what do you do? Nothing. I can't. Look, the Social Dilemma told me I was a puppet on a string. We're all addicted, right? And we actually know this. It sounds far-fetched, but there's actually been studies that show that there is a correlation between adverse mental health issues and not how much time you spend on social media,

• 26:48Speaker 01

  but what you believe is the effect of social media. Meaning that it doesn't matter how much time you spend. What matters is if you believe social media is bad for you, that's the people who are much more likely to have social, to have mental health issues. So in a way, you're creating this problem by telling people there's nothing you can do about it, as opposed to, I would have been much more for the film if they had put stuff in the movie that anyone can do. For example, how about turning off those goddamn notifications that are constantly interrupting you? Is that so hard? I mean, it takes five minutes. Turn off those stupid notifications. How about planning time to use social media as opposed to using it whenever you feel bored and lonesome and checking it 52 times a day? Use it on your schedule, right? These are simple things anyone can do. And I think

• 27:32Speaker 01

  that the fact that they didn't talk about those very simple solutions that anyone can do until the very, very end, they put a couple stupid points when nobody was watching the credits anymore, that's where the movie really fell flat.

• 27:43Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I was very disappointed by it. And I was very disappointed by how popular it became. But you know, I do think it became a little bit of a social craze of just piling on the social media stuff. I like the point you make about media because you and I are old enough to remember television in the 80s and 90s. And it's, there was a bit of a hysteria around kids watching TV. I remember hearing all these things of like, oh, the amount of TV you watch is rotting your brain. And there are all these scary statistics of like, the average person back in the 90s was watching six to seven hours of television a day. It's a lot of the same concerns and a lot of the same fears. And to your point, it's not social media, it's just media. Like, as long as there is mass entertainment,

• 28:28Mark Manson?

  and as long as it's going to be packaged extremely well, you're always going to have a very large population of people who feel a certain amount of emptiness in their lives, or who are craving distraction from whatever is uncomfortable in their life, that they're going to be susceptible to it. As you know, we just had Jonathan Haidt on the show a few months ago, who is really taking up the banner of, you know, social media is kind of at the root of the mental health crisis. There are a couple of things I would love to hear your perspective on. You know, one of the things I tried to kind of push him on was this claim that this is happening internationally. And of all the studies and data that I've seen, it seems to be very much an

• 29:12Mark Manson?

  Anglosphere thing, when you look at countries and cultures that are more communal, more collectivist, that they, you know, have, they're not as lonely, they're more religious, they have, people are still going out in person and inhabiting the physical world. You don't see a lot of these same mental health effects happening in those parts of the world. And so I, to me, it just feels like, social media can't be the whole story. It seems to be like, in my opinion, it's like one piece of a much larger narrative going on. I'm curious, like, how do you see the situation?

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I greatly respect Jonathan. I think he's, he's an amazing researcher. And our kids used to play together back when I lived in New York. And there's a lot we agree about. In fact, well before he wrote The Anxious Generation, we co-authored an article saying that, hey, we don't exactly agree that social media is the source of the problem. I think it's a symptom of the problem. We can get into what that means in a minute. But that our conclusions are the same. So when you look at what he recommends, I'm in complete agreement. I don't see a really good reason why kids need cell phones before 13. That's, you know, that's, that's the age when the social media companies say is the minimum age. To give your kid a product that the product manufacturers tell you is not for people under a certain age is lunacy.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Like, what are we doing as parents? You say, oh, but I can't stop my kid. Who pays for your kid's cellphone? You did, right? So letting your kid use a product that, that below the age limit, I think is crazy. I think we should raise that age limit. I'm fully in agreement with, he says 16 years old. That seems very legit to me. Phone-free schools, that makes a lot of sense to me. So at the end of the day, we agree on the conclusions in terms of what to do. I think we're in full agreement. I think what's different is that I, I think that this is, like you, a factor, not the whole story. And I think the whole story has to do with something much deeper, which is the fact that children in the Anglosphere.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  Are severely deficient in what we call psychological nutrients. And so psychological nutrients, that's kind of the name I gave. These three elements of self determination theory. Self determination theory is the most widely accepted theory of human flourishing and motivation. Every psychiatrist and psychologist on the face of the earth knows self determination. It's been around since the 1970s. And self determination theory says that every human being in order to have proper mental health and wellness needs three things. We need competency, autonomy, and relatedness. And when you look at children's lives today, as opposed to previous generations, they are severely deficient in these three psychological nutrients. If you think about the sense of competency. Peter Gray is a researcher who drew the same conclusions that Jonathan Haidt drew around

