Indistractable | How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life with Nir Eyal

Audio Transcription

Speaker 1:
On today’s show, we interview the bestselling author, the behavior designer, and the beautiful man who’s been asked to speak on the campus of the Stanford school of business and design. Today’s guest has successfully sold to technology companies since 2003 today’s guest is kind of a big deal. His name is Nir Eyal and on today’s show he’s going to teach us how to become in distractible. It’s not even actually a word. Yeah, that’s the word. He made up the word in distractible. On today’s show, he’s going to teach us how to gain control of our attention so that we can choose and design the life that we want to live. So this is a great place to talk about what is distraction. The best of it, understand what distraction is, is to understand what distraction is and not so the opposite of distraction. If you ask most people what’s the opposite of distraction?

Speaker 1:
Most people say it’s focus, right? The opposite. Distractions, focus, that’s offense. The opposite of distraction is non focus. The opposite of distraction is traction. Then if you look at the origin of both words, they both come from the same Latin root [inaudible], which means to pull and you’ll notice they both end in the same six letters, a CTI when that spells action. So traction is any action that pulls you towards what you want, things that you do with intent. On today’s show, he explains why email is killing your ability to get things done. Now I’m going to stay focused here, wholly going to concentrate. I’m going to do what I said I’m going to do stop procrastinating. Here I go, I’m going to get to work. But first let me check email, right? Let me just do that one quick thing on my to do list cause it feels good to just, you know, to get the momentum going, right?

Speaker 1:
Here’s the thing, by definition, any time, boy not doing what you said you would do that a distraction near also shares on today’s show, why super successful people have a calendar and they actually block out time to implement their calendar while the rest of the world simply does not. In the five years it took me to write this book. I talked with hundreds of people and there was one very surprising practice that everyone I talked to who didn’t struggle with distraction did and everyone who did struggle with distraction did not do, and that practice was to keep a well-defined schedule and it turns out that two thirds of Americans don’t keep any sort of schedule whatsoever. And even the one third who do 99% of them don’t keep it properly.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Thrive nation on today’s show,

Speaker 3:
our guests come from near and far Nir Eyall. How are you sir?

Nir Eyal:
I’m doing great. Thanks so much for having me.

Speaker 3:
Hey, real quick, let’s start with your website domain. It’s the most clever domain of all time. Can you tell the listeners what your website domain is so they can check you out while they’re listening?

Speaker 5:
[inaudible]

Nir Eyal:
sure. It’s near and far.com, but Nir Eyal spelled like my first name. I have a very unusual first name. Uh, and I are, and when I was growing up or what are the, the, uh, things that kids make fun of me for as my unusual name and they say near like me or far. And then I said, you know what, that’s kind of catchy. Then people will remember that if I turned that into my domain. So that’s my domain. It’s near and far and near spelling my first name and I are,

Speaker 3:
do you have any brothers and sisters?

Nir Eyal:
I do. I have two older brothers.

Speaker 3:
Are there names like Bobby and Carl or something like [inaudible]?

Nir Eyal:
Exactly. Jim. Bob [inaudible].

Speaker 3:
Okay. So now you, uh, are a, you taught classes at Stanford, Stanford business school. Um, I first heard about you when you wrote the book hooked, which is really, some people in silicone, silicone Valley have referred to it as kind of like the Bible of creating some of the technology we see today. Um, you’ve also sold to technology companies. You’ve, you’ve been a busy guy, but for the listeners out there that maybe aren’t super familiar with your background, could you share, um, kind of where you started and how you became a bestselling author?

Nir Eyal:
Sure. So I want you to call a behavioral designer. So I help companies build habit forming products for good. So I’ve worked with companies like a Kahoot, the world’s largest educational software to get kids hooked on to in classroom learning. I’ve worked with, uh, the New York times to get people hooked to read the news. Uh, the book has been used by companies like fit bod to get people hooked, exercising in the gym. Uh, so basically I studied the psychology of how products can build healthy habits and people’s lives and that’s what I taught at Stanford for many years. And then more recently I decided to look at the flip side of the fact that, you know, sometimes products are so well designed that sometimes we want to over use them and sometimes they become quite distracting. And so that’s what indestructable is all about. I, I tell people the Achilles heel of how to put distracting things in their place, not just our technology. Of course, people think about how distracting Facebook and Twitter and email and the AI, Oh, and in the news all are these days, but all sorts of distractions, right? Anytime we don’t do what we say we’re going to do, why don’t we do those things? And so what I want to do is to help people, uh, get out from under those distractions so that they can control their attention and choose their life.

Speaker 3:
No, I know some of our listeners out there are believers in the Judeo Christian faith and some are not. But if it’s okay, I’d like to start off at the beginning, uh, with, with Adam and Eve. We’re going old school here. Okay. So here we go. Adam and Eve was Adam and Eve. My understanding is that Adam knew clearly do not eat from this tree. He knew it. You do not eat from this tree, but yet he got distracted, you know, and as the Bible tells us, Satan, you know, came, just comes down and tricks Eve. And the next thing you know, they’re, you know, they’re, they’re, they’re distracted. They forgot their purpose. Why do people get distracted?

Nir Eyal:
So this is a great place to talk about what is distraction. The best way to understand what distraction is, is to understand what distraction is not. So the opposite of distraction. If you ask most people thinking about it for a minute, what’s the opposite of distraction? Most people say it’s focus, right? The opposite of distraction is focused not so fast. The opposite of distraction is not focused. The opposite of distraction is traction. And if you look at the origin of both words, they both come from the same Latin root [inaudible], which means to pull. And you’ll notice they both end in the same six letters, a CTI way. And that spells action. So traction is any action that pulls you towards what you want, things that you do with intent. Now the opposite of traction is distraction. Any action that pulls you away from what you plan to do, anything that you are not doing with intent.

