Strategies for becoming less distractible and improving focus | Nir Eyal

1. 0:00 – 4:20

   Nir’s background

   1. NENir Eyal0:00

      I went to Alibaba and I bought myself one of these flip phones from China, you know, like we used to have in the 1990s with no apps, no internet connection. And then I got myself a word processor off of Ebay so that I, you know, had, I could just sit down and write and do the important stuff. And even when I stopped using all the technology, even when I got rid of all the apps, I would sit down at my desk and I'd say, "Oh, you know what? Um, there's that book that I've been meaning, want to do some research in." Or, "Let me just clean off my desk real quick." Or, "You know what? I should take out the trash." And I kept getting distracted because the problem is not our technology. The problem is our inability to deal with discomfort. So what I have adopted for myself and what I'd advise anyone who finds themselves in this situation, is to always identify what is that internal trigger? What is that itch that you are looking to escape when you get distracted? Because that is the source of 90% of our distractions. It's not the pings, dings, and rings. It's the feelings. But to me that's incredibly empowering because once you realize, wait a minute, it's just a feeling. It's all it is. It's just an emotion. Then you can have tools ready to go. You can have arrows in your quiver ready to take out as soon as you feel that discomfort.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:08

      (instrumental music) Today my guest is Nir Eyal. Nir is the author of two bestselling books, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. Nir spends his time teaching and consulting at the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. His books have sold over one million copies in over 30 languages. In our conversation, we get very tactical about how to become less distractible and how to get better at focusing on doing the work that you know you need to do. Nir shares at least a dozen tools and tricks that you can put into place today to help you stay focused and avoid getting distracted. After this conversation, I've already implemented some of these tactics and they're actually working. If you find these helpful or you want to go deeper, definitely check out Nir's book, Indistractable. With that, here's Nir Eyal after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Vanta, helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate your growth. Thousands of fast-growing companies like Gusto, Calm, Quora, and Modern Treasury trust Vanta to help build, scale, manage, and demonstrate their security and compliance programs and get ready for audits in weeks, not months. By offering the most in-demand security and privacy frameworks such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA, and many more, Vanta helps companies obtain the reports they need to accelerate growth, build efficient compliance processes, mitigate risks to their businesses, and build trust with external stakeholders. Over 5,000 fast-growing companies use Vanta to automate up to 90% of the work involved with SOC 2 and these other frameworks. For a limited time, Lenny's Podcast listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Go to vanta.com/lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash Lenny to learn more and to claim your discounts. Get started today. You fell in love with building products for a reason, but sometimes the day-to-day reality is a little different than you imagined. Instead of dreaming up big ideas, talking to customers and crafting a strategy, you're drowning in spreadsheets and roadmap updates and you're spending your days basically putting out fires. A better way is possible. Introducing Jira Product Discovery, the new prioritization and road mapping tool built for product teams by Atlassian. With Jira Product Discovery, you can gather all your product ideas and insights in one place and prioritize confidently, finally replacing those endless spreadsheets. Create and share custom product roadmaps with any stakeholder in seconds, and it's all built on Jira where your engineering teams are already working, so true collaboration is finally possible. Great products are built by great teams, not just engineers. Sales, support, leadership, even Greg from finance. Anyone that you want can contribute ideas, feedback, and insights in Jira Product Discovery for free. No catch. And it's only $10 a month for you. Say goodbye to your spreadsheets and the never-ending alignment efforts. The old way of doing product management is over. Rediscover what's possible with Jira Product Discovery. Try for free at atlassian.com/lenny. That's atlassian.com/lenny.

2. 4:20 – 7:43

   How to become less distractible

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky4:22

      Nir, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

   2. NENir Eyal4:27

      Thanks so much, Lenny. Great to be here.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky4:29

      I feel like we have a chance to record the most valuable hour in podcast history because it could give people more time to do the things they want to do. And this is based on a book that you wrote called Indistractable, which is all about helping people become less distracted, become better at focus. And in my opinion, it might be the most essential skill in the workplace today. And so what I'm hoping to do today in our chat is just basically give people as many tactical skills and pieces of advice and tools to become less distractible and to get better at focus. How does that sound?

   4. NENir Eyal4:59

      That sounds great. I love that you're setting the expectations high. I'll try and meet them.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky5:03

      Well now we got to hit 'em. Okay, so here's the question. I'll just start really broad and let's just see where this goes. My question is just how does one become less distractible/how do I become less distractible?

   6. NENir Eyal5:14

      (laughs) Okay, so there's a, there's a deeper motivation here is that-

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky5:17

      Absolutely.

   8. NENir Eyal5:17

      ...I need help, which is great. That's my favorite thing to do is to actually, you know, get concrete with people a- about what their specific challenges are. But let me, let me back up here. So, uh, this is what I spent five years writing a book about, uh, because why did it take me five years to write a book? Because I was so distracted. So I wrote this book for me more than anyone else. You know, that- that's the only reason I write books, is not because of what I know but because of what I want to know. And I discovered there were so many myths and tropes and just flat out harmful things that I was doing to hurt my own productivity. And, uh, a- and when I really went down to first principles and looked at the research, uh, I found that there were so many things that I was, I was doing wrong, but since I've, I've changed my ways and adopted what, what the research literature says about distraction, it's improved my life in inconceivable ways. I mean, I, I'm in the best shape of my life at 45 years old. I have a better relationship with my family than ever. I'm more productive at work than ever before.... not because I didn't know what to do. That, that's what I find is, is, uh, really emblematic of, of people in, in, in today's, is not that we don't know what to do. It used to be maybe, okay, our grandparents, they didn't know what to do because the information was scarce. They had to go to the library and look things up. Well, today, with the internet, we all basically know what to do. And if you don't know what to do, Google it, right? You can find the answer out there. But we all basically know common sense stuff, like if you want to get in shape, you have to exercise and eat right. Okay? You don't need a diet book to tell you that. If you want to have better relationships with your family, you have to be fully present with people. If you want to do better at work, you have to do the hard work that other people don't want to do. We already know these things. What we don't know is how to get out of our own way, how to stop getting distracted. And so that was certainly my problem, and so what I wanted to do was really dive into the problem because the conventional solutions didn't work for me. Right? When I have a problem in my life, I'll, uh, I'll think about it, I'll write about it, I'll talk to friends, I'll talk to my wife about it. If I still can't figure it out, I'll read books about it. And what the conventional wisdom out there, written by, you know, a lot of college professors that are all tenured, is stop using technology. Right? Stop checking email. Get off social media. It's melting your brain. But that's not very helpful, right? Like maybe if you have tenure, that's okay. But I can't stop using technology. My career will plummet. I have to use these tools. So I wanted much more practical advice, and what I discovered was that the root cause of distraction is much more interesting and the solution is far more empowering than stop using technology, technology's evil, it's

3. 7:43 – 12:52

   Understanding distraction and traction

   1. NENir Eyal7:43

      melting your brain. So where, where do we begin? May- maybe the best place to start is by first, before we s- dive into the tactics around how do we become indistractable, the first place to start is, what is distraction? Right? That, that, understanding the, the term really, really matters, and the best way to understand what distraction is, is to understand what distraction is not. What's the opposite of distraction? So if you ask most people, "What's the opposite of distraction?" they'll tell you focus. Right? "I don't want to be distracted. I want to be focused." That's not exactly right. And in fact, the opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction is traction. Becomes pretty easy when you look at both words. Traction, distraction. They're opposites. Because both words come from the same Latin root, trahere, which means to pull, and they both end in the same six letters, A-C-T-I-O-N, that spells action, reminding us that distraction is not something that happens to us. It is an action that we ourselves take. So traction, by definition, is any action that pulls you towards what you say you were going to do, things you do with intent, things that move you closer to your values and help you become the kind of person you want to become. Those are acts of traction. Now, the opposite of traction, distraction, is any action that pulls you away from what you plan to do, further away from your goals, further away from becoming the kind of person you want to become. And what separates traction from distraction is one word, and that one word is intent. I love this Dorothy Parker quote. She said, "The time you plan to waste is not wasted time." So I think we need to stop medicalizing and moralizing, you know, h- what people do with their time. Why is it that, you know, uh, someone going on Reddit or on social media or watching a YouTube video, that's somehow morally inferior to watching a football game on TV? It's not. Anything you want to do with your time and attention is fine as long as it's done with intent, as long as you're doing it on your schedule and not s- someone else's, certainly not the tech company's schedule. So anything you do with intent is traction. Anything else is distraction. So what I discovered, for me, was that, uh, I was getting tricked by distraction, in that the most pernicious form of distraction I discovered was the kind I did- didn't even realize was distracting me. So let, let me know if this sounds familiar to you, Lenny. I would sit down at my desk. I would look at my to-do list. By the way, we can talk about why to-do lists are one of the worst things you can do for your personal productivity. We can get back to that later. But I would look, I would sit down at my desk, and I'd say, "Okay, I've got that big important project. That's what I'm gonna do this morning. I'm not gonna get distracted. Nothing's gonna get in my way. Here I go. I'm gonna get started. But first, let me check some email." Right?

