#553： How to Become Indistractable
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Summary
If you struggle with feeling distracted, you likely think that modern technology is to blame. If your phone wasn t so infuriatingly desirable to check, you d be a lot more focused and productive. My guest argues that the problem of distraction doesn t lie with technology, but with you. His name is Nir Eyal, and he s a behavioral design expert and the author of Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.
Transcript
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I'm Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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If you struggle with feeling distracted, you likely think that modern technology is to
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blame and that if your phone wasn't so infuriatingly desirable to check, you'd be a lot more focused
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My guest say argues that the problem of distraction doesn't lie with technology, but with you.
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His name is Nir Eyal, and he's a behavioral design expert and the author of Indistractable,
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How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.
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Today on the show, we first discuss Nir's work in helping companies create apps that hook
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people into using them and why he thinks those methods of attraction can be positive as long
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We then dig into how to do that, beginning with the idea that you can't complain about
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being distracted if you don't know what you're distracted from, how the first step in getting
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control of your attention is understanding what you'd like to be doing with it by planning
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out your time, and why the opposite of distraction is in focus.
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We discuss why time management is pain management, why we need to get comfortable with the uncomfortable
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internal triggers that prompt us to use our devices for emotional pacification.
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Nir then walks us through how to deal with the external triggers of distraction, including
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managing your email inbox, making pre-commitments, and turning indistractability into part of
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After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash indistractable.
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So you got a book out called Indistractable, How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your
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I know people's feeling like they're not in control of their attention is a big problem
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But before we get to this book, let's talk about the book you published before this,
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That first book you published was Hooked, How to Build Habit-Forming Products, and this
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And it's about how companies, or it was used by companies to create apps and websites that
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What was the big idea that you were trying to highlight in that book?
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So with Hooked, it was really, you know, this was published five years ago.
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And so the idea was really about how do we democratize these techniques that have been
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used by the gaming companies, by the social networks to make all sorts of products
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The reason I wrote the book, you know, I didn't, the book didn't benefit the social
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They've known these techniques for years and years.
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What I wanted to do once I learned these techniques was to share them, because my idea
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was what if we could make healthy habits just as engaging, just as sticky as the products
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that many people blame for distracting them many times, right?
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So my clients have never been the social media companies and the gaming companies.
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My clients are companies like the New York Times hired me to help make a habit out of reading
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Companies like Fitbod used the hook model to get people hooked to exercising in the gym.
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Kahoot used the hook model to build the world's largest educational software, which gets kids
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And so that's really the impetus of the book was for the benefit of anyone building a product
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that they want to turn into some sort of a habit.
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And what are the insights about human psychology and habit formation that you highlighted in
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I'm sure there's lots of them, but, you know, what are some of the few that stood out to
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So at the core of any of these experiences, whether it's Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp,
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Slack, Fitbod, even the Bible app, you know, the one case study that I highlight in the
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book is the Bible app, which has hundreds of millions of users.
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And all of them essentially use this four-part model called a trigger, an action, a reward,
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And it's through successive cycles through these hooks that customer preferences are shaped,
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that our tastes are formed, and that our habits take hold.
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These triggers are things in our environment, typically, the pings and dings and rings that
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It could be something as simple as scrolling a feed, opening an app, checking a dashboard,
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It's defined as the simplest action done in anticipation of a reward.
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And the reward, the point of the reward phase is to scratch the user's itch they came for
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Some bit of uncertainty around what they might find the next time they engage with the product.
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And this, you know, the engine of the hooked model is variability.
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That's what's called an intermittent reinforcement.
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He found that when he took pigeons and put them in a little box, now known as a Skinner
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box, and he gave them a little disc to peck at, if they pecked at the disc and received
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a reward on a fixed schedule, meaning peck at the disc, get a reward every time, he could
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train those pigeons to peck at the disc whenever they were hungry, right?
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As long as the pigeon was hungry, they would peck the disc.
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You know, that's how they learned this new habit.
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But what Skinner discovered to his amazement was that when he ran out of these food pellets
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one day and he couldn't afford to give them to the pigeons every time.
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So sometimes a pigeon would peck at the disc and nothing would come out.
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The next time the pigeon would peck at the disc, they would receive a reward.
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What Skinner observed was the rate of response, the number of times these pigeons pecked at the
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disc increased when the reward was given on a variable schedule of reinforcement.
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And so what we see in all sorts of products and services that we find most engaging, most
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engrossing, most fun, you will find this element of variability, whether it's playing a video
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game, whether it's watching the news, all right?
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We always want to know what we don't know, what happened that we are not aware of.
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It's what makes people listen to this episode right this minute.
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It's about not knowing what we're going to talk about next.
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And so that curiosity gap, that variability, that uncertainty is what keeps us scrolling
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This uncertainty is really at the core of many species drive to act.
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And then the last step of the hook model is called the investment phase.
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And this is where you put something into the product to improve it with use.
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If we think about the history of innovation, you know, traditionally, it's been very difficult
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and taken a very long time for a product to change its specifications for the user's
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So, you know, Henry Ford is famous for, or at least attributed with saying that you can
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have any color of Model T as long as it's black.
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And the reason he said that was because it's really hard to retool a factory and give you
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Well, today what's changed is that we are co-creating products in real time.
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So my version of Facebook, my version of Instagram, my version of Slack, email, whatever is customized
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So we are co-creating these products in real time by storing value in the product.
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And the more we use it, it actually appreciates in value.
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Because if you think about it, everything made out of atoms, as opposed to bits, depreciates
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The more you use something up, the less valuable it becomes your furniture, your clothing, you
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know, anything that we consume depreciates with wear and tear, but habit forming products
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They appreciate in value the more you interact with them.