• 31:56Speaker 01

  social media being the cause of the problem. He actually concluded that it was the No Child Left Behind Act. The fact that kids are constantly tested, you know, starting in the first grade, four, five, six times a year on these standardized tests, and that teacher salaries are tied to their, these kids' performance on standardized tests, means that we have built a generation of kids who are constantly told, you are not competent, you are not enough. And so if you don't have that sense of competency and mastery in the real world, this is called the needs displacement hypothesis, if you're not getting what you need in the real world, you look for it in the virtual world. And so that's why they are online, playing these games, going on TikTok, going on various sites, because that's where they feel competent, that's where they feel mastery, because they're not getting that sense in the real world.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  Then if you think about autonomy, we know that this is the most scheduled generation in history. You know, there's only two places in society where you can tell people where to go, what to think, how to dress, what to eat, who to be friends with, and that's prison and school. And so it's no surprise, if we hyper regulate our children and we put them in cages, they act like animals. And that's exactly what's happened. And so by hyper scheduling our kids, it used to be at least, you know, when we were kids, you know, three o'clock, school's out, the rest of the day you just got to play. Well, not anymore, because if you have money, well, now your kid's in test prep and swimming lessons and Mandarin lessons. And if you don't have money, because the Media has convinced us of this myth of stranger danger. We're locking kids up inside.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  And this is something that Jonathan and I greatly agree on. Kids need play. They have to have that socialization that comes from play. But parents are starving their children from that, from that, those social relationships. Which leads us to this third psychological nutrient of relatedness. That when kids don't have time for play, and we know that kids have less time for play in the Anglosphere than ever before. Well, they're looking for what they would get with play online if they can't get it offline. So if you're not playing in neighborhoods like we used to play, you know, our parents said, "Go outside and don't come back until the, the streetlights turn on." Parents are terrified. They're not, they're not doing this for their kids. And so what the heck are kids supposed to do indoors? They go on Fortnite. Well, what is Fortnite?

• 34:09Speaker 01

  I hear parents complaining about, "Oh, my kid plays too much Fortnite." I say, "Have you actually played Fortnite? It's not a video game. It's a way to interact with your friends, just like we used to be on the phone, talking to our friends." That's what they're doing on Fortnite. And in fact, it turns out it may have some protective effects. If you think about the fact that, you know, even Jonathan will say this, that girls are doing much worse than boys. Partially, we think it's because boys have video games to give them those psychological nutrients they're missing. And then finally, the last point is that we have to remember, none of this stuff happens in a vacuum, right? The critics of technology, they only point to the bad stuff. But gotta remember, zoom out a bit. Look at the big picture here. That if you look at all the things that used to kill kids in our generation. Drunk driving, record lows.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Drug use, other than cannabis, record lows. Truancy, record lows. Murder rates, record lows. This was supposed to be the generation of the super predator. They built prisons all over America to house these kids who were going to commit crazy crimes. That never happened. Why? Because if you wanted to invent a device to keep kids safe at home and off the streets, maybe one of these devices is not such a bad idea. So it turns out, despite the fact, he's absolutely right, that we're seeing greater rates of suicide among certain demographics, mostly girls in the Anglosphere. That's true, we're not seeing it everywhere, we're only seeing it in certain demographics. Overall, it's much safer to be a kid today than before these technologies. Now, I'm not saying that these technologies don't cause harm, and in fact, I'm the biggest