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky10:17

      Are you watching me? 'Cause this happens to me-

   3. NENir Eyal10:19

      (laughs)

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky10:19

      ... every morning. You gotta stop.

   5. NENir Eyal10:21

      This is totally autobiographical.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky10:22

      You should maybe stop.

   7. NENir Eyal10:22

      This is what I used to do all the ti- "Let me, oh, let me just scroll that Slack channel. What, what's everybody at the office doing? Oh, let me just catch up on industry news. That's important. That's part of my job, right? I'm being productive, right?" And what I didn't realize is that distraction was tricking me into prioritizing the urgent and the easy stuff at the expense-

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky10:39

      Yeah.

   9. NENir Eyal10:39

      ... of the hard and important work I had to do to move my life and career forward. So just because it's a work related task doesn't mean it's not a distraction. In fact, that's the w- worst kind of distraction, far worse than playing Candy Crush or whatever, because then you know you're putzing around. Then at least it's obvious that you're distracted. But if you're just checking work email, you feel productive, even though that's a distraction because it's not what you said you wanted to do with your time and attention. So now we can, we have this framework, right? We have traction, we have distraction. Now there's one more thing that's super important, then we'll have the entire picture so that we can stop-

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky11:11

       Mm-hmm.

   11. NENir Eyal11:12

       ... uh, stop, uh, thinking about the model and actually get to, uh, brass tacks of what do we actually do. Now that we have traction and distraction, the other thing we have to consider are triggers. We have two kinds of triggers. We have external triggers. These are things in our outside environment, the usual suspects, the pings, the dings, the rings, all this stuff in our outside environment which we tend to blame for distraction. But studies find that's only 10% of the reason we get distracted. 10% of the time it's because of something outside of us. What's the other 90%? Turns out 90% of the time that we get distracted, it's not because of what's happening outside of us, but that most distraction begins from within. Boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety. That is the cause of 90% of our distractions. So whether it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, you are always going to get distracted from one thing or another unless you understand the root cause of the problem. So step number one to becoming indistractable-... is to master those internal triggers or they will become your master. Then step number two, now we're working around those four points. Step number two, make time for traction. We can talk about that. Hack back the external triggers. And step number four, prevent distraction with pacts. So, you asked a big question, I gave you a big answer. That's the overall framework. That's a strategy. Tactics are what you do. Strategy is why you do it. So, I wanted to explain the, the strategy before we got into the tactics.

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky12:36

       Amazing, I love this word traction (clears throat) because it relates to kind of the other side of this podcast of growth, product market fit, building products people want, like getting traction with users. So, I really like that there's this additional way of thinking about traction, which is basically not being distracted.

4. 12:52 – 13:53

   The four steps to becoming indistractable

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky12:52

      Can you just repeat the four steps again for people to have this in mind?

   2. NENir Eyal12:55

      Step number one, master internal triggers. Step number two, make time for traction. So, this is where we're turning our values into time. We could talk about how to do that. Step number three is hack back the external triggers. This is where we get into the pings, dings, and rings, not just the obvious stuff like your phone, your computer. I take about a page and a half to talk about that. That's kind of kindergarten stuff.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky13:14

      Mm-hmm.

   4. NENir Eyal13:14

      But what about all the non-obvious external triggers? What about stupid meetings that didn't need to be called? What about emails that didn't need to be sent and received? What about our kids? Our kids are, are wonderful. I know you're, you're a new dad. They're fantastic to have kids. But they can also be a source of distraction. So, how do we deal with all those external triggers? And then finally, prevent distraction with pacts. And pacts are this firewall, this last resort against distraction that we can use to, to keep distraction at bay, and it's really about these four steps in concert in this order that anyone can use to become indistractable.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky13:47

      Awesome. Does this spell something c- clever, by the way?

   6. NENir Eyal13:50

      No, I, I didn't have an acronym, I just... But I do have a pretty picture.

5. 13:53 – 18:49

   Mastering internal triggers

   1. NENir Eyal13:53

      (laughs)

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky13:53

      Awesome. So, let's go through this and I'd love specifically the example you shared. I think many people run into this. There's a hard thing I need to do and I, I'm just gonna go check my email and Twitter instead.

   3. NENir Eyal14:01

      Yeah.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky14:01

      I feel like that's a very common distraction. Uh, and so sharing, getting to that at some point would be awesome, but otherwise let's get into these four steps.

   5. NENir Eyal14:09

      Yeah. Well, we, we can absolutely do that. So, is that, is that something you encounter? It sounds like, uh, it is.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky14:13

      100% every time. I have my to-do list-

   7. NENir Eyal14:15

      Yeah.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky14:15

      ... work on next week's post, and then I'm like, "Oh, let me just go check Twitter. Maybe let me tweet a-"

   9. NENir Eyal14:20

      Yeah.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky14:20

       "... tweet something and that'll be fun." And then-

   11. NENir Eyal14:22

       Totally.

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky14:23

       ... check my email. Oh, inbox zero. Let's get all the way to zero. Ah, that's cool." Okay, now the day is over.

   13. NENir Eyal14:28

       Exactly, exactly. And by the way, we are cut from the same cloth. This is exactly the pattern I used to get into, and, uh, and, and I knew I wasn't doing my best because I wasn't putting in the time to the things that were most important. I was doing just what was easy and what was urgent, and that's not good enough. So, the first step, so if we use this model, step number one is master the internal triggers. So, for, for you, Lenny, so when you say, "Okay, I know I've got a big, do this big important thing, uh, but now I'm going to go check email," I would guess that there's some kind of underlying emotion that you're trying to escape. Do you know if you can... Can, can you, like, let's put yourself in the, y- y- y- the shoes that you were in when you said, "I was going to do that big important thing, but now I'm going to check email instead." Do you, do you remember the last time that happened, by the way?

   14. LRLenny Rachitsky15:11

       Every morning. (laughs)

   15. NENir Eyal15:13

       Every morning.

   16. LRLenny Rachitsky15:13

       Um-

   17. NENir Eyal15:13

       This morning?

   18. LRLenny Rachitsky15:15

       Yeah, this morning.

   19. NENir Eyal15:16

       Okay, perfect. Perfect. Do you recall what you were feeling right before you went to Twitter or checked email or do the thing, did the thing that you didn't want to do as opposed to the thing you said you were going to do? What was that emotion?

   20. LRLenny Rachitsky15:26

       I don't know if this is, I don't know if this is an emotion or a feeling, but there's just this, like, I need to get serious and start using my brain and there's going to be this, like, deep work moment where I just get real deep.

   21. NENir Eyal15:36

       Mm-hmm.

   22. LRLenny Rachitsky15:36

       And I, it takes a lot of effort to push me into that, you know. Not... Sometimes easier, sometimes harder. So, maybe it's like avoiding this like, "Oh, okay, I'm gonna really have to think." It's like, I guess it's the fear of the brain starting to really have to work.