Nir Eyal:
So this is really important for two reasons. Number one, anything can be a distraction. Okay. So see if this rings a bell. So before I started this line of research, I used to sit down on my desk and I would say, okay, now I’m going to stay focused, totally going to concentrate. I’m going to do what I said I’m going to do. I’m gonna stop procrastinating. Here I go, I’m going to get to work. But first let me check email, right? Let me just do that one quick thing on my to do list cause it feels good to just, you know, get some momentum going, right? Here’s the thing, by definition, anytime you are not doing what you said you would do, that is a distraction. And I argue that these simple distractions that we think are just like, you know what? Let me just do that quick email.

Nir Eyal:
Let me just do that quick thing real quick. That turns out to be a much more pernicious form of distraction. It’s much worse than let’s say you play candy crush, check Facebook or watch a YouTube video. You know you’re slacking off at work if you’re using those things, right? But when you check email instead of working on that big project, you are letting distraction trick you kind of like say you said earlier, trick you into prioritizing the urgent at the expense of the important. So anything can become a distraction and conversely anything can become traction. So it’s not about exactly what you do. So a lot of you don’t have a lot of tech critics that are, you know, all chicken little about, Oh, technology is melting your brain. It’s addicting. Everyone that’s evil, this and that, that’s rubbish. The scientific evidence doesn’t show that it does any of this bad stuff if you use it according to your schedule, not the tech companies.

Nir Eyal:
So there’s nothing wrong with playing a video game or enjoying a football game on TV or, or going on Facebook or YouTube. These tools are wonderful as long as you use them with intent, as long as you plan when to use them. So okay, now we have two parts of this model. You’ve got traction and distraction. Got it. Now the question to answer what you asked earlier about, well why do we get distracted in the first place? We have to understand what prompt us to traction or distraction. Two things. We have external triggers, which are the pains, the dings, the rains, all of these things in our outside environment that leads us towards distraction. We’ll get back in a minute to how what you can do about those external triggers. That’s where most people tend to blame. They tend to blame their lack or some kind of pain or day.

Nir Eyal:
That certainly can lead us to distraction. But to my surprise, it is not the leading cause of distraction. The leading cause of distraction is not what is going on outside of us, but rather what is happening from within that 2,500 years ago, believe it or not, Plato talked about this very same product problem that played out of the philosopher 2,500 years before the iPhone talked about, boy, isn’t the world such a distracting place these days, so this is not any problem. And he asked this very important question of why is it that despite knowing what to do, we don’t do it right? Why don’t we do things against our better interests. Things that you know you should do but you don’t do it. And you know, think about it. Some Plato, he didn’t have Google 2,500 years ago. You know we have no excuse. It used to be that you could say, I don’t know how to lose weight.

Nir Eyal:
I don’t know how to eat right. I don’t know how to do be better at my job. I don’t know how to have a better relationship, but this isn’t it in this day and age. Google it, just Google it. It’s all there. And frankly, this is common sense who doesn’t basically know how to have a better relationship, be fully present with people, how to be better at your job, do the work, especially the stuff that people, other people don’t want to do. Lose weight. Come on. Seriously. Does anybody really not know how to do these things? The problem is not that we don’t know. The problem is that we can’t stop getting distracted from doing the things we ourselves know we should do. Why? And wouldn’t it be a superpower if we could just do what we said we are going to do. So this is really the meat and potatoes here.

Nir Eyal:
This is where we have to start. Why don’t we do the things we say we should? And so their answer to Plato’s 2,500 year old question of why don’t we do things against our better interests is that the real reason we get distracted is because of what we call the internal triggers. Internal triggers are uncomfortable, emotional States that we seek to escape from, and in fact, everything you do, you do for one reason only. Now most people say, okay, well why do, why do we do we do? They think there’s two reasons. Keratin sticks, pain and pleasure, right? Then everything we do is about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. This is what Bentham and Freud called the pleasure principle. It turns out that’s not true. Everything you do, you do for only one reason. That is the desire to escape discomfort.

Nir Eyal:
Everything you do, even the pursuit of pleasurable sensations is about the desire to escape. Discover. Think about this for a second. Physiologically. Okay, so if you are cold, the brain says, Oh, this is uncomfortable. Put on a jacket. If you’re hungry, the brain says, Oh, these hunger pains don’t feel good, you should eat. So everything we do physiologically is about the desire to escape discomfort. The same holds true psychologically. When your lonely check Facebook, when you’re uncertain, Google, when you’re bored, check stock prices, sports scores, the news, Pinterest, Reddit, all of these products and services cater to these uncomfortable internal triggers, so that means the big summer here to answer your question, took me awhile, but here we go. The answer to why we do everything we do is we do it to escape discomfort, which therefore means that time management is pain management. That any other technique you use, well, I don’t care what guru you listen to, what productivity hacks, what productivity books you’ve you’ve read. None of that stuff works unless first and foremost, we address this internal trigger, this desire to escape discomfort, which is the root cause of all procrastination and distraction. It’s not a character flaw. It’s our inability to cope with discomfort. In a helpful rather than harmful manner.