• 35:37Speaker 01

  advocate to saying, "Don't be a parent who just lets their kid do whatever they want online." Absolutely not. There's a whole chapter in my book on how to raise indistractable kids, and, you know, I have a 16-year-old myself, and this is something we have to do mindfully, because of course, you know, as Paul Verelio said, "When you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck." So, you know, ships are great, we sail ships all the time. Do we stop sailing ships? No, we made ships better, we made them safer. So what we will do as a society, whether it's children, whether it's adults, we're gonna do the same thing we've always done as a society when it comes to a new technology, is we don't stop using the technology, we adapt and we adopt to it. Meaning, we adapt our behavior, we adapt our norms, we have new standards around how we use these technologies, we change our behavior, that's what I'm trying to do with

• 36:22Speaker 01

  indistractable, and then we invent new technology, we adopt new technologies to fix the last generation of technology. So I think this is something we're working through, I think if we just blame social media for all of our troubles, we don't get to the root cause of the problem, which of course is something we love to do, right? People love to say, "It's not my fault, my kids are crazy, it's because of social media," as opposed to saying, "Wait a minute, maybe it's this much, this new technology of institutionalized learning, right? Nobody ever thinks about school, this ridiculous notion that we can put one teacher in front of a classroom of 30 kids and expect five-year-olds to sit there and just take it, right? That's not a problem that social media created.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  The fact that 10% of American children are diagnosed with ADHD, 10%, and up to 25% of American boys, 1 in 4 boys today are diagnosed with ADHD, this is not something that social media created, this is something institutionalized, that somehow, we don't want to come to grips with, that maybe we're expecting children to do things that maybe children aren't designed to do. A five-year-old is not designed to sit and listen to a teacher. Blabber on for hours on end. That's not what five year olds, six year olds should be doing. And yet we blame it on all these exogenous conditions. So all I'm saying is there are deeper reasons here than just saying, ah, it's technology's fault, which is exactly what parents have been doing for thousands of years. They've always said it's the latest and, you know,

• 37:45Speaker 01

  latest trend. That's what's causing my kids problems as opposed to a bit of introspection.

• 37:50Mark Manson?

  Well said, sir. Well said.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  I have a little bit of a follow up there. So I think almost everybody, even if they do disagree with John Height or you or whatever, everyone kind of does agree on the solution. Like you said, where you and John Height disagree, but you agree or disagree, but you agree on the solutions. Great. But what about, he made another very astute observation when Mark interviewed him, I thought anyway, which was a lot of times these moral panics are misplaced in a way that kind of hides the real problem. So like for television, for example, we thought television and video games are rotting kids' brains. You know, it's going to be the end of childhood as we know it. That didn't happen. It doesn't rot our brains,

• 38:34Speaker 02

  but it does destroy what he calls social capital. It made everybody, it forced everybody to go sit at home and just, you know, kind of you don't know your neighbors anymore. Now you're just inside, isolated. Do you think there's any parallel there with social media? Cause they kind of did, well, we've been told anyway, they've kind of done this sleight of hand. Right? They came in and they, they gave us all this free cool shit. We could connect with everybody, anywhere at any time. And then they kind of pulled the rug out from under us and started monetizing our eyeballs and attention. Is that, is that just another form of moral panic? Or is there something to that? Do you think? Is there, is the, is the panic misplaced? Or is it just not even, not even a thing?

• 39:16Speaker 01

  So again, I wish I could give a black and white yes or no, right or wrong answer. But I think I'll refer to soft.

• 39:22Mark Manson?

  Damn it, damn it, Neil. You with your nuance again.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  So I'll go way back. I'll quote Sophocles. Sophocles said, "Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse." So of course, these things give us all kinds of goods, and they're also going to excise a cost. They're also going to give us bads. And so the solution isn't to say, "Stop using it." That's ridiculous. It's about getting the good while doing away with the bad. And this has happened over and over again with every technological revolution, right? The car. Is the car good or bad? Yeah, it's kind of both. It gave us global warming. It also gave us the ability to transport goods and services to people who need them. So they always come with a curse. And so what we're going to do as a species is to figure out how to get the best of these devices