   23. NENir Eyal15:51

       Yeah. Is, that's hard work, right? So, maybe it's a bit of laziness, right?

   24. LRLenny Rachitsky15:54

       Yeah.

   25. NENir Eyal15:54

       Maybe it's a bit of momentum. It's-

   26. LRLenny Rachitsky15:56

       Yeah.

   27. NENir Eyal15:56

       There's this uncomfortable feeling of like, "I don't..." This cold start problem.

   28. LRLenny Rachitsky16:00

       Yeah.

   29. NENir Eyal16:00

       "Oh, I don't really want to do it right now." So, this is incredibly important and I appreciate your, your candor here around what you feel because all of us experience it and we don't want to talk about it. We want to think that it's, "Oh, I'll just grayscale my phone," or, or, "I'll just turn off notifications and that's going to solve the problem," and it never does. And let me tell you, I tried all of it, right? I, I went to Alibaba and I bought myself one of these flip phones from China, you know, like we used to have in the 1990s with no apps, no internet connection. And then I got myself a word processor off of eBay so that I, you know, had, I could just sit down and write and do the important stuff. And even when I stopped using all the technology, even when I got rid of all the apps, I would sit down at my desk and I'd say, "Oh, you know what? Um, there's that book that I've been meaning to do some research in," or, "Let me just clean off my desk real quick." Or, "You know what? I should take out the trash." And I kept getting distracted because the problem is not our technology. The problem is our inability to deal with discomfort. So, what I'd, what I have adopted for myself and what I'd advise anyone who finds themselves in this situation is to always identify what is that internal trigger. What is that itch that you are looking to escape when you get distracted? Because that is the source of 90% of our distractions. It's not the pings, dings, and rings. It's the feelings. But to me, that's incredibly empowering because once you realize, wait a minute, it's just a feeling. That's all it is. It's just an emotion. Then you can have tools ready to go. You can have arrows in your quiver ready to take out as soon as you feel that discomfort. So, let me give you one tool I, I, that I use every single day. Uh, feel free to, to, to use it next time you feel the same, same problem. Uh, it's called the ten-minute rule. And this is just one of a dozen different techniques that you can use that I put in the book, but this is one that I, I use almost every single day. So, for me, you know, I've been a professional writer now for over a decade and writing is never easy. Like, I hear people say like, "Oh, just form a writing habit." I think that's ridiculous. I don't know what they're talking about, right? A, a habit is defined as a behavior done with little or no conscious thought. I don't know how to write out of habit. Writing is always hard fricking work. I've written two bestsellers, thousands of articles, and let me tell you, it's always difficult. It's hard, and all I want to do when I write is just Google this one thing, or let me just check the news real quick, or let me just do anything but the actual writing.So, here's what I do.

   30. LRLenny Rachitsky18:15

       By the way, there's a great quote that I'll share real quick about this that sh- I think I share often on this podcast that I think it's, like, falsely attributed to Hemingway, but it's that writing is easy. You just sit down at the keyboard and bleed.
6. 18:49 – 23:20

   Surfing the urge with a 10-minute timer

   1. NENir Eyal18:49

      the work is really difficult. So, here's what I do. Every time that I'm tempted to go do something else, which is all the time, what I will do is I will take out a timer, right? I'll- I'll take out my phone and I'll say, "Set a timer for 10 minutes." I'll put- I'll put the phone down and my job is to, for those 10 minutes, when I- whenever I'm ready, get back to the task at hand or do what's called surf the urge. Surfing the urge acknowledges that these emotions are like waves. They crest and then they subside. But that's not how we think about emotions. Most of us think about emotions as always being there. If I feel bored, I feel like I'm always gonna be bored. If I'm frustrated, it feels like I'm always gonna be frustrated. But that's never the case. Emotions are like waves. So, your job is to set that timer for 10 minutes and realize you can do just about anything for just 10 minutes, right? So, the idea is not to say, "Don't do it." We know that this technique that a lot of people use of abstinence, telling yourself, "Don't do that, that's bad," actually can backfire. And we can talk about the psychology, if that's interesting, of why abstinence backfires. But a much healthier technique is not to tell yourself no. It's to tell yourself not yet, right? You're not saying no. You're saying not yet. And so you can do just about anything for 10 minutes. So, what I tell myself is, "Okay. I'm just gonna wait 10 minutes before I check email, before I scroll social media, before I Google something that is just trying to procrastinate doing the work." I can do that. I'm a grown man. I can do whatever I want. Okay, I can do that in 10 minutes. And so for those 10 minutes, all I have to do is either get back to the task at hand, right? Get back to writing or surf the urge, which is simply experiencing that sensation, acknowledging, "You know what? This is hard work. That's okay. That's why I'm feeling frustrated. That's why I'm feeling bored. That's why I'm feeling anxious. That's why I have this cold start around, like, I don't really want to do this work, because it's difficult." So, what I do is I take a deep breath and I repeat a mantra that I made up for myself. You can make up your own mantra. My personal mantra, whenever I feel this internal trigger, is I remind myself this. I say, "This is what it feels like to get better. This is what it feels like to get better." And just saying that for as long as I need to, until that emotion crests and subsides, and then get back to work. What you will find nine times out of 10 is that by the time those 10 minutes are up, you will have forgotten about that sensation. You'll be right back in the task at hand. And so that's what's called the 10-minute rule. And of course, what you're doing over time is that the 10-minute rule can become the 12-minute rule, can become the 20-minute rule, and most importantly, you are proving to yourself that you have agency, that you said you were going to focus on a task and you did. That's the most important part. The- the flip that we need to, to change in people's minds is this ridiculous belief that technology is hijacking our brains, that there's nothing we can do about distraction, that our, uh, focus is being stolen. It's not being stolen. We're giving it away. And so what we need to do is to empower ourselves by showing ourselves in practice, as well as in theory, that we can, uh, postpone that distraction when we say we will.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky21:46

      What I like about this is, one, it's kind of like the Pomodoro technique, but it's shorter. The 10 minutes, I think, is a really clever tweak versus 20 minutes, which a lot of people recommend. And then, I guess a couple follow-up questions. Do you do this one time in the morning and then not come back to it? Is this like a jump start for the day and then you start... Like, I find, if I start a thing like this, it won't be 10 minutes. It'll be, like, an hour because I'm like, "Okay. I did the hard thing. I'm into it. I'm just gonna keep working." So, is this like a jump start for the morning or do you come back to this throughout the day?

   3. NENir Eyal22:13

      So, you can do it whenever you find yourself slipping off track. And so the- the- the Pomodoro is a version of this. I don't think it's complete enough because Pomodoro just says, "Set the timer, do it." Okay, fine. And that- and that's great. If it works for you... By the way, anything I'm saying right now, if the thing is working for you, if your life is awesome and you're doing what you said you're going to do, maybe this isn't the podcast. Maybe my book isn't the book for you, right? I'm talking to the people who, for whatever reason, you know you're capable of more. You know you're drifting off track. Maybe you, if like me, you said you were gonna exercise but you didn't, or you said you were gonna eat right but you don't. You said you were gonna work on that big task but you procrastinate. That's- that's really who I was and that's who I wrote this book for. Uh, a- a- and so you can use that technique whenever you get distracted. It's not the whole picture, okay? So, it's super important. Remember, we talked about those four steps. This is just step number one. There's about a dozen different things you can do. Maybe this particular 10-minute rule doesn't work for you, doesn't work for everyone. There might be other techniques you use so there's dozens of different techniques just about this step around mastering internal triggers. But the next step, to answer your question of, "Well, how long do I go for? Do I do it for an hour if now I'm in the zone?" And my, uh, answer is emphatically no. You don't go as long as you think you-