Speaker 3:
Let’s, ah, there’s a Napoleon Hill quote that I’d like to read, read to you here. Um, that, uh, Napoleon Hill, the famous self-help author back in the day, he once wrote, he said, the capacity to surmount certain, he says, the capacity to surmount failure without being discouraged is the chief asset of every person who attains outstanding success in any calling. The, the, the capacity to surmount failure without being discouraged as the chief asset of everyone, every person who attains outstanding success at any calling. I agree with that. And I would like to know in your new book that you’ve wrote written here in distractible, how to control your attention and choose your life. How can our listeners learn how to surmount a short term failure or setback? Because I know like when I sit down to write a book, the one thing I don’t want to do is as soon as I sit down is write the book.

Speaker 3:
And so I encourage myself, I say motivational phrases like, clay, would you like a nice warm glass of shut the hell up? And I say, yes, I do want a glass of shut the hell up. And then I sit down and write and my wife will come down and she will hear me talking to myself and she’s like, what did you just say? I offered my self a nice warm glass of shut the hell up. Or I have little things. I have little games I play. I’m not going to leave this room until I’ve written this book or two. I’ve written this chapter or so for the people out there that are struggling to kind of coach themselves through this, you know, the insurmountable failure that happens sometimes. Give us the tips that are in the book. Helpless.

Nir Eyal:
Yeah. Yeah. So look, tips and tactics are cheap. The tactics are what you do. Strategy is why you do it. You know, I’m going to give you a link in the show notes for where you can get lots of more tips and tricks than you can ever use, right? That that stuff is easy. You know, this app or this little trick or this life hack. What’s more important is the strategy. I want to get the picture in your brain so that when the time comes and you say, darn it, why am I not doing what I said I’m going to do? You can look at these four basic strategies cause there’s only four steps to becoming an distractible. Step number one is to master the internal triggers, master the internal trigger to understand mastering the internal triggers to understand where is the source of discomfort and then use it to harness it to lead us towards traction rather than distraction.

Nir Eyal:
You see there’s a myth out there. I think that is perpetuated frankly by the self help industry that we are told. If you’re not happy all the time, how many books do we read with happy in the title that if you’re not happy all the time, if you’re not contented, if you’re not feeling great all the time, something’s wrong with you, you probably need some kind of pill, right? Something’s, something’s dysfunctional. That’s for the vast majority of people book that. If you think about it, the species is not designed to be perpetually happy. Quite the opposite. We’re designed to be perpetually perturbed. If there was ever a group of homo sapiens who were happy and satisfied all the time, our ancestors probably killed an eight though, right? That would not be a good trait. You want dissatisfaction to drive you forward to keep you hunting and creating, inventing, striving, improving your lot in life.

Nir Eyal:
So what I want people to remember is that feeling bad is not bad. Okay? It’s human, it’s normal. And in fact it’s the fuel that can drive us forward. We have to feel discomfort in order to get us to do anything and everything in life. It’s about how do we deal with that discomfort. Do we escape it with booze, news, Facebook, football? Do we try and get our minds out of current reality or do we use it as the rocket fuel to propel us towards traction? Use that discomfort to move you ahead. And I tell you exactly the tactics for how to do that. But that’s step one. Let me go through the four steps and then we can dive deeper into any one of these that peak your interest. So that’s number one. So it’s master the internal triggers. Step two is about making time for traction, making time for traction.

Nir Eyal:
In the five years it took me to write this book, I talked with hundreds of people and there was one very surprising practice that everyone I talked to who didn’t struggle with distraction did. And everyone who did struggle with distraction did not do. And that practice was to keep a well-defined schedule. And it turns out that two thirds of Americans don’t keep any sort of schedule whatsoever. And even the one-third who do, 99% of them don’t keep it properly. You know, I would speak to people who struggle with distraction and they would tell me about how distracted they were and how they couldn’t get anything done. It seemed like their kids want this and their spouse wants that. And you see what happened in the news today and this happened on Twitter and my boss, I just can’t get anything done. And then I would say, well what did you plan to do with your time?

Nir Eyal:
And they’d say, well look, look at my to do list. Look at all these things I have to do that I didn’t get done. I said, no, you didn’t hear the question. I asked, what did you plan to do with your time? Show me her calendar and they’d kind of take, she pays, she sheepishly take out their phone and they’d show me their schedule. Let me tell ya, it was always blank. Maybe there’s a dentist appointment or meeting on there, but for the vast majority of the day it was blank. So here’s the rule. Here’s what I want you to remember. Listen super carefully. You cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. You can’t call something a distraction unless you know what I distracted you from. If there’s lots of white space in your day, I have no sympathy, right? Everything’s going to distract you. The news, the stock market scores.

Speaker 3:
I have a question for you, mr Neer, because I think somebody out there would get, get mad at me if I didn’t ask you this. You know, I’m, I’m like a slave to our, to our, to our listeners here, right? This is what they want. I know they want me to ask this because I’ve met so many of them in our conferences. For me personally, right, right now I’m calling you at one. Uh, it’s one 18 central. We’re on the call, you’re on the call, I’m on the call, I’m mentally present. You’re mentally present. It’s crazy. These, this idea that you’re focused on focused, we’re all focused, which means my phone is off, right? So my phone is off right now and I don’t feel bad about it. I do not feel bad about it. But somebody out there is going, okay, I’m buying into the system.

Speaker 3:
I’m going to make a calendar. I’m going to be intentional. But they’re partnered with somebody, you know, whether it’s a relationship partner or a business partner who doesn’t respect the one hour they have blocked off to interview Berge, you know, Najarian or to interview Nir Eyal or to interview Wolfgang puck or whoever we may have on our show. They don’t respect this. So what would you say, cause luckily my wife does respect it and my employees do respect it. But what tip would you have for somebody who’s made the calendar and that people around them just don’t seem to respect it?