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So that's the fourth step of the hook, the investment phase, which also loads the next
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So when you send someone a message on WhatsApp or Slack or Instagram, when you send someone
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that message, you are investing in the service, thereby loading the next trigger, prompting
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you through the hook once again, because you're likely to get a reply.
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So that reply from your message is an external trigger, which brings you through the hook once
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And now, eventually, the promised land of a habit forming product is to no longer require
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What they do eventually is attach themselves to what's called an internal trigger.
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And we'll talk about internal triggers more when we talk about how to become indistractable,
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So every habit forming product, the ultimate goal is to no longer require a ping, a ding,
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What they bank on, the promised land, is to attach the product's use to some kind of
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When we are bored, we check Reddit or stock prices, sports scores.
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All of these things cater to an uncomfortable internal trigger, an uncomfortable sensation.
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When a company can attach the use of the product to a problem in your head that you feel and
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You know, we can help people form healthy habits around eating and exercise and connecting
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It can also form some pretty bad habits if you're not dealing with that feeling in a healthy
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manner and instead looking for emotional pacification with a distraction.
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All right, so you wrote the book on sort of laying out what makes a product or an app or
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a service habit-forming, yet you had this realization that you were losing control of
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So how does the guy who wrote the book, who understood what the companies were doing to
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capture our attention, how did you realize you had lost control of your attention?
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Yeah, so for me, the seminal moment for me was really when I sat down with my daughter
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So before I wrote Hooked, nobody was calling me, nobody was emailing, nobody was writing
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And so I had plenty of time to write my book in peace.
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But then when I wrote Hooked, and I actually self-published it at first and just thought,
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I had like a few thousand blog subscribers, and I thought maybe they'd like it.
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And I started getting more phone calls and requests for consultations and requests for
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And to one point, I realized that this was a detriment in some ways.
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I'm very thankful, but it was also a problem nonetheless.
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And I remember sitting with my daughter one afternoon, and we had some time together where
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we could just spend some quality time as daddy and daughter together.
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And we had this book of activities that had all kinds of things that daddies and daughters
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And one of the activities was to ask each other this question.
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If you could have any superpower, what superpower would you want?
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And I remember the question verbatim, but I can't tell you her answer.
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Because in that moment, when she answered, I was distracted.
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I was looking at my phone because I'd gotten some email or some message.
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Something happened when I was using, that made me check the device, probably some ping
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And the next thing I knew, when I looked up from my phone, she'd left the room because
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she'd gotten the message that whatever was on my phone was more important than she was.
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And so that was kind of the turning point for me.
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I remember actually, I told this story to a friend of mine.
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And so he was curious, and he asked his daughter what superpower she would want.
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And she told him that, you know, daddy, the superpower I would want would be the power
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And his daughter said, so that when you and mommy are on your phones, I'll have someone
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So this is not a problem that only I experience.
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And if I'm honest with you, that wasn't the only time it happened.
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I would get distracted when I was with my daughter.
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I would sit down to write, you know, the thing that made me successful as an author
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And yet I would find that I would, you know, putz around.
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And so I decided to dive headfirst into the problem.
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Knowing what I know as someone in the industry, as an industry insider, I wanted to figure out,
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you know, how can we put this stuff in its place?
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And my knee-jerk reaction was to blame the technology.
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And the reason I blamed the technology is because that's what everybody tells you is
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Every book I could buy on the topic, and I have dozens of them here, they all basically
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I did the 30-day detox, you know, the 30-day plan.
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I got rid of my smartphone, and I bought myself this $12 feature phone on Alibaba that does
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nothing but send text messages and receive phone calls.
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I got myself a word processor from the 1990s that don't even make anymore with no internet
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And I sat down, and I said, great, I got rid of all the technology.
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Because I'd say, oh, let me tidy up my desk real quick, or let me take out the trash,
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or, oh, you know, there's that book I've been meaning to do some research into.
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I bet there's something interesting there that I should probably read, and I would keep
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And so the more I dove into the psychology of procrastination, I realized that we have it all wrong.
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The technology is not the cause of distraction.
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The root cause is much more interesting and much more important to identify if we are
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Well, let's talk about that root cause, because I've had that same issue before.
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I've done things where I've implemented firewalls on my devices where I can't access certain
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And one thing I find myself doing is, okay, there was one site that was super distracting,
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Well, I just find another site to distract myself with.
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So what is, if it's not the device or the technology, what is the root cause?
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Yeah, you may not like this, but the root cause, in order to understand the root cause
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of the problem, let me just back up to some first principles here.
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So let's start with, what do we mean by distraction?
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If you ask people to define the opposite of distraction, they'll tell you it's focus.
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I don't think the opposite of distraction is focus.
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That in fact, if you look at the entomology of the word, the opposite of distraction is
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That both traction and distraction come from the same Latin root, trahare, which means to
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And they both end in the same six letter word, A-C-T-I-O-N.
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So traction is any action that pulls you towards what you want to do, things that you do with
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The opposite of traction is distraction, anything that pulls you away from what you plan to
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So all of our behaviors are either leading us towards traction or distraction based on
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Now, in order to understand what pulls us towards either traction or distraction, which
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He called it a krasia, the tendency that we all have to do things against our better interests.
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So 2,500 years ago, well before iPhones, well before Facebook and Instagram, people were
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complaining about, gosh, isn't the world such a distracting place these days?
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Every generation has their tech boogeyman, whether it's the television, the video game,
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I mean, even the written word was derided by Socrates as something that was going to enfeeble
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But we have to ask ourselves really to get down to first principles, not only why do we
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do things against our better interest, but why do we do anything and everything?