• 40:11Speaker 01

  without letting them get the best of us. I think, though, what we need to be very careful of is a drumbeat for action that only comes from one source. Meaning, where do we hear the call to regulate social media from? You hear it from traditional media. And nobody's turning the lens on traditional media who is in competition with social media, right? We know that Fox News, we talk about in The Social Dilemma, they talk about how Facebook, at the time, that was what Social Media was, Social Dilemma was about, how Facebook was causing social derision. We know that Fox News had a much bigger impact

• 40:51Speaker 01

  on changing people's opinions than Facebook did during previous elections. So what I think we need to do is to refocus the lens to say, "Wait a minute. How do we make sure that people are getting the right media diet, not just on social media? At least on social media, we can tweak the algorithms, right? Mark Zuckerberg and other people, you know, if there was regulation as such, or even if he just wanted to keep people engaged, it turns out that giving an occasional dose of someone else's opinion that's not yours in the social media feed can actually increase engagement. Whereas if you're watching Fox News, you are only getting one side of the story all day long, or MSNBC, or whoever else you want. So in a way, social media has the opportunity to give a more diverse opinion set if we so designed it, whereas our older technologies, they're only spouting

• 41:36Speaker 01

  the same perspective. And so I think we need to be a little bit skeptical about old media, legacy media telling us that new media is so bad for us and when they're not looking at themselves in the mirror.

• 41:46Mark Manson?

  I feel like social media is similar to to do lists, which is the more conscious you are as you use them, the better it gets, the more benefit it gets. Like, do you like that? Do you like that connection there? Do you? No? Not good? Nir liked it, Drew. Nir likes my hair brain theories. All right, we'll be right back.

• 42:13Mark Manson?

  All right, we're back. You know, during the break, I was thinking, Drew, hear me out here. We have a social network that is a to do list.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 42:21Mark Manson?

  And we can share to do lists.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  The eighth circle of hell.

• 42:24Mark Manson?

  You can see each other's to do list.

• 42:26Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 42:27Mark Manson?

  Are you in? Do you want to?

• 42:28Speaker 02

  I'm out.

• 42:29Mark Manson?

  Nir, do you want to invest in my to do list?

• 42:30Speaker 02

  Nir, you go ahead. I'm out.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  I want to see the pitch deck first.

• 42:37Mark Manson?

  All right, we've got, we've got some audience questions. Nir is going to join us and help us answer them. What do we have first, Drew?

• 42:44Speaker 02

  We do. This one comes from Kartiki, I think I'm saying that right, from YouTube, who asks, how do I get myself to do the things that I know I should do? We get some variation of this question all the time. We know what we should do. We have all the information. Why don't we do it?

• 43:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, this is the question that drove the writing of this book as well as my research for the past decade and a half here is all about this question. This is a fascinating question. In fact, Plato asked this question, the Greek philosopher 2,500 years ago. He called it akrasia, the tendency to do things against our better interest. It is such a good question. Why is it that despite knowing what to do, we don't fricking do it? And today, you know, you can't argue you don't know what to do. Maybe, you know, our grandparents could say, well, I don't know how to lose weight because I don't have access to that information. I don't know how to start a business. Today, you know, right? And if you don't know, Google it. All the information is right there. The problem today is that, not that we don't know what to do, it's that we don't know how to get out of our own way. We don't know how to stop getting distracted.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  So the answer is to use these four strategies in concert. Number one, master. The internal triggers, you need to have a plan in place so that when you feel bored, lonesome, indecisive, fatigued, uncertain, you know what to do with that sensation as opposed to what most people do is escape, right? I can't deal with this discomfort. Let me scroll something or click something or smoke something as opposed to, wait a minute, let me deal with this discomfort. Because what high performers do, what we find in studies, is that high performers, they feel the same way the rest of us do. They also get bored and lonesome or indecisive. They feel the same way, but they know what to do with that feeling. And high performers will use that discomfort. They will use those internal triggers as rocket fuel to propel them towards