7. 23:20 – 25:02

   Making time for traction with a timebox schedule

   1. NENir Eyal23:20

      you can. What you want to do, and this is step number two, is you're making time for traction by turning your values into time, right? Which means you are going to make a time box schedule, because you cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. I'll say that again. You can't call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. So, for me at least, when I would succumb to, "Oh, let me just check email for a quick minute, let me just see what's happening on Twitter for a quick minute," part of that was because I would justify to myself, "Well, this is a work-related task. I gotta do it sometime," and there wasn't a specific time to do it on my calendar, so I would keep thinking, "Well, I gotta do it sometime, might as well just do it now." And that's a huge mistake because if you can't look at your calendar and say, "Oh, that's traction," okay? Check email, write the blog post, post the podcast, go on social media. If that's not what's written in your calendar-... if, if, if it's not there, it's a distraction. And so it's not just work-related stuff. Like I literally have time in my calendar, spend time with my daughter, go on social media, watch Netflix. It's in my calendar. So now I took what was previously distraction and I turned it into traction by putting it on my schedule. So you actually do this through the day you have, "I'm gonna check Twitter during this time of the day. I'm gonna hang out with my daughter during this time of the day." Exactly. And so, and you're, you're adjusting it never in the day. So you never want to do that. You always want to make sure you're doing it the day before. And so what I do once a week, Sunday evenings, it takes me maybe 10 minutes a week, 8:00 p.m., I sit down and I look at my schedule for the week ahead and I ask myself, "Does this schedule reflect my values?"

8. 25:02 – 28:36

   How to turn your values into time

   1. NENir Eyal25:02

      What are values? Values are attributes of the person you want to become. I'll say it again. Values are attributes of the person you want to become. So there's three life domains, you, your relationships, and finally your work. So what you got to do is you look at your calendar for the week ahead and you ask yourself, "How would the person I want to become spend time taking care of themselves?" That's the you domain. If you can't take care of yourself, you can't take care of others, you can't make the world a better place. So then you put in your calendar how you want to take care of yourself. What might that include? Well, time for rest. We all know how important sleep is. But I used to yell at my daughter and say, "Oh, you know, it's your bedtime. You got to get to bed." And then one day she said to me, "Daddy, do you have a bedtime?" She was absolutely right. I was a hypocrite 'cause I, I know how important sleep is and I didn't have a bedtime. Now I have a bedtime. It's in my schedule. Then put in time for whatever else is important to you. Is reading important to you? Is prayer important to you? Is meditation, is exercise, is video games, is that important to you? Great. Whatever's important to you according to your values, put it in your schedule. Then you're gonna put your relationships in, right? So don't let the relationships in your life get whatever scraps of time are left over. Put time in your schedule for your significant other, for your kids, for your buddies, right? How many of us are trapped in this loneliness epidemic because we don't make time for our closest relationships? Including adult friendships. Don't let those wither away. Put time in your schedule for those as well. We know that, that most friendships, they don't die in some big blowout. Relationships starve to death because we don't invest in them. Put time in your schedule for those relationships. We can talk about how to do that as well. Then finally, the work domain involves two kinds of work. We have what's called reactive work and reflective work. Reactive work, reacting to notifications, reacting to emails, reacting to taps on the shoulder from your colleagues. That's gonna be time, that's gonna be part of everybody's day. I get that. But don't let that be your entire day, because what most people do, they habituate into not wanting to think. They don't want to think what's important. "So just let me look at my email inbox. My email inbox will tell me what to do." You know, "What, what's really important for my business? Uh, that's, that's really hard. I don't really want to think about that. I'll, I'll just, I'll look at my to-do list and I'll start ticking off easy tasks to do that make me feel productive." That's terrible. What you want to do instead is to book time in your schedule for this reflective work time, which is where you can, you, you do the kind of work that requires you to work without distraction. Planning, strategizing, thinking, for god sakes, can only be done without distraction. So that fills up your calendar as well. And what you're going to find, that there's never enough time for everything, which is good. Because what this forces you to do, and this is one of the main reasons why to-do lists suck, is because to-do lists have no constraints. You can always add more to a to-do list. You can always add more. But here's what happens. This is what happened to me. I would get home from work, I'd have a very busy day, and I'd look at my to-do list and it's 100 items long, and I'd think, "Wow, I've been working real hard all day and look at all this stuff I still didn't do. Loser." And so day after day, week after week, month after month, I was reinforcing this self-image as someone who doesn't know how to manage their time. And then I started saying stupid stuff like, "Oh, maybe I'm no good at time management. Maybe I have undiagnosed ADHD. Maybe there's something wrong with me." There's nothing wrong with me. There was something wrong with this very stupid to-do list method, which doesn't force you to understand that there are trade-offs, that you have to prioritize properly, and that can only be done with constraints. And that constraints come from your calendar. So you're turning your values into time by making time for traction and having this calendar. And then, only then, you can look at your calendar and say, "Ah. Whatever it is I plan to do, that's traction. Everything else is distraction."

9. 28:36 – 29:22

   Booking deep work time

   1. NENir Eyal28:36

      I want to share a couple things that worked for me that are very much along these lines. One is booking a, I call it deep work time within the day. This was like the only thing I had in the calendar, so I didn't, I didn't do the other things, which I think would have been really helpful. But I had a, I called it deep work time, I will slap you if you book anything over this meeting. (laughs) Love it. (laughs) And I did that every Monday morning, Wednesday morning, and Friday sometime. And I found that's- Who was slapping you? Uh, I would be slapping the person that booked time over that slot, and nobody booked

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky29:05

      Oh, okay. Got it, got it.

   3. NENir Eyal29:06

      And I don't know if that's, uh, allowed these days. I don't know how this... (laughs) Depends who you're booking with, I guess. Yeah, make it a little less aggressive maybe. But, uh, that worked a ton, just like it was like a two or three hour block of deep work time, and that made a big dent in my ability to have time fo- to focus 'cause people weren't booking me

10. 29:22 – 31:00

    Making pacts to prevent distraction

    1. NENir Eyal29:22

       as a PM. Yeah. I love it. I l- And by, by the way, just I, I want to hear more of these, but that's, that illustrates a really good point, that when the stakes are high enough, right? I hear people all the time saying, "I just can't find the time to focus and I can't get this done and it's impossible these days." And then I say, "Well, let, let's make a little wager here," right? Let's say people, I get this around physical fitness a lot or, you know, somebody says, "Oh, I, I want to be an author. How do I do that? How do I write the book? I can't seem to find the time." And, and they constantly say why they can't, they can't, they can't. There's this constraint. My boss wants this. My kids want that. They have every kind of excuse. And then I say, "Okay, let's say that, um, uh, if you don't work out s- you know, 8:00 a.m. Monday morning, if you don't work out, you're gonna have to pay me $10,000. Are you gonna do it? Are you gonna work out?" "Well, of course, I'm gonna work out," right? Easily, yes, of course. "Well, it's..." Okay, so we've established you can. Now we're just negotiating the price. So this has to do with step four, around making pacts, making what's called a pre-commitment, and one of them is a price pact. This is how I got in shape. I used to be clinically obese. Today I'm in the best shape of my life partially because I use these pacts. Now, the important thing is you have to do this last.... if you don't figure out the internal triggers, most importantly, if you don't make time for traction in your schedule, if you don't hack back the external triggers, this fourth step won't work. But as a last line of defense, it's incredibly impactful. And we can talk about how to do that as well.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky30:39

       I heard the, uh, All In guys did this to lose weight. I think Sax and Jason Calacanis-

    3. NENir Eyal30:42

       Oh yeah, I didn't know that.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky30:43

       ... did a pact too. I think it was, like, a lot of money.

    5. NENir Eyal30:45

       Oh, very cool.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky30:45

       Like, $100,000 or something wild for, uh-

    7. NENir Eyal30:49

       Oh, that's awesome. A- action- that's what I used to finish this book as well. Maybe they read my book, I wonder, 'cause I- I- I talked about this exact situation.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky30:55

       And, and you hit it, it sounds like. You made it.

    9. NENir Eyal30:57

       I did, yep. (laughs)

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky30:58

        Okay. Great.