Nir Eyal:
It’s a really great point because look, I’m not naive enough to say that just because you’re in distractible, everyone around you will be in distractible. That’s just not the case. So you know, half of the book is about what you personally can do. The other half of the book is what do we do in these various environments and people we interact with. So there’s a big old section on how to raise indestructable kids, how to have indestructible relationships and how to build an indestructible workplace. And so here’s the big takeaway for the section on how to build an indestructible workplace is that the problem of distraction in the workplace is a symptom of cultural dysfunction. Distraction is a symptom of cultural dysfunction because if you can’t talk about this problem of distraction, I got news for you. You got all kinds of other distractions, not your key problem.

Nir Eyal:
The key problem is that you can’t talk about this problem. Cause here’s the thing. Nobody likes working with constant distraction. Nobody’s at their best. And we all know this. So if you can’t talk about this problem and tackle it, the real problem is that you can’t talk about the problem. And when people sit down together without fear of getting fired. In this section of the book, I talk about psychological safety, this well established research that shows that one of the, the most cancerous part of the modern American workplace is that so many people work in places where they can’t raise their hand and say, Oh, something’s not working out here and we should talk about this. And if you look at every case of corporate malfeasance, whether it’s the Boeing seven 37 max disaster all the way back to Enron and Tyco, every single company where CDs massive disasters, the copra is always the same thing.

Nir Eyal:
It’s not the people per se, it’s that the people who knew about the problem were told to shut up. We’re told to sit down and not talk about this problem. That’s the problem. And when people can’t, so the solution of course is to give people the psychological safety to talk about this problem. And it turns out that when people do this, so I profile in the book Boston consulting group who I know from personal experience, I used to work there, they used to have a very hard charging 24 seven workplace culture where people were always expected to be on all the time and they had, because of result of this, they have very high employee turnover. And I was one of those employees that left because it was just too much, you know, to to this culture was not sustainable today, it’s consistently ranked by the employees on Glassdoor as one of America’s top places to work. And they’ve dramatically reduced employee turnover because they gave people the opportunity to talk about this problem in a regular meeting, in a regular session. So that changed everything. So it’s not about adopting somebody else’s rules. I see a lot of companies do this. Let’s do a meeting free Fridays or no email Wednesdays. That never works because that’s not the real problem. The real problem is that people can’t talk about the problem and once they talk about the problem, they can start implementing these tactics for themselves.

Speaker 3:
You, you, um, are, are the inventor of the word indestructable by the way, and I, I’d like to ask you about this a little bit here. Uh, going back to the beginning of the book, um, you are a kind of a what a writing partner or a writing, a buddy of Mark Manson, the guy who wrote the subtle art of not giving an F who we just interviewed on the show, he’s monster bestselling author. You guys are writing buddies of, I understand. They’re like, well, you guys actually get together in one room and write at the same time it, am I getting that right?

Nir Eyal:
That’s right. That’s right. And so that, that’s actually one of the techniques that I talk about in the book. It’s actually a step for a, let me get back to that actually because it has a place in the model. Step number three, which you asked about earlier that I didn’t get to is about hacking back hacking back external triggers. Because you know, this has to do with the pain and the dings, the rains, all of these things in our outside environment, including it turns out the number one source of distraction in the modern American workplace is not the phone, it’s not the computer. The number one source of distraction is other people. 80% of survey respondents, right? You probably saw that one coming. 80% of survey respondents say the number one source of distraction, particularly for who work in open floor plan offices is other people.

Nir Eyal:
And so what do we do about this? Right? And so I tell you how to hack back all of these external triggers. I tell you how to hack back your phone, your computer Slack meetings, uh, real life meetings, uh, and of course the open floor plan office. And so let me just give you a taste of what to do here. Inside every copy of the book is what’s called a screen sign. It’s a piece of card stock is big red piece of paper that you fold into thirds and you put it on your computer monitor. This goes back to your question of what do I do if I’m in distractible, but other people keep distracting me? Well, if you put this on your computer monitor and people have started using this all over the world, now I get pictures from people every day using this and it works like a charm.

Nir Eyal:
You put this, this big honkin red sign that says I’m indestructible at the moment, please come back later. Then you don’t use this all day. You don’t want to be antisocial, but for that time in your day when you need some time to think, you need some time to focus. You put this on your computer monitors and if you work at open floor plan office, people see it and get the message right. So that’s a very, very effective way to hack back. And then per your question about Mark, so that’s the fourth step. The fourth step is called prevent distraction with packs. Now packs are are pre commitments. They’re promises you make to yourself or to someone else. So Mark and I, for a good chunk of writing, both of our last books, we sat next to each other, uh, in, in, at my home office. He can, we’d come over and we would work together for a set period of time.

Nir Eyal:
Now anyone can do this. If you want to sit down with a work colleague and say, okay, for the next 45 minutes to an hour, an hour and a half, however long you need to do your focus work, we’re going to keep each other accountable and that we weren’t looking over each other’s screens. But having that other person right next to you also being focused can be a great way to make this promise as accountability pack. Now, a lot of people say, yeah, but you know, I don’t feel comfortable doing that with someone at work or maybe they work from home. Well, ironically enough, the solution to tech distraction can oftentimes be better tech. And so there’s a wonderful technology that I use all the time. In fact, I love the company so much. I invested in and it’s called focus mate and focus mate. What you do is you go onto this website, [inaudible] dot com you pick a time when you need to do focused work and you say, okay, nine o’clock I’m going to get started and this is particularly awesome for people like me who have trouble getting started.