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And if you ask most folks, what is the nature of human motivation?
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They will tell you some version of carrots and sticks, typically.
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Bentham said something similar that everything that we do is about the pursuit of pleasure
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Turns out that neurologically, however, this ain't true.
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That in fact, everything we do is not about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.
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That everything we do, everything we do is about a desire to escape discomfort.
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And we know this is true physiologically, right?
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And if you eat too much, okay, now you're stuffed.
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The brain gets us to do stuff by making us feel discomfort that we have to act.
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We have to manipulate our environment to stop that discomfort.
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And the same is true with psychological sensations, as we talked about earlier, right?
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That when you're lonely, Facebook, uncertainty, Google, boredom, Reddit, stock prices, sports
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The brain doesn't get us to act because we feel good.
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The memory of feeling good creates psychological imbalance for us to want to do something, right?
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There's a reason we say that love hurts, because psychologically, that is exactly what is going
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Desire, craving, wanting, all of those things do not feel good.
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That is what prompts us to quell that uncomfortable sensation.
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So back to distraction, what does all this mean?
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If all of our behaviors are spurred by a desire to escape discomfort in one form or another,
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what that means is that time management is pain management.
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So I don't care what life hacks you just read about or what guru tells you to take a cold
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shower at 4 a.m., none of that stuff works unless, first and foremost, we learn how to deal
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And what we do with that discomfort leads us to either traction or distraction.
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If we channel it for good, it can actually be a force that spurs us to do what we say we're
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But if we're not trained, if we don't know how to master our internal triggers, that's
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where we turn to these technologies, which we love to blame as the source of the problem,
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They're just the tools that we use for emotional pacification, like babies sucking on their
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And until we learn that principle and accept it and deal with it, we will always become
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So this idea of distraction, a lot of things you were talking about were internal triggers.
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And you mentioned before, apps and websites use external triggers, but ideally, they want
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We want to be the go-to source for people when they feel bored or when they feel sad or
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Do they sit in a room and think about that and say, that's what we want to do?
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But for example, when I worked with the New York Times, it was very much that, right?
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When in a user's day would they sit down and want to scratch a psychological itch of boredom,
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fear of missing out, uncertainty around what's going on in the world?
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And so they build their product to cater to that uncomfortable emotion.
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When I didn't work with Fitbod, but Fitbod is this great app that used the hook model
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And their internal trigger was trying to cater to the person who goes to the gym like I used
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to be and would face uncertainty around what to do, right?
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There's all these muscle heads that seem to know what they're doing.
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And so the solution to that discomfort is an app like Fitbod.
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Well, let's talk about this idea that everything is pain.
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What would you say to someone who says, well, I do something because I genuinely like it.
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How would you say, well, no, actually you're doing that to avoid pain?
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Let's say someone who consistently works out, right?
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It's not because they're gritting their teeth to exercise every day.
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They just do it because it's just part of what they do and they enjoy it.
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Let's take it to its really base fundamental state.
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Orgasms feel good and we are programmed biologically to have the orgasm.
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But that sensation, that pleasure is what we remember about the experience.
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But getting to the experience, we get there because we crave, we desire, we lust.
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And I imagine some people, they work out because they don't like the feeling of not working out.
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So I talked to a former NFL player a few weeks ago and he said, no, that's not true.
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I don't believe that everything we do is about the desire to escape discomfort because I love the rush of going out on the field and the crowds and the cheering.
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And I worked my ass off and it hurt, but I did it anyway.
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And then about after 15 minutes of explaining to him this concept, he said, you know what?
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Because not going out there and not giving it my best and not performing and the idea of letting down my fans was so painful that I had to do this.
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So the wanting and the desire creates pain because in order to fulfill that pain, you do the thing.
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So in fact, the brain has two separate systems.
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It's called the liking system and the wanting system.
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And whether we like something or not doesn't actually matter.
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They've done these experiments on rodents where they trigger their wanting system to want a particular thing.
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And even though they may not like that thing, they still do it because they want it, because they crave it.
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So the liking system is what lights up, so to speak, in the brain.
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I hate that term, but you get what I'm trying to say.
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It was activated when something is pleasurable.
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But the pleasure itself is not necessary to get us to do a behavior.
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What is necessary is the wanting system, which spurs us to act because of discomfort.
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So you said that distraction has been with us forever.
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And I think a lot of people who are listening, they lived in a time when there were no smartphones or whatever.
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I remember when I was a kid, I found ways to distract myself.
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But something seems different about the tech we have here.
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What do you think is different about the tech that we have today?
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I mean, just the fact that technology is so pervasive and is designed to be so persuasive is different.
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I mean, the fact that we have it with us at all times of the day in our pockets means that if you are looking for distraction, it's easier than ever to find.
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But I think what has gone off the rails a bit lately is this idea that just because something is designed to be engaging,
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just because it is designed to be fun, that somehow it's addicting us all.
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And, of course, that narrative is one that gets a lot of attention.
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I recently published an article in The Atlantic that was titled, Tech Addiction is the New Reefer Madness.
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That people have been fearing something that is apparently taking over our brains since time immemorial.
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There's this practice of tappening where we have these ancient skulls of people who lived thousands of years ago who their brain was fractured in order to let out an evil spirit.
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So there's something about us that looks to blame something taking over the mind.
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And I think the latest boogeyman that we like to blame is technology.
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Because while something is designed to be engaging, there's no doubt that Netflix designs its shows to be engaging.
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Should we say, hey, Netflix, can you stop making your programming so good?
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Hey, Apple, your iPhone is way too user-friendly.