11. 31:00 – 34:31

    The problem with to-do lists

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky31:00

       Another trick I'll share that I found really useful around the to-do list. So, I use to-do lists, but I've learned that I can't just let them grow, is when I was, when I had a regular job, I wrote it down on a, in a notebook, and every morning, I rewrote the to-do list so that it reminded me, like, "Okay, I've copied this thing 10 times now. I'm not gonna do it. I'm just gonna push it up." So that act of just rethinking about it every day was really impactful. But that works for people that are okay with an analog to-do list. If it's digital, that doesn't go away.

    2. NENir Eyal31:28

       Yeah. Yeah, s- so that's, uh, th- there's nothing wro- I just want to clarify, there's nothing wrong with taking things out of your brain and putting them on a piece of paper. That's, that's wonderful. But that's step one. And so, the big mistake that people make is they put stuff on their to-do list, and then they wake up in the morning and what are they supposed to do? "Well, I'll do whatever's on my to-do list." And so, what they tend to do is the easy stuff, right? I've known people, I had, hate to tell you, I used to do this myself too. I would do a task and then forget to put it on my to-do list. So I would go back in and write it on my to-do list just so I could check it off the box. Right? How messed up is that? Uh, it's ridiculous. And this, I think this is something that I, I think really does need to change, is that we have this culture where checking stuff off your list is like our little emotional reward, right? But that's, that's ridiculous. We need to stop measuring ourselves by how many cute little boxes we check off, and rather, a much more important metric is not, "Did I finish the task?" I don't want you to track, "Did I finish?" That's not the important part. Okay? But people are probably scratching their heads, "What do you mean? Isn't it all about finishing what I have to do?" No. The important part is figuring out your productivity. It's figuring out how efficient you are at using your time. So, a much more beneficial metric to track is not, "Did I check off the box? Did I finish?" Rather, it's, "Did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction?" I'll say it again. "Did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction?" Because that is the only way to understand how long things take you. The problem with to-do lists is that there is no feedback loop. There's no feedback mechanism. How long do things take you? So, this is why you have what's called the planning fallacy with people who use to-do lists, which says that, on average, studies have found that tasks take people three times longer to finish than they estimate. Why does that happen? Because when you say, "Okay, here's that thing on the to-do list. I'm gonna work on that and, you know, and see how long it takes me to get it done." So, you work on it for five minutes, and then you get an email, and then you get a notification, and then you start talking to one of your colleagues, and you never actually track how long that thing took you to finish. As opposed to when you say, "Look, I'm gonna work on that task for as long as I said I would, but without distraction. That's it. That's all I'm gonna do," what you now have is a metric of how far you got. "So, I worked on that presentation. Uh, it needs to be 30 slides long, and I worked on it for 30 minutes, and I finished two slides." Okay, great. Well, now I know that I need 10 more of those time boxes to finish the entire task. And this is why it turns out that people who measure themselves the way I espouse of people who say, "I'm just going to measure myself based on did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction, regardless of whether I finished?" The kicker here is they actually finish more. They get more done than the to-do list people.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky34:14

       Mm-hmm.

    4. NENir Eyal34:14

       Because now, they understand how long things take them to finish, and they can appropriately time that, as opposed to what most of us did, what I used to do before I wrote Indistractable, was procrastinate, procrastinate, procrastinate. "Oh, crap, I gotta get this done. The deadline's here, so I'm gonna work all night to finish it." And of course, that's not when you do your best work. And it's very stressful.

12. 34:31 – 36:08

    The drawback of deadlines

    1. NENir Eyal34:31

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky34:31

       Since you mentioned deadlines, do you have any advice, lessons on that as a tool to get things done?

    3. NENir Eyal34:36

       What we find is that, you know, people who are very deadline motivated, they do finish what they say they're going to do, but of course, the quality is crap. (laughs) It's, they're, they're, they're typically getting by by the skin of their teeth. And I, I did this all the time, and this is, like, my entire, uh, college career and my MBA at Stanford career, was waiting, waiting, waiting, and then, you know, finishing at the last moment. And I could do well enough. But of course, I could do so much better if I worked without distraction, right? And so, it wasn't until... And we all know this, basically, right? We know that putting in a little bit of diligent effort a little bit at a time with plenty of lead time is gonna give us a much better result than cramming at the last minute. But the, the, the reason people don't do this is because they don't understand how important it is, one, to manage those internal triggers. Like, if you're constantly thinking, "Ugh, that project is gonna suck. I don't really wanna work on it. I want- don't wanna make those sales calls. I don't wanna make that presentation. I don't wanna do that thing that, that feels uncomfortable," and you don't have the tools to deal with that discomfort, you're always gonna procrastinate.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky35:36

       Mm-hmm.

    5. NENir Eyal35:36

       Because fundamentally, procrastination is an emotion regulation problem. It's not a character flaw. There's nothing wrong with you. You're not broken. It's just that you don't have the tools to deal with emotional discomfort. And that's the part that everybody skips over is that we don't want to talk about these uncomfortable feelings. But that's where it has to start. And then, the, the, the part that people don't do is, is actually planning out not the task itself, but the time to work on the task without distraction. That's the part that, that, uh, if, if, if you can implement that step two that I talked about, making time for traction, that becomes a game changer.

13. 36:08 – 39:54

    Distraction is an emotion regulation problem

    1. NENir Eyal36:08

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky36:08

       So, I've tried things like this, where it's here throughout the day. "I'm gonna try this. I'm gonna do this and this, this." And I just don't end up doing it. Things come up or I just get distracted. I'm like, "Ah, whatever." I guess one question is, how often do you find yourself doing the things you set out in your calendar? And then, two, any other advice for actually staying on track and doing-

    3. NENir Eyal36:25

       Yeah.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky36:26

       ... things you've set out to do?

    5. NENir Eyal36:27

       Okay. So wa- number one, did you have tools in place to deal with the discomfort? What did you do when you didn't feel like doing something?

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky36:32

       I did not. I did not have that like surfing the wave in the 10-minute trick. And I'm curious if there's other tricks in that bucket actually. But no, I did not.

    7. NENir Eyal36:39

       Absolutely, yeah. So tha- that's the most important thing, right?

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky36:41

       Mm-hmm.

    9. NENir Eyal36:41

       Is... An- and that is the most important section, that's why I put it at the front of the book. Because again, procrastination is an emotion regulation problem. Becau- a- and I think this is fascinating. Personally, you know, I really wanted to dive deep and, and not only understand why do we not do what we say we're going to do, but why do we do anything and everything? What is the seat of human motivation? And I think I didn't understand it properly. I think most people don't understand motivation properly, right? It, it d- doesn't that blow your mind if you think about it? I know what to do. I agree this is what needs to get done, I just don't do it. Right? D- isn't that ridiculous? And by the way, this is not a new problem. Plato, 2,500 years ago, the Greek philosopher talked about this very same problem. 2,500 years before the internet, before social media, before all these things that we think are so distracting online, the Greek philosophers had the same exact problem. This is part of the human condition. It is part of our DNA that we constantly get distracted. But to me, that's a f- that's a fascinating mystery. Why is that? Well, if you look at the deeper question of why do we do anything and everything, the seat of human motivation most people think is about carrots and sticks, right? If you ask people why do we do what we do, it's about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Jeremy Bentham said something similar to this. Uh, Sigmund Freud called it the pleasure principle. Neurologically speaking, it's not true. It's not true. It's not about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. It's not about carrots and sticks. But in fact, the carrot is the stick. Okay? This is where I wanna give you that like, uh, Matrix-like moment. Remember that scene in The Matrix where, uh, uh, there's that kid with a spoon, and the spoon starts bending and the, the, the kid says, "Imagine there is no spoon"? Right?

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky38:14

        Absolutely.