Nir Eyal:
Right? So you know, I used to say, okay, nine o’clock nine 15 nine 29 still hadn’t started on that big task. I needed to do well with this. I know I have to get started because somebody on the other end is waiting for me. They’re going to give me a bad review if I don’t show up. But when I do show up, I see them on a little video monitor, they see me and we said, okay, what are you working on? What are you working on? Go and for the next 45 minutes we work without distraction. So there’s a lot of tools out there for entering these packs and there’s other types of packs as well. There’s actually two different types of packs that I didn’t discuss that can also help us to us to stay on track.

Speaker 3:
I have got just a boatload of followup questions for you. So I’m going to, I’m going to fire them off. We’ll go into like a high octane bonus round here. And I’m just going to hit you up cause I know you have all a lot of these answers cause you’ve done so much research over these past five years while you’ve been crafting this book. So my first question is, um, where is your office located? I’m not looking for the home address, I’m just saying. Where are you in New York? Are you where, where are you guys located? Yeah,

Nir Eyal:
yeah, I’m in New York city.

Speaker 3:
Okay. So you and, and, and then when you and Mark are in a room, how big is this room?

Nir Eyal:
Oh, it’s, it’s a converted closet. It’s a, I dunno, like I me six foot by 10 foot.

Speaker 3:
And do you listen to music while you’re writing or you write in silence?

Nir Eyal:
Uh, I typically listened to, I’ve, I, I don’t like listening to music with words. So I haven’t have called endo E N D E L that makes this kind of ambient music nonstop in the background. And the only reason I do that is to kind of tune out other potentially distracting noises.

Speaker 3:
Um, I feel like there are some external triggers that, um, I have seen my clients, um, cut out some of them digital, some of them not. And I would like to go through a laundry list and get your take on these things. Um, so one is, uh, turning off push notifications, um, in your book in distractible, how to control your attention and choose your life. What is your take on push notifications that notify you? You know, every time a, a piece of mail gets delivered, every time that your alarm goes off, every time an email comes in, every time a Facebook update happens, every time an Instagram happens, every time a tweet comes in and every time it’s an overwhelming list. What is your thought about the push notifications?

Nir Eyal:
Yeah, so this is where I’m going to have my Marie Kondo moment, right? So what sparks joy? My question is, is it serving you or are you serving it? That’s the critical question. It’s not about saying technology is evil or push notifications or even push notifications can be great if they help you do an act of traction rather than distraction. So when I, with my daughter, I don’t want push notifications because I have planned to be with my daughter right now, I leave the phone on so that if my wife calls me in an emergency that I can see that it’s for calling, but I don’t have Facebook notifications on. I don’t have email notifications on it. I don’t have all the other stuff on because it’s not serving me in that period of time. A great feature that a lot of people don’t know about but actually comes built into almost every device these days is called do not disturb while driving and with do not disturb while driving.

Nir Eyal:
Again, almost every device has it already. Uh, if you don’t know how to use it, just Google it. But here’s how it works. Basically you turn this on and if someone calls or texts you, they will receive a reply that says, I’m sorry I can’t talk right now. I’m driving mindsets. You can customize it. Mine says I’m in distractible so I can’t talk right now in distractible. If this is urgent, text me with the word urgent. Okay? So if it really is, Oh my God, you’ve got to call me right away. The house is on fire. You can, you know, you can die, you can type in urgent and then the call or the text message will come through. But when I’m doing something where I don’t want distraction, I’m writing, I’m with my daughter, I’m, I’m doing something that I requires, my focus, I can turn on, do not disturb it, then everything else is blocked out. So it’s helping me towards, towards doing what I want to do, traction rather than allowing me to get distracted. So it’s really about asking yourself, is it serving you or are you serving the external trigger?

Speaker 3:
Now this is going to get a little little mean, I’m sure. But we’ll, we’ll, we’ll see what happens. Um, you know, most of the listeners who listen to this show own a business or, or want to at some point, that’s kind of our, our tribe or our audience there. And, uh, you know, ink magazine has research that shows 85% of applicants just make stuff up on their resume. You know, the U S chamber now shows 75% of employees in the big box stores. They, they tend to borrow things from the workplace and tend to forget to bring them back. You know, that whole thing. So there are certain people that are not necessarily the best fit in a workplace. What is your take on the distractible people in your life? The people who are causing the distractions in your life? The people that cause, because for me, and I own multiple companies and you have hundreds of employees between all of them.

Speaker 3:
And so for me, I’ve always found it easier to address the person directly, let them know, you know, Hey, let’s stop the whatever stick within the org chart, stop doing the thing or whatever. And if there’s certain people I’d find out that just they’re not coachable. So I have to move the, remove those people from my life sometimes. What would you say to listeners out there that have one guy in their office and he, he just likes to cook tuna fish in the microwave and it’s the smell wash throughout the building and he just loves to, you know, always be late and he loves to fire off a barrage of all caps. You know, those big emails, you know, the ones that are like two page pontifications about the workplace. Is there a time to, you know, sometimes they’ll let somebody go if they’re the cause of the distractions.

Nir Eyal:
Yeah, I mean, you know, if there’s someone who’s not a good fit, uh, for the company culture, the company mission, uh, that if it’s not somebody who’s, uh, who’s offering value of the company. Sure. Yeah. I think that is somebody that you, uh, you know, there’s nothing, there’s nothing that’s, you know, I think we have, uh, laws that allow us to, to fire. It will sometimes because sometimes people aren’t a great fit. Um, now when it comes to distraction, I rarely see them. The problem is the employees. Typically it’s management. And I’ll tell you why. You know, I, I’ve been hired for to do thousands of workshops and presentations about how to help, you know, with my first book about how to build habit forming products. And now with the second book about how to, uh, control your attention and choose your life. So it made sense.