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So instead of holding our breath, waiting for tech companies to change, in which case we are going to suffocate,
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why don't we do something about ourselves without this hysteria, thinking that we're all getting hijacked and our brains are being manipulated?
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We haven't developed what's called the social antibodies to put this stuff in its place.
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And as an industry insider, right, not some professor who's never had a social media account, I have all these social media accounts.
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And let me tell you, we can get the best out of these tools without letting them get the best of us.
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I think I read somewhere in a book, I think it was a book about how to get a handle on your social media addiction or whatever.
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There's monks who use smartphones, but they're not checking it all the time like we are.
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And they're like, well, you know, I use a smartphone.
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So first and foremost, we have to start by mastering the internal triggers.
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By realizing that the reason we get distracted, the reason we do anything is to escape discomfort and try to find ways to channel that discomfort towards traction rather than distraction.
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So the first step has to be mastering the internal triggers.
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And this utilizes this idea of turning your values into time.
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You know, when I wrote this book, I interviewed a lot of folks who struggled with distraction.
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And many of them would tell me, you know, I'm so distracted these days.
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I can't get anything done between what my kids want and what my boss wants.
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And, you know, this is happening on Slack and this is over email.
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Can I see what exactly you got distracted from today?
00:25:41.840
What did you plan to do that you didn't get done?
00:25:44.960
And they'd oftentimes take out their calendar on their phone and they'd show it to me.
00:25:53.620
And it turns out the two thirds of Americans don't keep any sort of calendar.
00:26:01.180
Like we spend so much time and effort protecting our stuff, right?
00:26:09.540
We protect our stuff because we don't want anybody to steal it.
00:26:18.860
And if you don't plan your day, why are we surprised when someone plans it for you?
00:26:24.000
Whether it's your boss, whether it's your kids, whether it's something that happens in
00:26:27.860
If you have lots of white space in your day, you know what you're going to do with it?
00:26:33.440
And so the thing is, we cannot call something a distraction unless we know what it distracted
00:26:41.220
So these monks who use social media, they understand there's nothing evil about social media.
00:26:49.800
So let's stop vilifying it and instead use it correctly, which is to say, make time for
00:26:58.720
If you want time to meditate, to pray, to go on a walk, to have focused work time, wonderful.
00:27:04.340
I want you to do that stuff according to your values.
00:27:07.140
And by simply using this technique that has been studied in thousands of studies now, it's
00:27:11.740
called setting an implementation intention, which is just a fancy way of saying you're
00:27:15.700
going to plan what you're going to do and when you're going to do it.
00:27:19.280
And so what I want folks to do is to keep what's called a time box calendar.
00:27:27.220
That all I want you to do is to turn your values into time.
00:27:31.140
So if you value physical health, and I'm not saying everybody needs to value that, just
00:27:35.080
whatever your values are, does that have time on your calendar?
00:27:38.520
If you value time with your friends, do you have a regular opportunity to do that?
00:27:42.780
If you value learning and growing intellectually, do you have time for that?
00:27:48.900
These things need to be on your calendar because if they're not on your calendar, they're just
00:27:53.200
So that's the second very important step to becoming indistractable.
00:27:55.900
Yeah, and it sounds like you have to be intentional.
00:27:59.480
And the other thing too, as you talk about, it's not just filling it with positive stuff.
00:28:03.100
I mean, it's not positive or negative, but not just filling it with typical productive
00:28:10.200
I'm going to scroll Instagram for 30 minutes this time.
00:28:13.980
And in fact, it relieves you of that psychological tension.
00:28:17.020
So what happens to a lot of folks, particularly if they have kids, they'll tell their kids,
00:28:21.220
you can't play Fortnite until you finish everything else you have to do.
00:28:25.900
And so the kid all day is thinking about, am I going to be able to play it?
00:28:34.540
If we talked about how the thing that spurs all behavior is the desire to escape discomfort,
00:28:39.940
well, their rumination is uncomfortable, right?
00:28:42.600
This is why abstinence doesn't work, by the way.
00:28:44.600
If I tell you, hey, whatever you do right now, do not think of a white bear.
00:28:50.660
Of course, all you're going to be thinking about is a white bear.
00:28:56.820
So by simply planning the time for ourselves, for our kids and saying, yep, you can play
00:29:03.340
You can check Instagram at this time of day, as opposed to throughout your day, whenever
00:29:08.660
you feel bored for a minute, whenever you feel lonely.
00:29:11.820
8 p.m., that's the time on the calendar when you're going to scroll social media.
00:29:15.380
You turn what would otherwise be a distraction into traction.
00:29:19.560
Remember, the time you plan to waste is not wasted time.
00:29:24.200
And I think we've written about this before on the site about overcoming bad habits.
00:29:28.440
The more effective way, again, is not gritting yourself and sort of abstaining.
00:29:32.820
The more effective way, oftentimes, the easier way is to fill that up with good habits, right?
00:29:40.900
Put on the calendar the stuff you want to do so you actually do it instead of filling
00:29:45.700
your day with stuff you don't actually enjoy doing.
00:29:49.720
That we can make it easier to do the things we really want to do by simply planning when
00:29:57.500
And I want to mention as well that it's not just about time boxing here.
00:30:02.920
I think what I'm hoping to add to the conversation is also this practice of schedule syncing.
00:30:08.180
Schedule syncing is the practice of sitting down with the stakeholders in your life and
00:30:12.300
reviewing that time box calendar so that you can synchronize expectations.
00:30:17.520
So this practice completely transformed my marriage.
00:30:23.580
And a few years ago, my wife and I would constantly fight about household responsibilities.