    11. NENir Eyal38:14

        Well, the carrot is the stick. What do I mean by that? We know that the only reason we do everything and anything from a neurological perspective is not about the pursuit of pleasure. It is all about the desire to escape discomfort. Everything you do, even the pursuit of pleasurable sensations, the carrot is the stick. Because even wanting to feel good, craving, lusting, desire, hunger, that desire for something that feels good is itself psychologically destabilizing. The carrot is the stick. So what that means, I think that's incredibly empowering. Because what that means is that whenever we don't do something, whenever we procrastinate, it's just a feeling. That's all it is. It's just a feeling. And so when we learn those tools, it doesn't mean we're... I think people start, you know, intellectualizing it and thinking, "Ah, there must be something broken with me. Maybe I need a pill, maybe I need a treatment." Chances are, there's a 99% chance, there's nothing wrong with you, it's simply that you don't have these tools. So that's where we have to start, is absolutely understanding and, and applying these techniques so that when you feel that discomfort, you use that discomfort. What I found in my research writing this book is that high performers in every industry, business, the arts, sports, high performers, they feel the same internal triggers. They also feel lonely. They also feel bored. They also feel stressed. They also feel anxious. But they use that discomfort like rocket fuel to propel them towards traction. Whereas what distractible people do, as soon as they feel uncomfortable, as soon as they feel bored, as soon as they feel lonesome, as th- soon as they feel indecisive or stressed, boom, they're escaping it with a drink, with a click, with something to take their mind off of that discomfort. So that has to be step number

14. 39:54 – 45:03

    Hacking back external triggers

    1. NENir Eyal39:54

       one.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky39:55

       That is fascinating. Basically, distraction is an emotional regulation problem is the way you put it. Uh, what else works in helping you manage that discomfort? We've talked about this 10-minute trick, the timer, the surfing of the urge. What else is in that bucket of things I could try when I'm just like, "Nah, I'm just gonna go check Twitter. I need to work on this thing right now"?

    3. NENir Eyal40:13

       Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, there's, there's a bunch of different techniques you can use there in terms of the internal triggers. We can get into some of the nitty- more nitty-gritty techniques. There's lots and lots of 'em. Th- the most important thing here though is that once you have some in your toolkit that you wanna try, let's say it's the 10-minute rule, it's sur- surfing the urge, there's re-imagining the task, the temperament, all kinds of things that you can do.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky40:32

       Mm-hmm.

    5. NENir Eyal40:32

       The next thing is to put it on your calendar, which we talked about briefly. So let's say you say, "Okay, I've got that time when I..." What, what did you say that you wanted to do that you check emails dead? What were-

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky40:39

       Start on, start on my po- newsletter post for the next week or just continue.

    7. NENir Eyal40:43

       To, to write it?

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky40:44

       Yeah, write it.

    9. NENir Eyal40:45

       Okay. And did you have that in your calendar? You said w- that was part of the time, "Punch me in the face if I don't do it," kind of thing?

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky40:51

        That was back when I was at a, uh, had a regular job. These days, it's just... What I used to do is my first half of the day until 3:00 is just deep work time. I called it, uh, it's time to build time.

    11. NENir Eyal41:01

        Okay.

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky41:01

        And, uh, and then 3:00 and beyond is meetings.

    13. NENir Eyal41:04

        Excellent.

    14. LRLenny Rachitsky41:04

        So it was actually a huge block of time of focused time, but it was not subdivided by the things I wanted to do throughout the day.

    15. NENir Eyal41:10

        I see. So, uh, so, okay, so step two would be putting on your calendar, "I am going to work on writing this newsletter for 30 minutes, 45 minutes," whatever amount of time. Make it whatever is reasonable for you based on, you know, how, how long you think you, you can do it.

    16. LRLenny Rachitsky41:23

        Mm-hmm.

    17. NENir Eyal41:23

        Put that on your schedule. Okay? Step number three is hack back the external triggers. So did you find that when you said, "I was going to work on writing this newsletter," was there anything in your external environment that was pinging, dinging, kids, uh, pets, spouse, anything like that?

    18. LRLenny Rachitsky41:38

        It's interesting that now that you say that, uh, there's that fact that only 10% of distractions are from that. So it makes me... On the one hand, I, I recognize that most of the time, there's not like a thing pulling me to Twitter, LinkedIn, or whatever. Most of the time it's just like, "Ah, there's probably something interesting going on." Uh, but there's definitely times when I see a little badge or my little phone gets a little push or, yeah, my wife's with the kid in the distance. I'm like, "Oh, let's go check out what's happening there."

    19. NENir Eyal42:02

        Yeah. Yeah. So that's where we wanna hack back. So the reason I use the term hack, uh, to hack something is to gain unauthorized access, right? So someone hacks into your bank account or, or hacks into your, uh, your database. Uh, so we know that these technologies are gaining unauthorized access to our attention span when they're constantly pinging and dinging us. So there's some very simple things you can do, right? Setting a schedule, uh, in advance so that your device turns off, uh, as it goes to do not disturb during certain times of the day, all right? Or before you begin this task, before you start writing, you make sure to turn on do not disturb so that there's nothing in your, in your way. On my desktop, I have, uh, do not disturb set-... from midnight to 11:59 all the time. I- I- It's on- constantly on Do Not Disturb because I don't want those constant notifications, uh, d-disturbing me when I'm doing, uh, when I'm doing focus work, so ha- making sure that that's on. Uh, when it comes to, you know, many of us work from home today, uh, so, uh, making sure that your family knows when the time is that you are indistractable and, uh, I'll give you one tip. Uh, I know, I know you're- you're- you have a baby at home, but soon that baby's going to be a toddler. Uh, and- and so one thing that we did in my household is that my wife went to Amazon and she got what we call the concentration crown. And the concentration crown is just this little wreath thing that she wears. It looks like a little princess thing. It has little LED lights. It lights up. There's a picture of it in the book. And, uh, when my daughter was only six years old, we told her, we said, "Look, whenever mommy is wearing the concentration crown, that means that she can't be interrupted and she will be with you within 30 minutes." So, her time block was always, uh, you know, no more than 30 minutes, so sh- we said, "We will be with you within 30 minutes. Please don't interrupt unless you're bleeding, okay? If you're bleeding, you can interrupt us. But without- unless you're bleeding..." And this is when my daughter was only six years old. She could find something to do. It's okay for kids to be bored time to time. But as long as- as mommy was wearing the- the concentration crown, that told her, and by the way, me, as her sp- significant other, as her husband, worked really, really well because I would always interrupt her and say, "Hey, Julie, can I ask you this one thing?" And she was working on her computer, but I didn't know whether she was listening to a podcast or a video or doing, you know, work that needed concentration. So, hacking back those external triggers, making sure they don't gain unauthorized access by- by, uh, interrupting the interrupter- uh, interruption, whether it's with your, uh, your kids, your colleagues. So, every copy of Indistractable has this little pullout piece of paper, this piece of card stock that you fold into thirds and you put on your computer monitor, okay? It's this big red sign on your computer monitor that says, "I'm indistractable at the moment. Please come back later." Now, you could say, "Well, why not just put on headphones so my colleagues will know I- I'm not to be interrupted?" Yeah, but then they think you're, you know, you're- you're putzing around playing video games or something on your machine as opposed to if you say, "No, I'm doing focus work right now. Please come back later," you're making it acceptable to not constantly be interrupted. You're making it okay, culturally, uh, appropriate to work without distractions. So, those are just some ways that you can hack back those external triggers.

15. 45:03 – 48:18

    Preventing distraction with pacts

    1. NENir Eyal45:03

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky45:03

       I love that crown idea, and I think a lot of people are gonna use that. This time of year is prime for career reflection and setting goals for professional growth. I always like to spend this time reflecting on what I accomplished the previous year, what I hope to accomplish the next year, and whether this is the year I look for a new opportunity. That's where today's sponsor, Teal, comes in. Teal provides you with the tools to run an amazing job search. With an AI-powered resume builder, job tracker, cover letter generator, and Chrome extension that integrates with over 40 job boards, Teal is the all-in-one platform you need to run a more streamlined and efficient job search and stand out in this competitive market. There's a reason nearly one million people have trusted Teal to run their job search. If you're thinking of making a change in the new year, leverage Teal to grow your career on your own terms. Get started for free at tealhq.com/lenny. That's tealhq.com/lenny. For avoiding distractions, triggers, pushes, all that stuff, is there any tools you recommend? I imagine this is a lot of people are thinking, is there, like, a way to block Twitter and...