Nir Eyal:
I will be giving presentations about distraction and why the focus, it improves company output and improves, improves employee wellbeing, all this good stuff. That is that it can increase in one’s life. And yet in these meetings, if anybody is distracted on their phone, guess who it is. It’s not, it’s what’s that? The managers of course know more than the managers. It’s the big boss. It’s not the, the, the, the, the gen Z or the gen Y or the, the gen X or whatever. It’s not the young folks. It’s always the big boss and the boss who wants to show everybody how important he or she is. Right? Because I just got these emails that are super important. I can’t be bothered with. And so that permeates an organization. I mean, our break culture flows downhill. Everybody sees that and they learn from it. It becomes a secondhand smoke effect where people, you know, they also think to themselves, well, if, if the big boss is checking me his email or her email, does that mean I shouldn’t checking my email? Maybe the email they’re sending is to me and I need to get on that right away. And so that tends to be what permeates this, this terrible workplace culture, uh, that is, is, is really damaging our work environments. It tends to be from the big boss, unfortunately. And the good news is it can also be improved by what the big boss does, right? So if you show others what it means to be in, if you set the example, if you are indestructible yourself, that’s how we show our employees how they can do it themselves.

Speaker 3:
Let’s dive back into, into time blocking for a second. And let’s pretend that you and I have sat down and we’ve agreed on this diabolical idea that, that, uh, your, your family is as important as your finances and your fitness is as important as your friendships. So we’ve just figured out that faith, family, finances, fitness, friendship, and fun, they all have a place in our life. So let’s talk about faith and family first. Do you think we should block out time for family or should we just give them what’s left?

Nir Eyal:
Absolutely. I mean, look, this is, this is a pillar of becoming indestructible because when I say timebox your day, I’m not saying just for productive work related tasks, quite the opposite that we need to look at our time in terms of our values. And the goal here should be to turn our values into time. That’s what we want to do here. Turn our values into time. You know, when we think about our stuff and how we protect our stuff, whether it’s a alarms on our homes, whether it’s security systems in our cars, uh, we put our money and volts be in bank accounts so that they’re safe. But when it comes to our time, sure. Come on over. Take as much of it as they did the news. Oh sure. What are the Kardashians do? Oh yeah, sure. Taking that time. What does my boss want?

Nir Eyal:
It was my kids want share and take as much time as you want. And that is the only asset that everyone on the face of the earth, no matter how much money you have, everyone, bill Gates, Warren buffet, and everyone else all get the same amount of time, 24 hours per day. And yet many of us just give it away for free whenever anyone wants it. And so we have to start protecting our time, starting with our values. And so there’s three life domains at the center. The most important is you. If you can’t take care of yourself, you can’t take care of others. So first, the first thing I want you to do instead of making you know, a big lofty plan for a five year goal or a vision board, or the regrets of the dying, how about we just start with next week.

Nir Eyal:
Okay. For next week. How much time do you need eat for you? Whether that’s time for prayer or meditation or exercise or a bedtime, right? We, we, you know, we tell our kids, you’ve got to get to bed on time, but we’re hypocrites. What about our bedtime? We know that sleep is absolutely essential for proper health and mental wellbeing. So do you have time on your schedule to do something you know that you want to do for yourself? Mainly getting proper sleep. Now, I’m not telling you that your value should be the same as mine, but whatever your values are, you need to make time for those values on your schedule. Now, even for fun things, by the way, if part of your values include, look, I want to watch football. I want to go on Facebook. I want to enjoy YouTube a little bit. No problem.

Nir Eyal:
There’s nothing wrong with any of that stuff, but making that time on your schedule in advance so you’re not using it when you’re feeling bad or lonely or bored or indecisive, you’re not using it as an escape. You’re using it intentionally. That becomes something that you planned to do with your time. Anything else would be a distraction. So you can turn distractions into traction by simply planning for them. So that’s the you domain. The next domain is the family domain or the, I’m sorry, the relationships domain. The relationship domain include things like family and friends, et cetera. Your community, and I think this is a big reason why we are in this loneliness epidemic these days. You know, psychologists tell us that loneliness is as detrimental to our health as smoking and obesity and that we are in the middle of this loneliness crisis in this country.

Nir Eyal:
And the reason we are going to this loneliness country, a crisis is not because of Facebook or Twitter or social media didn’t do this. In fact, Robert Putnam wrote about this in the 1990s he wrote a book called bowling alone and in the early nineties he noticed that there was a collapse in the number of organizations around the country that held time on people’s calendars. What type of organizations? The bowling league, the key club, the church group things. That whole time on your calendar to be with other people. Listen, knowing other people and having them know you is a fundamental human need. We need that for our psychological and physiological wellbeing. But if you don’t plan that time with your friends, with your families, with your loved ones, with your community, it’s not going to happen. So that time needs to be held as well. And then finally in the last domain, it’s called the work domain.