• 44:26Speaker 01

  traction rather than trying to escape it with distraction. So that's the first and most important step. You have to have a tool ready to go to deal with that discomfort. And there's about a dozen of those different tools in my book. The second step, make time for traction. You've got to have that calendar so that you know, okay, I'm going to work on that task without distraction. And the important thing here is, when you use a to-do list, back to railing on to-do list, Mark. No. When you use a to-do list, it's all about checking cute little boxes, right? That becomes the metric of success. I'm going to check cute little boxes. That's what Mark likes. That's what I used to do. It's so satisfying. It's so satisfying. I used to do that too. I'll go even deeper. I'll expose this. I used to write things in

• 45:05Speaker 01

  my to-do list after I had done them, just for the joy of coming up. How stupid is that, right? So that is the wrong metric of success. The right metric of success is not, did I check off a cute little box? Because you know what you're going to do. You're going to do the easy stuff, the urgent stuff. Rather, the right metric of success is, did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction? That's it. That's it. Not, did I finish? This is really important. Not, did I finish? But did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction? Mark, this is how you wrote your second book and how I finished Indistractable. Remember, we sat down together, we said, "All right, we're gonna write for 45 minutes, and we're not gonna stop until the clock rings."

• 45:49Speaker 01

  That's all that matters. It wasn't about finishing, it was about working without distraction, because then, for the first time, you'll be able to say to yourself, "Okay, I've got this much to do, how much did I accomplish in this period of time when I worked without distraction?" And then you can plan out how long the rest of the task will take you. As opposed to a person who just uses a to-do list, they start on a task for five minutes, they start working on it, "Oh, let me just check email for a quick minute, oh, I could use a cup of coffee, and oh, Janet's at the water cooler, hey Janet, okay, what was I working on again? I totally forgot." And so they take way longer to finish a task, because they have no idea how long it takes to finish. And we know that, on average, people take three times longer to finish a task than they estimate. This is why, because they don't have this feedback loop on how long things take. You can only do that with time boxing.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  So that's the third step, the second step, sorry. The third step is to hack back the external triggers, where we talk about how to clear all those pings, dings, and rings. That's kinda kindergarten stuff, that doesn't take too much time, but still important. What's more important are all those stupid meetings you didn't need to go to, that are nothing more than distraction, emails that didn't need to be sent and received. We can go through each and every one of those as well, to hack back the external triggers. And then, as the last line of defense, that's when we use these pacts, where we have this pre-commitment that keeps us on track. So it's really about using those four strategies in concert.

• 47:05Mark Manson?

  I do have a comment about the time versus... Because, you know, as somebody who's written multiple books, I've struggled both ways with this, right? Like, you can set the task, which is like, "I'm gonna write 1,500 words today," and the flaw of that is that you quickly find yourself just writing a bunch of shitty words that aren't usable, so that you can hit your metric and say you're done for the day. From there, I switched to what you just described, which is like, okay, I'm gonna write for three hours today. And it doesn't, if I do 1,500 words, or 500 words, or 3,000 words, it doesn't matter. As long as I write for three hours today. The flaw of that is that I can

• 47:46Mark Manson?

  just sit there and like, kind of half-ass an hour or two of it, and say I did three hours. And so, I've struggled with this, and I'm being very genuine here. Like, I've struggled with this, I've kind of come to the conclusion that some tasks are more suited towards certain metrics than others. Like, there are some tasks that like, like, you either pay your electric bill, or you don't. Like, there's no, I'm gonna time-box 20 minutes to pay my electric. It's like, no, you just pay your fucking electric bill, right? Like, it's a very yes or no binary thing. Whereas there are other, you know, say like, researching something, or brainstorming, like, there's theoretically, you could, you could research

• 48:30Mark Manson?

  something infinitely, right? So you have to put a time limit on it. So, this isn't, this is less of a question, and more of just like, a little bit of a digging further into this topic of, I've, I've come to the conclusion over the years, that some tasks, some things are more well-suited towards some measurements of productivity than others. And I also believe that some, like, people's personalities tend towards, like, like, when I've experimented with time-boxing, I just look at my calendar, and I get so fucking stressed, like, instantly. And I, I feel, it feels so inflexible, and so rigid, and, and like, anything that goes

• 49:10Mark Manson?