00:30:29.180
And it turns out this is not uncommon that, in fact, in most heterosexual dual-income households,
00:30:36.160
women still take on a disproportionate share of household admin duties.
00:30:40.020
And I'm embarrassed to admit that that was happening in my household, even though one of
00:30:43.640
my values is to have an egalitarian marriage, right?
00:30:48.560
And yet my wife was really taking on more household duties than I was.
00:30:52.300
And my excuse was just, you know, honey, if I don't do something, just tell me to do it.
00:30:57.200
You know, if like I forget to take out the trash or do the laundry or whatever, just tell
00:31:02.040
What I didn't realize is that me asking her to do that was itself work.
00:31:20.920
And inside that time box calendar are our household responsibilities, right?
00:31:26.500
So I know exactly when I'm going to make, you know, we meal plan.
00:31:30.700
So I cook everything on the weekend for the entire week.
00:31:38.940
I know when all the household tasks that I need to get done will happen so that she can
00:31:42.640
coordinate what she needs to do based on what I've already done and vice versa.
00:31:47.240
And let me tell you, this 15-minute practice of just looking at each other's calendars and
00:31:50.720
saying, okay, who's taking my daughter to this class today?
00:31:53.260
And okay, what's different this week than was last week?
00:31:59.060
And that same practice of schedule syncing is something we can do in the workplace as
00:32:02.980
You know, so many managers, they just lob over outputs, right?
00:32:09.920
And they have no sense of how much time these tasks take.
00:32:16.280
We have this basic trust exchange in the workplace where I give my employer my time and they
00:32:22.640
But if there's no understanding about how long something will take, what happens?
00:32:28.800
The time that we're supposed to be doing our work at work now bleeds into home time and
00:32:34.760
And so what we thought would be just a 40-hour-a-week job is now a 60- or an 80-hour-a-week
00:32:40.520
And if you know that's what you're getting into, if you're going to work at a startup
00:32:42.820
or on Wall Street and you know that's what you're going to get into, great.
00:32:47.540
But if you didn't realize that and you thought you were getting into a place that only required
00:32:51.680
40 hours a week and now you're working 50, 60, 70 hours a week, well, that's a bait
00:32:56.720
And so what we have to do is this regular practice of doing this schedule sync with our managers,
00:33:02.100
with our teams, and saying, look, boss, here's how I'm going to spend my time this week.
00:33:07.000
And by the way, it doesn't necessarily have to be in a week's time.
00:33:10.200
If their schedule changes every day, you want to do it with the frequency with which your
00:33:16.280
They say, look, here's all the priorities I have on my plate.
00:33:18.280
Here's everything you asked me to do that's on my to-do list from you, all the backlog of
00:33:23.880
Here are the things that I couldn't fit in my calendar.
00:33:30.580
And that schedule syncing process is incredibly effective.
00:33:35.480
You will see a huge boost in your performance when it comes to matching expectations with
00:33:41.040
what you should be doing with your time, with your boss, with your employees, through this
00:33:44.400
simple process that literally takes 15 minutes a week.
00:33:47.860
And do you think, I mean, in your experience, when you've talked to people who've done this,
00:33:50.720
I think a lot of people are a little hesitant to have that conversation with their boss.
00:33:54.400
They're like, well, the boss says, I got to do this.
00:33:56.240
Have you found that managers actually enjoy having that conversation with their employees?
00:34:00.460
In my experience, managers are scared to have this conversation, but they're dying to.
00:34:05.620
Because what a manager has to be very cautious of is micromanaging.
00:34:10.940
And so this is one of those practices that actually is better implemented from the bottom
00:34:16.120
When a manager comes to an employee and says, I want to see every minute of your day, the
00:34:22.020
But when the employee comes to the boss and says, hey, boss, I really want to do everything
00:34:27.020
you've asked me to do, but I just can't fit it all into my schedule.
00:34:30.240
Can you help me figure out what to deprioritize?
00:34:33.360
Then we have transparency into how we spend our time.
00:34:37.180
And typically, a manager will be very amenable to that.
00:34:40.660
Whereas when it goes the other way around, you might get an opposite reaction.
00:34:44.000
So these are tactics you can use, I think high-level tactics beyond then just like block
00:34:48.420
stuff on my phone and whatever to help you get a control of those external triggers.
00:34:59.840
Let's talk about getting a hold of external triggers.
00:35:02.580
So the third step, I call hacking back the external triggers.
00:35:05.520
And the reason I call it hacking back is that I think everyone is pretty convinced that
00:35:18.420
It's not, you know, email and Slack channels, let's be honest here.
00:35:21.520
But they are definitely hacking our attention through all of these pings and dings.
00:35:28.680
Two-thirds of people with a smartphone never change their notification settings.
00:35:33.720
Can we really complain about technology addicting us if we haven't taken 10 minutes to change
00:35:38.880
So I devote a couple pages to that in the book, but that's kindergarten stuff, right?
00:35:42.400
Lots of books can tell you how to change your notifications on your phone.
00:35:45.180
If you don't do it, I don't want to hear that you're distracted, right?
00:35:48.140
Turn off those notification settings that don't serve you because Zuckerberg can't turn them
00:35:52.340
What we find is a much more pernicious source of distraction are the ones that people don't
00:35:58.640
Principally, if we work in an open floor plan office, turns out that these open floor plan
00:36:03.540
offices save companies a ton of money because they don't have to give everyone their
00:36:06.880
own private office like they used to have to a couple of generations ago.
00:36:10.700
But today, companies save all that money because they save a lot on real estate, but these open
00:36:16.400
floor plan offices are a hotbed of distraction.