Nir Eyal:
And so this comes last. Most people put this one first. In fact, I argue it comes last. First you need to take care of living out your values for yourself, then your relationships and only then your work. And so this is where we asked ourselves, how do we split our day between reactive work and reflective? You see reactive work is responding to all the pings and dings, the meetings, the phone calls, the emails. If you’re in a call center, that’s all you do, okay? But very few people listening to me right now work in any 100% reactive job. You need time for reflection. Reflection is where we solve those difficult problems. We do longterm planning. We think for God’s sakes, with time for reflection, we have to have that time if we are going to drive our businesses and our lives forward, but how many of us make time to think? You know, when I do these presentations in front of me, I’ll oftentimes ask, how many of you have a job that requires you to think everybody’s hand goes up and then I say, well, how many of you have time in your day to do what your job requires? To have time to think? Almost nobody. I’m telling you, it is a huge competitive advantage. If you simply make that time to think without distraction. That is where we do our best work. But it doesn’t happen unless we make time for it.

Speaker 3:
I your your book is, is filled with so much wisdom though. Again, the book is indestructible. How to control your attention and choose your life. But I had a couple of just final little nuanced questions I wanted to get into because I’m, you know, Proverbs from, from that controversial book known as the Bible. Proverbs 1320 reads, walk with the wise and become wise for a companion of fools suffers harm. Um, Tim Ferriss who, uh, is not in the Bible but uh, he’s written some good books. Um, he says, but you are the average of the five people you associate with most. Do not underestimate the effects of your pessimistic unambitious or disorganized friends. If someone isn’t making you stronger, they’re making you weaker. And I could quote Oprah and everybody else who said it in a different way, but the point is you do become the average of the people you spend the most time with.

Speaker 3:
Talk about blocking out time for, um, specific friendships in your life because now that you are a bestselling author, you’ve worked with some of the biggest companies in the world that are calling you every day your inbox is getting filled up with opportunity and you know, you’re getting all these opportunities. I’m sure when you were first starting out you thought it’d be cool to have an opportunity, but now you’re getting so many opportunities, so many people reaching out. What is kinda your personal filter to decide who to spend time with and and what things to do.

Nir Eyal:
Yeah. This is such an important point I, but I think the, the more important question is not who do you spend time with. Cause I think many of us have too many choices in terms of who to spend time with. It’s do you make that time? I mean how many times have you heard from a friend when we should grab coffee sometime, right? Let’s go get a drink. Yeah. What does that happen? It doesn’t happen unless we make those regular occasions to have that time with each other. So one of the things I talk about in the book is this practice I call the kibbutz and the kibbutz, we just use that term. It’s a kibbutz in Hebrew means gathering and it doesn’t have any necessarily a religious connotations. Basically this is a gathering of couples because we have these couple friends that we really enjoy spending time with and we kept saying this stuff each other.

Nir Eyal:
Oh yeah, let’s get together some time. Yeah, we should totally make that happen. It just didn’t happen. So we said, okay, here’s what we’re going to do twice a month, same time, same place we are going to get together. Why? Because adult friendships are important. So many people stop having friends when they have kids. It’s destroying us. It’s such a bad idea. And so what we started doing is we got rid of all the friction that’s involved, right? So every two weeks we get together. Same time, same place. Everybody brings their own food. By the way, that’s a big deal. So nobody has to do any cooking. You bring your own food, people bring kids. And for that time, for each other, what we do, it’s almost like a, like an interactive Ted talk. We go around the circle and every week one of these eight people and these four couples, one of these eight people have the floor and they talk about something that’s on their mind.

Nir Eyal:
And we go deep. We don’t talk about sports and politics and whether we talk about what’s really going on. So, uh, one week somebody talked about, uh, let’s see. Recently it was, Oh, somehow this question around like, is it right to force our kids to do something they don’t want to do? Like learning how to play the piano? Is that, is that a good idea? So we then we talked about that for the afternoon and then another time it was somebody was having trouble at work. They started this company and they weren’t really happy there. So they, they, they bore their soul and kind of got down to business in terms of what was bothering them. Many of us, we don’t have that in our lives and that’s a problem. We need those regular instances. And let me tell you wouldn’t happen unless we put that time on the books.

Nir Eyal:
Now, one additional point I want to make you remember I said earlier that anything can be a distraction. One of the things that we learned can be a distraction are our kids. That when we would get together in this gathering, one of the first times we did this, one of the kids came home and said, mommy, daddy, I hurt my champ. I bumped my knee, I need help. And this would throw the entire conversation off track and so we decided that the kids cannot interrupt. They can listen, but they can’t interrupt unless someone’s bleeding because we need that time as adults to have those interactions with our friends. We want those adult friendships and just as importantly, we want to model for our kids what an adult friendship looks like, that these people in our life are important to us. These are our friends. They matter to us and so we need to invest in them. So you, you can’t interrupt for any frivolity. If we put juice boxes in a room, we put some games for the kids to play and they’re fine and they know this rule up. If nobody’s bleeding, do not interrupt. And so that’s been a great way to to block out those external triggers even when the distraction can be something like your kids.

Speaker 3:
I have five kids and people think that I am a crazy person when I tell them that I keep my phone off all weekend, they think I’m a unethical, horrible person. When I tell them I’m downstairs between 3:00 AM and 9:00 AM uninterrupted working on man projects before I go check in on the fam and we have a great family. My wife and I been together almost 20 years, but I think that really is powerful. I think somebody should write that down. I mean having that weekly. In your case it’s biweekly, right? You get together biweekly with some couples at the same time so you don’t have to play the schedule chess. Right. I mean it’s the same time and the kids can’t interrupt you unless someone’s bleeding. That is a bad idea. I dare said near. That’s a power move that that right there is a power move for somebody out there that is a power move.

Nir Eyal:
Somebody should write that down.