  over, or under, or I'm late to, like, it feels like a failure, that it's, it's like, I need a little bit more, like, flexibility in my life. So it's like, I do this, this, I do a combo of like, calendar plus to-do list, but I don't, I'm not too religious about either one of them. I kind of like, they live in harmony. But anyway.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  Well, no, so, so the good news is, the good news is, that, You can plan for this flexibility. The problem is that a lot of people let perfect be the enemy of good. And we know that time boxing and using what's called setting an implementation intention, just a fancy way of saying, planning out what you're gonna do and when you're gonna do it. We know it works. I mean, study after study after study have shown this. The thing is, people, very common trap, they make it overly rigid. And they think that the right mindset is to be a drill sergeant. You have to do this, and then you have to do this. And that becomes exhausting. The right mindset is not to be a drill sergeant. It's to be a scientist. What is the job of a scientist? The job of a scientist is to make a hypothesis, run an experiment, look at the results, and then run new experiments based on those results.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  So when you make a time box calendar, in the day, it's set. It's locked and loaded. But there's no rule that says you can't change your calendar for the next day, or the next day, or the day after that. So right off the bat, I know, Mark, anybody who tells me, "I'm gonna do three hours of writing in my schedule," no way. I don't know anybody who can do. We've both written bestselling books. I don't know anybody who can write for three hours. So what you will learn, what I would definitely learn, is if I try, and I've done this, where I said, "Okay, I'm gonna write for," I was never that ambitious, I said, "two hours." And then after two hours, I'm like, "Oh, my God, I am, this is not working out. This is miserable." Okay, well, then tomorrow, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna do a 30-minute time box, schedule a 15-minute break, and then do another 30-minute time box. And that works out much, much better for me.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  So that experimentation is one thing that makes it much easier to follow that schedule. The second thing is that you can actually plan time for spontaneity, right? People say, "Well, what if somebody needs me? What if I, what if I'm not sure, you know, what I wanna do?" That's fine. So for example, with my daughter, we, you know, it's, we have time every weekend. We have a big three-hour block of time, and we call it planned spontaneity. We don't know what we're gonna do together. Maybe we'll go to the park, maybe we'll get some ice cream. I don't know what we're gonna do. But I know what I will not be doing. I will not be checking social media. I will not be taking work calls, because I've scheduled that time for someone I love very much. So that is a huge benefit of time boxing, is that you know you have scheduled out your values in advance. You know, when it comes to spending time with people you love, in my calendar, taking

• 51:41Speaker 01

  care of my body, exercising, you know, it's 46, I'm in the best shape of my life. Not because I have good genes or because I'm particularly athletic, but because I do what I say I'm going to do. So the part of the problem is that people get so scared about scheduling their day, they don't even try it. As opposed to the idea is you're constantly asking yourself week after week, how do I make my schedule easier to follow? If something was too hard to do, well, then pare it down for the next day or make adjustments, move it around. But the idea is that if you don't plan that time, you look back and say, what the heck was I doing? Right? I was I was doing all this other junk as opposed to the stuff that's really important to me and my values.

• 52:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I think the the the commonality here, I've always said that productivity is personal. And I think what I mean by that is all these things that we're talking about, they're tools, right? And every tool is like the optimal use of time boxing for you is going to be different than it is for me. And it's going to be different than it is for Drew. And the same thing, any lists that we make or any email organization inbox organization that we do, like everything, the optimal point is always going to look different for everybody. And and so I think it's there's a certain amount of flexibility that has to be brought to whatever tool you choose to use. And I think that gets lost a lot. Like whenever I see productivity advice online, it's just like it gets lost. People get very religious about it.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  More particular tool. Oh, you have to use this software and only this software. That's ridiculous. There is no magic tool, right? It is about iterating and adapting.

• 53:06Mark Manson?

  Everybody's different. And and to your point, your original point is like everybody's internal triggers are different, right? Your productivity system and whatever tools you use and the way ways you use them should be catered to towards your personality, your particular internal emotional triggers, the your weak points and strong points, etc.