00:36:19.740
Way more than our devices is Janice coming over and saying, hey, did you hear the latest
00:36:29.120
We want to interact with our colleagues, but we want to do it on our schedule, not just
00:36:33.000
when anybody feels like coming by our desk and interrupting us.
00:36:36.060
So every copy of Indistractable comes with a cardboard cutout that you pull out of the
00:36:42.260
book, you fold it into thirds, and it's what I call a screen sign.
00:36:46.500
You put this screen sign on your computer monitor, and it tells your colleagues, I'm
00:36:54.500
It's this bright red sign that you put on your computer screen.
00:36:57.140
Now, I know some people are thinking, well, I put on headphones, and headphones tell people
00:37:03.560
They're not bothering you for the wrong reasons.
00:37:06.360
They're not bothering you because they think you're watching YouTube videos.
00:37:12.620
You are doing work, and it's okay to ask people to come back a little bit later.
00:37:18.120
And so that's what this means by hacking back the external triggers, whether the external
00:37:21.980
triggers are our technology or being distracted by colleagues.
00:37:26.460
And I mean, this is kind of related to time syncing, blocking your schedule.
00:37:30.540
Another thing you talk about, and I've seen other places that I've done, I've tried in
00:37:33.420
my life and implement it with success, is set time for email, right?
00:37:37.380
Instead of just checking your email constantly, okay, the way you hack back on that, turn off
00:37:41.180
all the notifications, and then you're only going to check it at certain hours in the day.
00:37:45.760
So this technique is probably the most bang for the buck that you can possibly get from
00:37:54.940
So it turns out that between email and meetings, those two things, the time left over for the
00:38:01.820
average knowledge worker to do everything they have to do in their day is only an hour
00:38:06.500
So if you took out meetings and email from the average knowledge worker's day, they'd only
00:38:11.460
have about an hour and a half to do everything else in their day.
00:38:14.560
So that's why most work gets done outside of work on nights and weekends.
00:38:22.140
So here's a killer technique that I've been using now for a few years that has dramatically
00:38:27.120
reduced the amount of time I spend on email every day.
00:38:29.340
So the equation you want to remember when it comes to the time we spend on email is called
00:38:35.400
TNT stands for the total time you spend on email, the big T, equals the number of emails
00:38:40.520
you get times little t, the time you spend per email.
00:38:44.760
Number of emails you get multiplied by the time you spend per email.
00:38:48.060
So how do you reduce the total time you spend on email?
00:38:51.380
Well, the first principle is that if you want to get fewer emails, you have to send fewer
00:38:59.140
You make sure that you only send the emails that really need to be sent.
00:39:04.240
Because what most people do, they go chronologically through their email and they kind of catch
00:39:09.340
Whatever is at the top of their email inbox, that's what they try and reply to.
00:39:12.720
Some people try and get to this mythical place of inbox zero as quickly as possible, but that's
00:39:16.440
so counterproductive because the more emails you send per day, the more emails you're going
00:39:27.020
So instead, what you want to do, what we find is that where we spend the most time wasted
00:39:42.020
You open an email, you read it, you put it away.
00:39:44.300
You open the next email, you read it, you put it away.
00:39:47.360
Hour goes by, you open that email again, you read it, you put it away.
00:39:53.460
And then sometimes people open and check, you know, each email five, six, seven, maybe
00:39:59.520
Next time we have to create ourselves a little rule here that every email that we open, we
00:40:05.920
The first time we open that email, we have to answer this question.
00:40:17.960
If it needs a reply right this second, like a hair on fire type of problem, okay, go ahead
00:40:23.160
But everything else, you know, I don't subscribe to the two minute rule by David Allen.
00:40:26.660
And I think that's bad advice because you know what happens if it's a two minute rule
00:40:30.060
and you have a hundred emails that each require two minutes.
00:40:32.660
Well, now you're spending 200 minutes on email.
00:40:36.000
Instead, what we want to do is ask ourselves, when does this message need a reply?
00:40:41.300
Does it need to reply today or sometime this week?
00:40:45.460
Then we have time on our calendar every day for only the emails that need a reply today.
00:40:51.180
And we label each email that needs a reply today as such.
00:40:54.200
Now that's going to be about 10 to 20% of your email inbox is messages that need a reply
00:40:59.680
About 80% of your emails either never need a reply or they can wait a little while.
00:41:05.880
So then we have time on our time box calendar when we only reply to the emails that need
00:41:15.240
For me, I call it message Mondays, where it's a big four hour block where I flush through
00:41:23.040
Now you say to yourself, yeah, but what's the difference, right?
00:41:25.620
If I reply to it right away or if I reply to it in a week's time, isn't it the same thing?
00:41:30.960
There's this magic thing that happens when you let non-urgent emails wait.
00:41:38.260
This is called email decomposition, kind of like a compost pile.
00:41:42.340
What happens is when you let non-urgent emails wait a little while, most of them you don't need
00:41:48.420
to answer because people figure out stuff on their own or something just gets crushed under
00:41:54.240
the weight of some other priority and is no longer relevant.
00:41:57.600
And so by letting emails just simmer for a little while, letting them decompose, you'll
00:42:05.400
The ones that do, you go ahead and flush through all those in that time slot where you have to
00:42:11.520
go through the emails that require a response sometime this week.
00:42:14.480
And this will dramatically reduce the time you spend on email.
00:42:18.840
And you also have great advice and sort of tactics to use with Slack or other social networking
00:42:23.740
services that people can check out in the book.
00:42:25.420
I want to circle back to this idea of internal triggers.