Speaker 3:
Oh man. Now here’s the deal. I, you’re not looking for book ideas, but I can tell you this because I work with many business owners who say they seek time and financial freedom and when I helped them get earn the financial freedom, which we document with case studies and that kind of thing, they find themselves with the financial freedom. Now to enjoy their time and they find themselves kind of bored near, you know, they’ve found this, I was bored but also isolated and I think you just gave a tip for how to keep from being isolated. And I’d like to wrap up today’s show by asking somebody, asking you for a tip of, for all of our very wealthy listeners who have earned a bunch of money but now their schedule feels empty and they feel like, gosh, isn’t there more to this world? I thought, you know what, they’ve already achieved. A lot of our listeners have achieved their financial goals. How does somebody not feel hollow like the Easter bunny when they have a schedule that is now free of obligation and it’s open to possibilities? How do they, maybe you’ve never seen this before. Maybe you have, I mean it sort of, someones just feels kinda like the hollow Easter bunny there. Their soul seems to be missing is they don’t have anything to do. Maybe it’s a retired listener who just sold his big company. What advice would you have?

Nir Eyal:
Well, first of all, may you be so lucky to have this problem. This is a very, very high class problem. But I think part of the solution for anyone, whether you’re retired or not, is to pick good problems to fix that. You know, our values should drive how we spend our time and what, what is a value, right? What, what values mean. Values are defined as the attributes of the person we want to become. And so this is why we have to turn our values into time. We ask ourselves once a week, I’ll give you a link in the show notes where I have this, uh, this tool anybody can use. It’s free. You don’t have to sign up for anything. You don’t have to give me your email, nothing. This schedule maker tool and where I walk people through this online tool that anyone can use to decide how they want to spend their time.

Nir Eyal:
Because we talk a good game about, you know, you know how busy we are, but when you actually decide in advance how you want to spend our time, this is how we hold ourselves accountable. So it doesn’t matter your socioeconomic position. Any of us can decide how we want to live at our values by turning our values into time. So whether you’re a retiree and you’re looking for stuff to occupy your time, if you find yourself being hollow or you’re feeling hollow, it’s because you’re not living out your values. You need to ask yourself, how would the person I want to become, spend their time to simple as that and by picking a good problem and then that is one thing the world has no shortage of. We have of problems. So pick a fight, pick a fight for something that you want to fix in the world and you don’t have to be retired to do that. Whether that’s picking the what kind of career you want to pursue, how you want to spend your time, it’s about deciding for yourself. What brings meaning. How would the person you want to become spend their time? Would it be about, you know, fighting for a political issue, fighting for the environment, fighting to improve people’s living conditions, fighting to create a new technology, a new business that brings people value. Whatever it is, pick that fight and schedule that time to win that

Speaker 3:
near you are an unbelievable, uh, author. I appreciate you spending all the time that you spend and invest in, in putting out your, your, your content, your, your books. You’re awesome. And you’re also, uh, a beautiful man. Or are you living entirely off of kale at this point? Or what are you doing? You’re looking good

Nir Eyal:
massages every day. Kale wraps. Now, not at all. I will say, you know, you don’t know me before I, you know, I used to be clinically obese at one point in my life and I have to say that, uh, you know, there’s no facet of my life that hasn’t been touched by the ideas that I put in, in distractible. Because look, you know, when you are in distractible, there’s so much you can do with your time. I, I used to be obese and now I love exercising. For the first time in my life, I used to never understand. People say, Oh, I ran a marathon. I got to run her sigh. I have no idea what they’re talking about. Right? Like I used to hate exercise, but now that I am in distractible, I do what I say I’m going to do. I’m in the best shape of my life at 42 years old, I’ve never been in better shape. I’ve been married for almost 20 years. My relationship is stronger than ever. My relationship with my daughter is better because I’m fully present with her and it’s because a lot of the tactics I know you and I both use around. When I do something, I’m fully vested. I’m there, I’m present what I do, and that makes all the difference for becoming indestructable.

Speaker 3:
W w what time did you wake up today?

Nir Eyal:
Seven.

Speaker 3:
Seven. Is that kind your, your, your your default seven.

Nir Eyal:
Yeah.

Speaker 3:
And those first four hours of your day, what do you, what are you doing? First four hours.

Nir Eyal:
So it’s scheduled every day. I know what I’m going to do the first four hours. So I wake up at seven and I go upstairs. My job, one of my responsibilities is to make breakfast for my family. So from seven to seven 30 I cook, my daughter comes up at about seven 30. We eat together until eight. I hit the gym from eight to nine. I shower up, I get ready from nine to nine 30 and then from nine 30 to 1130, that’s my writing time. So I have two hour block of writing and then I at 1130 I work from home. So most days if I’m not traveling when I’m at home at 1130, I cook lunch for my family. Like 1230. I take calls and meetings. Uh, and uh, then the rest of the days is mostly stuff like this. What I’m doing right now,

Speaker 3:
well near a little pro tip for you, if your writing career doesn’t work out, I know you’ve had already or you’ve already had bestselling books. If the writing career, if you were looking for a fallback position, you need to be on the cover of romance novels. That’s what you need to do. That’s your backup position. Unbelievable. Just a, I’m telling you Thrivers if you look up Nir Eyal, all right now look them up and I, R, E Y, a.L , he’s in the best shape of his life at the age of 42. I’m serious. This is a thing of the, you’re, you, you, you are an inspiration for the thrive nation out there, my friend. And thank you so much for investing your time with our listeners here today. I appreciate it. Thank you for the kind words. And uh, you know, if you think Roman Snellville should have nerds on their cover that I’m sure I’d make a great model. It’s an interesting variety of romance novels now. It’s a, it’s a kind of a fork in the road, but it’s, it’s a romance novel. I appreciate it. And now, without any further ado.