• 53:29Speaker 02

  The original question was, how do I get myself to do the things that I know I should do? What if we change that slightly? Would you change your answer if it were, how do I get myself to feel like doing the things I should do? Isn't that the real question? Isn't that the real question? So, you know, we have all these strategies and these tools and these, all of this. The real question is, why do I not feel like doing the things I know I should do? Right? Would you change your answer? Or is this also the same recipe?

• 53:56Speaker 01

  It's a great point, and I don't, I don't think that we know, frankly. I mean, we have some, some approaches, uh, which I think have some real disadvantages. For example, you hear people saying a lot about, well, just get into flow. Right? Just, just make it into flow. Or, or even better, make it into a habit. Right? You know, habit has become code for, I know I should, but I don't wanna.

• 54:17Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Right? Like, I wanna get into an exercise habit. I hate frickin' exercising, but if I create a habit, I'll have this, this autopilot button that will just make it easy to do. Uh, I don't like writing, but I know I really want to write a novel. And so can I just turn that into a habit? Well, no, you can't, right? Because what's the definition of a habit? The definition of a habit is the impulse to do a behavior with little or no conscious thought. How exactly do you write with little or no conscious thought? That doesn't sound like something that's gonna be actually very readable. Or if you go to the gym and you're exercising with little or no conscious thought, you're not gonna beat any PRs. You're not gonna get much stronger. It requires effort. It requires hard work. So part of, you know, if you can find an activity that gets you into flow and is, and, and is fun, and you can turn into a habit, wonderful. Do it.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  How exactly do I do my taxes in flow? I don't, how do I do my taxes habitual? It sucks. It's no fun. And so that's the kind of behavior that people get distracted from. Nobody gets distracted from doing the stuff they like. That's easy. That's, you can get into flow when it comes to stuff you like doing. It's the hard stuff you don't like doing. But, of course, pretty much everything worth having in life is on the other side of discomfort. And so that's where we need a different approach. We don't need to try and, uh, ignore the discomfort, but rather we want to lean into that discomfort to know how to deal with it so that we can use it as traction, to propel us towards traction, rather than trying to escape it all the time with distractions. So the problem with, I think, some of these strategies that tell us to make the thing fun, right?

• 55:48Speaker 01

  To add the spoonful of sugar, is that When that doesn't work, when that invariably fails and it's hard and uncomfortable, people start thinking, "Well, they're messed up," right? That there's something broken about them. There's nothing broken about them. It's this stupid technique, that this lie, that everything can be fun. No, some work is gonna be hard. And so, the strategy should be to deal with that pain. As I said, time management is pain management and expecting it to be difficult. Let me give you one concrete example, so everybody can take away. So, when I'm writing, and this is, writing is always hard work, right? I've written two books, I've written countless articles. It's always hard. All I want to do when I'm writing is go watch one of Mark's videos on YouTube, or go do something else, right? Go check email. That's all I want to do when I'm writing.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  Or do research. I need to do research, right? Which is just more procrastination. So, what I've implemented now is a technique that comes from acceptance and commitment therapy, which is called the 10-minute rule. The 10-minute rule acknowledges that these uncomfortable internal triggers, they crest and they subside. But that's not how we feel them. In the moment, we think it's always gonna be there, right? When you're bored, "Oh, I'm always gonna be bored." When I'm uncertain, "Oh, I'm always gonna be uncertain." When I'm anxious, "I'm always gonna be anxious." That's not the case. That emotions come and go. And so, what acceptance and commitment therapy teaches is that if you can ride that urge, like a surfer on a surfboard, for just a few minutes, that emotion will crest and subside. So, here's what I do. So, when I feel that urge, and this comes back to identifying, what is that feeling,

• 57:18Speaker 01

  right? Is it boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty? If I can name it, and then just take a minute, and I do what's called the 10-minute rule, I set a timer for 10 minutes, I take a deep breath, and now I have a choice to make. I can either get back to the task at hand whenever I'm ready, or I can use these techniques to surf the urge. And one of the techniques that I use to surf the urge is a mantra. And so, my mantra, you can steal it, you can borrow it, you can make up your own. My mantra, when I feel this urge, is to tell myself...