00:42:27.780
So one thing you talk about is like being aware of those internal triggers and what they
00:42:32.780
So if you see, okay, I'm feeling sad, I'm going to check Instagram.
00:42:40.400
So if they're feeling sad, like they have something planned they're going to do instead
00:42:47.260
So the idea here is that we want to, there's three things we can do with these internal triggers.
00:42:51.760
We can reimagine the task, reimagine the trigger and reimagine our temperament.
00:42:57.940
And so when it comes to using these techniques in concert, when we know what we want to do in
00:43:04.240
So let's say you sit down and you say, okay, I'm going to work on this big project.
00:43:08.100
I've got this presentation I need to do, I need to do my taxes, I need to do this research,
00:43:12.020
I need to do this thing I'm not really crazy about doing, but I need to do it.
00:43:15.160
So you have that time on your calendar and now you find yourself getting distracted, okay?
00:43:24.300
I've written two books, but it's really, really hard.
00:43:28.580
I don't understand these authors who can just whip out a book in a few months' time.
00:43:36.620
I would just check email for a minute or look something up on Google or do some research.
00:43:41.980
And I would do this stuff thinking, oh, this is productive, right?
00:43:46.820
But the fact of the matter is, if it's not traction, if it's not what I plan to do, it's
00:43:54.540
It's the stuff that tricks you into thinking it's productive.
00:43:57.020
Oh, email, yeah, that needs to get done sometime.
00:43:59.120
No, if you're doing a task that you plan to do, like writing, like finishing that presentation,
00:44:04.520
whatever that thing that you've been putting off, the hard stuff that you didn't want to
00:44:07.360
do, if you're giving up that time to do just the urgent stuff, just the emails, which most
00:44:11.860
of the time aren't even urgent, then you're just as distracted as if you would be playing
00:44:19.380
So now I don't get distracted this way anymore.
00:44:22.180
So now when I sit down to write, when I find myself about to get distracted, what psychologists
00:44:28.000
tell us to do, and this comes from acceptance and commitment therapy, what they tell us to
00:44:31.800
do, one of the most empowering things we can do is to simply note the sensation, writing
00:44:37.360
down what it is you are feeling, without judgment, just with curiosity.
00:44:47.100
I'm anxious whether anybody's going to like this.
00:44:48.840
Whatever it might be, just write down that sensation on a piece of paper next to you.
00:44:53.460
Then what you want to do is to call, is called surf the urge, because in the moment when we
00:44:58.920
experience an emotion, it feels like it's going to last forever, right?
00:45:02.060
When we're angry or sad or happy or whatever, it feels like we're always going to be that
00:45:06.300
And that's never the case, that emotions are fleeting and then they subside, kind of like
00:45:12.040
And so what we want to do is to surf that urge with curiosity rather than contempt.
00:45:21.300
The blamers are the ones that say, oh, it's Facebook.
00:45:27.220
The shamers, and this is what I used to do, they say, oh man, I have a short attention
00:45:31.940
span or maybe I'm lazy or maybe there's something wrong with me.
00:45:34.920
Or we shame ourselves into thinking that there's something wrong with us.
00:45:39.080
And of course, neither of those answers are correct.
00:45:41.560
Blaming others or shaming yourself, neither of those things are the right approach.
00:45:44.780
Instead, the right approach is to explore that sensation with curiosity rather than contempt.
00:45:50.920
And one of the techniques that I use to surf the urge is called the 10-minute rule, where
00:45:54.560
you can tell yourself, I will give in to any distraction, whether that distraction is,
00:45:58.700
hey, I really want to check email right now, or I really want to look at my fantasy sports
00:46:04.640
I really want to eat that piece of chocolate cake.
00:46:11.760
I'll literally say into my cell phone, you know, set a timer for 10 minutes.
00:46:14.700
And my job is to just sit here and feel that sensation with curiosity instead of contempt,
00:46:23.960
And you will find that nine times out of 10, you will get back to the task at hand before
00:46:30.400
And this is a way, way more effective technique than sheer abstinence.
00:46:33.840
As we talked about earlier, when you obsess about it and say, no, no, no, no, no, no,
00:46:40.580
So strict abstinence oftentimes doesn't work for these kinds of things.
00:46:43.680
Instead, what we want to do is to learn how to manage these sensations and ride them like
00:46:49.600
Yeah, the 10-minute rule sounds like, you know, a tactic that people suggest if you,
00:46:54.580
So instead of like, okay, I want this thing, buying it now, like I'm going to wait till tomorrow.
00:47:05.320
So we've talked about getting an understanding of our internal triggers, doing the time boxing,
00:47:12.300
The last section on how to get a handle of distraction is using pre-commitments.
00:47:17.360
So for those who aren't familiar, what are pre-commitments?
00:47:19.640
And what are some examples of pre-commitments that can help people to become indistractable?
00:47:25.560
And this is something that I have to warn you about a little bit because we have to do it
00:47:29.540
A lot of people have tried some variation of these techniques and they find that they
00:47:33.660
backfire because they haven't done the other ones first.
00:47:37.100
So there's a time and place to use these pre-commitments.
00:47:38.980
A pre-commitment is basically deciding in advance what you are going to do so that when
00:47:44.160
you potentially get distracted, you have some kind of instrument in place that prevents you
00:47:51.220
So a good example of a pre-commitment is a retirement account where if you take out your
00:47:57.500
money before you've reached a certain age, you have a penalty that you have to pay because
00:48:02.600
it's preventing you from doing something you don't want to do.
00:48:07.180
Now we can use these pre-commitments to block out distraction.
00:48:14.200
There's an effort pact, a price pact, and an identity pact.