    3. NENir Eyal46:07

       Yeah. Absolutely. So, that's a perfect, uh, lead-in to step number four. So, we talked about step number one, master internal triggers, make time for traction, hack back the external triggers. We just talked about step number three. Step number four is preventing distraction with pacts. And so with pacts, there's three kinds of pacts. We have, uh, a price pact where there's some kind of financial disincentive to go off track, so this is where, you know, we talked about earlier, uh, uh, you're making some kind of bet. We could talk about that- how I got into shape, uh, for the first time in my life using something like this, how I finished the book using something like this. That's a price pact. Uh, there's an identity pact, which is very, very impactful, which is what- what you're doing is you're forming a personal identity. So, uh, this comes out of the psychology of religion, where we know that people who call themselves a certain moniker, uh, for example, if you say you're a devout Muslim, you're not debating whether you should have a gin and tonic, right? Because devout Muslims don't drink. If you say, "I'm a vegan or vegetarian," uh, a vegetarian doesn't wake up in the morning and say, "Hmm, I wonder if I should have a bacon sandwich for breakfast." No. They are a vegetarian. That is who they are. So, that's why the book is called Indistractable. Indistractable is meant to sound like indestructible. It is your identity. It is who you are. And so is it any different for someone to say, "You know what? I'm sorry. I don't check every ping and ding every 30 seconds. I'm indistractable." Or, uh, "You know what? If we're gonna have a- a meal together, if we're gonna sit down and have lunch together, I want to have that lunch free of distractions, so can we put away our phones?" Is that any different from someone who says, uh, "I have particular dietary preferences or I have a particular religious garb"? No. It- Maybe it's un- it's- it's not the norm, maybe it's a minority of people who do that, but that's what I think it's gonna take for the world to- to- to become indistractable, is that more of us show how great of a life we can have when we have some of these principles and make it part of our identity. And then the third pact is what's called an effort pact. And this gets into your question around what kind of tools we can use. An effort pact is where there's some kind of friction, some kind of effort that- that you need to take in order to, uh, to get distracted. So, as the last line of defense, that's why this is the fourth step. The last line of defense, the firewall against distraction, is- is, uh, making sure that you keep yourself in just as much as we keep distractions out. So, I'll give you a- a personal story

16. 48:18 – 53:42

    Specific tools to hold you accountable

    1. NENir Eyal48:18

       here. Is it okay if, uh... I don't know if this is a family show. Is it okay if I talk about my sex life a little bit?

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky48:22

       Absolutely. Let's- let's get into it.

    3. NENir Eyal48:24

       Okay (laughs) . So, it's not- it's not as exciting as it- as it might sound. I've been married for 22 years now and, uh, we found that, you know, my wife and I, uh, found that- that we weren't being as intimate as we used to be, and this was- was when I first started writing the book. And part of the problem was that every night, we would go to bed and she would be fondling her iPhone and I would be caressing my iPad and we weren't-... being intimate because we were busy playing with our devices, as opposed to each other. And so I started doing this research around, uh, around Indistractable. And I, I learned about, uh, uh, this technique around making an effort pact. And so what we did, I went to the hardware store and I bought us this $10 outlet timer. And this outlet timer, anything you plug into it will turn on or off at a particular time of day or night, whatever you set. And so in my household, until this very day, every night at 10:00 p.m., my internet router shuts off. So what does that do? We know that every night, 10:00 p.m., the internet router's gonna shut off. So my daughter knows, my wife knows, I know, I gotta get everything done that I need to do online because the internet's gonna shut off. Now, could I turn the internet back on? Of course I could. I could tether, I could go pull out the router and replug it in, but that takes effort. And so what I've done is if all else fails, right? If the internal triggers, uh, the, uh, making time for traction, hacking back, if all else fails, I've inserted a bit of mindfulness in something that I used to be mindless about, right? Now I have to ask myself, "Wait a minute, do I really need to go all that trouble of, of replugging and unplugging my router? Or should I do what I said I was going to do, which is get to bed on time and, and maybe be intimate with my wife?" It's made a world of difference. Just that, that, uh, that... And I'll tell you honestly now, Lenny, now after a few years of doing this, it's become part of our routine. We all know bedtime's at 10:00 p.m. That's when we need to start getting ready for bed. The internet router's gonna shut off. We actually don't even need this anymore because it's be- become part of our routine. Um, so that's one very cheap tool anyone can use as part of this effort pact. Another thing that, that I use almost every day, my daughter uses it as well, is this wonderful app called Forest. Do y- do you know Forest?

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky50:32

       No.

    5. NENir Eyal50:33

       It, it's, it's awesome. So here's the way Forest works. So it's this cute little app. Here, I can show it to you. I'll pull it up. And the way Forest works is when you say you're going to do focused work time, you t- you plug in how much work time you want. So let's say I'm gonna do 40 minutes of, of focused work time. There's that cute little virtual tree that's planted on my screen as soon as I hit Go. And if I pick up my phone and I do anything with it, that cute little virtual tree gets cut down, right? It's, it's just a, a small reminder to say, "Oh, that's not what you said you were gonna do right now. You said you were going to work without distraction. Here you are picking up your phone." It reminds you, "This is not what you said you were going to do." So it inserts that bit of friction, that bit of effort. Uh, another... You asked for more tools. Another, uh, product I, I love is called Focusmate. Have you, have you tried Focusmate?

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky51:21

       Uh, is that the one where they match you with somebody and you're kind of working, watching each other work?

    7. NENir Eyal51:26

       Yes, exactly. It's like, uh-

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky51:27

       Okay.

    9. NENir Eyal51:27

       ... chat roulette with all... without the dirty bits. So, uh, I love this company so much, I actually invested in it. Uh, so basically what you do is you go online, you, you, you look at this calendar, and you pick a time when you want to do focused work. So one of my, uh, issues used to be getting started. Once I got started, I was good. But getting started 8:00 a.m., uh, kind of like what y- what you were saying with this cold start problem. So what it does is it gives you this pact, uh, again, this pre-commitment you're making with another person. "Okay, 8:00 a.m., I'm gonna be there. And if you don't show up, you're gonna get a bad review." So it g- it binds you to another person to build this pact, this effort pact, to say, "I will be here at that time." You say, "Okay, what are you working on? What am I working on? All right, go." And for the next, uh, for that entire time box, you work without distraction. And just seeing that other person who's also working without distraction, uh, i- is a, is a wonderful way to bind you into what you said you were going to do. So those are just a few tools. There's many, many others.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky52:20

        Amazing. Okay, so let me actually try to just list out all the things you've shared so far, and it's gonna be across all the four steps, and then I'm gonna follow up on a couple of things here. So I'm just... Here's, uh, my notes. One is this idea of just set a ten-minute timer and just fore- tell yourself, "I am going to work on something that I really want to work on right now for ten minutes, and that's all I'm gonna do." And while you're doing that, surf the urge. Just you're gonna feel like you don't, but just, like, surf it and feel it and be aware that you're... uh, this is difficult. Uh, this calen- like, the calendaring of your day, that feels like a fundamental part of your, your approach, is just figure out what you want to do during the day ahead of time, put it on the calendar. So your to-do list is your calendar, essentially. There's this whole idea of pacts. You shared a bunch of different pact ideas. There's, like, "I will pay you a lot of money if I don't do this." There's this wifi. Okay, and then I guess that translates into some of these other things, the wifi killer, uh, device, the Forest app, the Focusmate app and product. And then there's a few other things you shared. Just do not disturb, like set a timer so that during the day, you have Do Not Disturb on during set times. For you, it's all the time, which I try to do, too. And then obviously, let your, like, wife through her important contacts. And then, uh, make your family aware of when you're gonna be working so that they know not to bother you. Maybe this crown, concentration crown.