• 57:49Speaker 01

  This is what it feels like to get better. This is what it feels like to get better. And I'm acknowledging that it's not supposed to be easy, that if it was easy, everyone would do it. And so I'm not trying to escape that discomfort. I'm leaning into the discomfort by saying, yeah, bring it on discomfort. That's part of the process. And what I find is that if I just repeat that mantra and I try and just wait for 10 minutes until I can give into that distraction, until that alarm rings, what I find is that nine times out of 10, way before the 10 minutes are up, I'm back to the task at hand. And so what you're doing over time is that you're increasing your self-efficacy. If you're saying, hey, I'm just going to work on this task for 10 minutes. Okay, I'm not going to check my phone for 10 minutes. And if that's too long, make it five minutes, whatever it is. But over time, the five-minute rule becomes a 10-minute rule, becomes a 15-minute rule. And what you're doing is building your agency.

• 58:34Speaker 01

  Remember that sense of control that we talked about earlier that's so important? That becomes your control valve is, yeah, these things don't control me. I control them. I can wait 10, 15 minutes until I decide to do something else.

• 58:45Mark Manson?

  Viewing that pain management, as you put it, as it's a skill that can be built and developed, it's a muscle that you grow over time through consciously increasing it.

• 58:55Speaker 02

  We have a wisdom of the week.

• 58:57Mark Manson?

  Do we have a wisdom of the week?

• 58:57Speaker 02

  We do have a wisdom of the week. It's by Nir Eyal, actually.

• 59:01Mark Manson?

  Wait, I thought of one, actually, while he was talking.

• 59:06Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 59:07Mark Manson?

  And it actually fits perfectly, given one of the things that he said.

• 59:11Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 59:11Mark Manson?

  So Blaise Pascal once said, "All of humanity's problems stem from people's inability to sit in a room quietly alone."

• 59:19Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. That's pretty good. You're so unimpressed. I was so excited about that. Because I'm so impressed by the one I have for Nir said in one of his books.

• 59:32Mark Manson?

  All right, say Nir's and then we'll let the audience decide which one's better. Nir or Pascal?

• 59:36Speaker 02

  "The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity." I thought that was a pretty good one.

• 59:42Speaker 01

  Wait, but that's not even my quote. That's actually Dorothy Parker.

• 59:45Speaker 02

  Oh, that's Dorothy Parker.

• 59:49Mark Manson?

  I'm pretty sure that was Abraham Lincoln and then before that it was Einstein. Yeah, before before Lincoln.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  Can I add one more? Let's add one more.

• 59:58Mark Manson?

  Yeah, please, please. Save this, please.

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  It is a good one. So Poila Koila said, "A mistake repeated more than once is a decision."

• 1:00:06Mark Manson?

  I like that.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  Right? That's a good. So the point here is that like, okay, let's say social media is is rotting our brains. Let's say all the critics are right. Okay, fine. Let's give it to them. And now what? Right? How many times do we say, "God damn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok," before we frickin' do something about it? If you're not doing anything about it, you're making a decision to constantly be distracted. Whereas an indistractable person says, "Uh-uh. You got me once. You're not gonna get me again."

• 1:00:29Mark Manson?

  Well said. Nir, it's been a pleasure, sir. Thank you so much for coming on.

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  My pleasure.

• 1:00:34Mark Manson?

  You're so well spoken. You're so smart. I miss you, dude. Like, I hope one day you you come back. I hope one day I see you again.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  Yes, I know. We had a lot of fun together. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. I'm sure I'll be in L.A. soon, or hopefully you come out to Singapore and visit. And yeah, great to see you as always. Miss you, buddy.

• 1:00:53Mark Manson?

  Yeah, you too, man. You too. All right. Thank you, Nir. Thank you, Nir. Talk to you soon.

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  My pleasure. Thanks, guys. Take care.

• 1:01:00Mark Manson?

  The Subtle Art of Not Getting a Fuck podcast is produced by Drew Burney, edited by Andrew Nishimura, Jessica Choy is our videographer and sound engineer. Thank you for listening, and we will see you next week.