00:48:17.660
An effort pact is where we put some bit of work in between us and something we don't
00:48:23.920
So in my life, a good example of this is a few years ago, I found that my sex life was
00:48:28.120
really suffering and my wife and I had been married for 18 years and we were just not
00:48:32.580
being intimate with each other because every night we would go to bed and she would fondle
00:48:37.020
her iPhone and I would caress my iPad and we wouldn't spend any time together.
00:48:41.400
And we were going to sleep later and later because of our devices.
00:48:45.160
And that was really taking a toll on our marriage.
00:48:49.400
First, we followed these three steps that come before, right?
00:48:52.160
We mastered the internal triggers, made time for traction by putting in bedtime in our calendars,
00:48:56.820
It literally says not only bedtime, it says when it's time to get ready for bed.
00:49:00.120
We hacked back the external triggers so there's no screens in our bedroom anymore.
00:49:03.880
And now we come to the fourth step in terms of using a pact.
00:49:08.620
I went to the hardware store and I bought this $10 outlet timer.
00:49:13.360
And the outlet timer plugs into your wall and whatever you plug into the outlet timer will
00:49:19.420
turn off at a certain time of day or night, whatever you program into it.
00:49:22.920
So in my household, every night at 10 p.m., my internet router shuts off, okay?
00:49:31.540
Now, I actually bought a router that has this built in.
00:49:34.200
So now all the smart home devices like Amazon Alexa, et cetera, that stuff stays on.
00:49:38.320
But my computers, my iPhone, the iPads, all that stuff loses its internet connection at that time.
00:49:47.440
I could go fiddle around with the settings and do that stuff.
00:49:53.100
So this effort pact keeps you on track by making a little bit of work, keeping you away from
00:50:00.240
So as this last resort, remember, hacking back external triggers is about keeping those
00:50:06.540
Using pre-commitments to prevent distraction is about keeping yourself in.
00:50:16.260
Like he knew he'd go crazy listening to the sirens.
00:50:20.140
So he tied himself to the mast so he didn't have to worry about it.
00:50:26.440
Because that was something I've never heard of before.
00:50:35.300
And we know that it turns out that people who call themselves a certain moniker, they have
00:50:41.400
a certain identity, don't seem to expend any self-control or willpower on doing or not doing
00:50:48.740
something that's consistent with their identity.
00:50:51.400
And this is something I really like because I hate willpower.
00:50:57.820
I want to help people have systems in place so that they don't need any self-discipline.
00:51:01.640
And so this line of research was really interesting to me.
00:51:07.200
You know, there's that joke about how do you know someone's a vegan?
00:51:11.940
And not to pick on vegans because you can substitute any moniker there.
00:51:15.680
You know, you can substitute people who are paleo or people who are, you know, CrossFit or
00:51:22.340
When there's an identity involved, we become more likely to live up to that moniker.
00:51:26.660
So a devout Muslim doesn't ask themselves every day, ooh, should I have that gin and
00:51:32.260
No, devout Muslims don't drink alcohol, period.
00:51:36.380
They're not deciding, ooh, should I or should I not?
00:51:39.200
And so that's why the book is titled Indistractable.
00:51:45.440
And that word is very similar, it sounds like, indestructible.
00:51:49.340
And so I want people to start calling themselves this moniker.
00:51:53.820
So when someone complains to you, hey, I emailed you and you didn't reply back in 30 minutes
00:51:58.660
after I sent you the email, you can reply, oh, I'm sorry, I'm indistractable.
00:52:02.560
I don't interrupt my time that I planned when I'm doing something else to constantly be
00:52:08.920
I use this screen sign on my monitor because I'm indistractable.
00:52:18.240
Why should they bristle any more than people wearing ethnic garb or religious garb?
00:52:26.260
And so that identity pact, calling yourself indistractable, teaching others about how to
00:52:32.260
By the way, this is something we also see in religion.
00:52:34.500
You notice that every major religion has apostles, right?
00:52:39.840
And part of that, of course, is to spread the faith.
00:52:41.960
But more so from a psychological standpoint, the reason that every major religion has people
00:52:48.240
who proselytize is not only for the person they're trying to convert, but rather it's
00:52:55.620
So when you tell someone else that you are a Christian, you are a vegan, you are a whatever,
00:53:03.360
you are reinforcing your own identity and making it more likely for you to stay on the straight
00:53:09.880
And we can do the exact same thing when it comes to being indistractable.
00:53:14.840
So just from here on, everyone's going to start calling themselves indistractable.
00:53:20.940
So it sounds crazy for a while and maybe only the early adopters will do it.
00:53:23.880
And those are the people who are going to be more productive at work, more happy in their
00:53:27.400
home lives, more healthy because they actually work out and do what they say they're going to do.
00:53:31.840
And so hopefully, you know, in a few years, this will catch on.
00:53:34.580
But here's your opportunity to be an early adopter.
00:53:39.520
Well, Nir, where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
00:53:51.480
And when it comes to indistractable, you can go to indistractable.com.
00:53:54.660
There's an 80-page complimentary workbook that we couldn't fit into the hardback.
00:53:59.160
So you can get it for free at indistractable.com.
00:54:01.860
There's also a video course, all kinds of tools and resources there as well.
00:54:19.980
It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
00:54:22.360
You can find out more information about his work at his website, nirandfar.com.
00:54:28.860
Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash indistractable, where you can find links to resources,
00:54:39.520
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast.
00:54:44.900
Check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as
00:54:48.260
well as thousands of articles that we've written over the years about productivity, time management,
00:54:51.940
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00:54:54.180
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00:55:21.880
Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you not only to listen to the AOM Podcast,