    11. NENir Eyal53:41

        Yeah.

17. 53:42 – 56:37

    Managing emotions and discomfort

    1. NENir Eyal53:42

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky53:42

       Okay, before we move on to a different topic, I'd love to spend a little more time in that first bucket, 'cause it feels like your point is so important, that most of our distraction is this emotional regulation that we just don't like discomfort. And so I'm curious what else you could teach me and teach people about getting better at managing that emotion. Are there any other tactics in that bucket that might be useful?

    3. NENir Eyal54:02

       Absolutely. So there's three big buckets in terms of mastering these internal triggers. We can reimagine the task, reimagine the trigger, and reimagine our temperament. And so maybe I can give you a, uh, one big tip I think that I discovered when it came to reimagining our temperament. If we think about our temperament as these immutable qualities, as the attributes of, of, uh, uh, our, our personality, we have to be very careful about what kind of identity and what kind of limitations we let into our psyche. And I'll give you a good example of this. So a few years ago, there was this line of research around what's called ego depletion. Ego depletion is this idea that willpower is a depletable resource. And you saw some researchers doing studies that seemed to suggest that willpower was something that you run out of, right? That, uh, you know, for me, uh, I would come home after a long day of work and I'd say, "Oh, I'm out of willpower." I'm, quote, "spent." There's nothing else I can do. Give me that pint of Ben and Jerry's. I'm gonna sit in front of the TV 'cause I'm, I'm spent. There's no more willpower left.And some of these studies seem to suggest there was this, this phenomenon, except the problem became that, uh, you know, in the social sciences when something sounds a little fishy, when it sounds too good to be true, the scientific process dictates that we should re-run those studies. And it turns out that these studies around ego depletion could not replicate. Uh, we couldn't find the effect. And so, there was, uh, a one exception to this, and that exception was in a study done by Carol Dweck, uh, s- she's one of my research heroes. She wrote the book Mindset you're probably familiar with. And she did a fascinating study where she found that, that ego depletion does actually exist, but only for one group of people. Who was that group of people? It turns out that the only people who really did run out of willpower, the way you would run out of charge in a battery, were people who believed that willpower was a limited resource. And so this is super, super important to not let ourselves be influenced by these ridiculous notions, these beliefs that somehow, we are impaired, that we are limited, that we're addicted. That's a really popular one, that we're all addicted, we're all, you know, unable to control these, these behaviors. That is not true. And in fact, it's only true if you believe it is true. So, it should be part of our practice to tell ourselves we are indistractable. Indistractable is meant to sound like indestructible. It's meant to sound like a superpower. So, repeating to yourself that you're not limited, it's just about your actions. It's not a moral failing. It's not something wrong with you. It's not that technologies are doing it to you, it's simply a series of behaviors that we have to practice.

18. 56:37 – 1:00:09

    Taking responsibility and being high-agency

    1. NENir Eyal56:37

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky56:37

       I really like that. That's a theme that comes up a lot on this podcast, is people that feel like they're responsible for their situation. Like, they didn't cause it, but they're still responsible. Like, it is their responsibility to deal with it and to being more successful. And there's this idea of just being high agency.

    3. NENir Eyal56:52

       So, one of the things this, that I think is important to remember here is that there's a lot of things that the individual can do. I think there's a lot of things that we can do, uh, within a company or o- an organization as well that we can make our, our workplace indistractable. But then I think there's some things that we can do on a societal level, and these are called social antibodies, that, uh, social antibodies are when society spreads norms or manners that help us overcome, uh, otherwise antisocial or destructive behaviors. And so the good news is that we have been here before with something far more harmful and far more addictive than social media or technology distractions. If you think back to the 1980s, you know, I was a, a child of the '80s. I remember the '80s very well. And I remember when I was growing up, we had ashtrays in our living room. In fact, everyone I knew had ashtrays in their living room. And today, that sounds crazy, right? You, you couldn't imagine walking into someone's home and, uh, lighting up a cigarette. If someone did that d- that to you, that would be crazy, right? No one d- would do that today. Well, why? Why did that happen? Why would it be so incredibly rude to just walk into someone's home and light up a cigarette? Well, because there wasn't a law that said that that was illegal, right? It's someone's private residence. Wh- what changed was that we have new norms, new manners around how to behave, uh, when it comes to these destructive be- behaviors. So, I remember when my mom took away those ashtrays in our living room and she threw them away, and one day, one of her friends came over and took out a pack of cigarettes and was about to light a cigarette. My mom said, "No, no, no, no, no, I'm sorry. We are non-smokers." You see? She had this, this noun that she used to describe herself. She, she described herself as a non-smoker. "If you'd like to smoke, if you'd kindly go outside." And of course, that's the norm today. But it took brave people like my mom to go against the trend for these antisocial behaviors. So, I think the same thing is gonna happen when it comes to becoming indistractable, frankly, with or without my book. My book was intended to accelerate this process. But we're gonna do this naturally, right? Because what humans do throughout history when it comes to figuring out how to use a technology well is that we adapt and we adopt. We adapt to the technology by forming new behaviors, new norms. So, just like my mom said, "Hey, we are non-smokers." That's my identity. "I'm a non-smoker. If you'd like to smoke, you're gonna have to go outside." We need to be comfortable with saying, "Hey, we are indistractable," right? If someone sits down with you across the table and you're having a nice conversation, they take out their phones, say, you know, "Hey, hey, uh, if we're gonna have a conversation, let's be here both in body and mind," right? That means putting these devices outside of meetings. If we're gonna have a, a business meeting or a personal meeting, we're gonna declare these no phone zones, right? Because that's who we are. We want to be indistractable. So, we adopt these new behaviors, and we see that happening already, and then we a- a- d- sorry, we adapt to these behaviors, I should say, with these new norms, and then we adopt new technologies that help us fight the bad aspects of the last generation of technology. And that's what we have always done. In fact, right now, there's an explosion of tech companies that are making a lot of money. A lot of these apps and, uh, uh, startups are making money with tools to help fix the last generation of technology. And so there's all kinds of tools listed in my book from Forest and Focusmate, all kinds of tools that can help us put technology in its place, ironically enough, with new and better technology.

19. 1:00:09 – 1:05:04

    Becoming indistractable at work

    1. NENir Eyal1:00:09

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:09

       You've touched on this point that I wanna come back to around how you're not as confident that we're as addicted to technology and apps as we think, and I think that's really important. I'm excited to chat about it. Before we get there, I wanted to chat and follow this thread essentially of becoming indistractable at work and building a company essentially that helps your teammates become less distractible. What advice would you give to leaders at companies to help employees at the company have better focus essentially?

    3. NENir Eyal1:00:37

       A lot of folks that, that, uh, I've worked with in the past have said, "Look, I can become indistractable. I'll follow these four steps. Fantastic, I'm indistractable. But what if my company is not indistractable? How do I help other people become indistractable? Or what if my boss is not indistractable and they're constantly asking me and pinging and dinging me for stuff and I'm not able to do my best work? So, what do I do about that?" So, there's a whole section in the book on how to build an indistractable workplace. And what I discovered was in, in the research, uh, wr- in writing this book is that indistractable companies have three traits. And so the first trait is that indistractable companies provide employees with what's called psychological safety. This comes out of the research, uh, from Amy Edmondson at the Harvard Business School. And what she discovered was that...... truly that, that companies have to provide employees with psychological safety. Meaning, if you can't talk about a problem, if you can't raise your hand and say, "Hey, you know what? I'm just not able to do my best work when I'm constantly expected to reply to every email, to every notification every 30 seconds. I can't do my best work." If you can't talk about this problem, that is the problem. As I like to say, distraction is a symptom of dysfunction. Distraction is a symptom of dysfunction. And when it comes to the workplace, if you don't give employees that psychological safety to say, "Hey, you know, how do we deal with this problem?" Just like any other problem, that in fact is the problem. It's not the technology. It's the fact that you can't get together and talk about this problem without fear of somebody thinking, "Oh, you're lazy," or, "You don't want to be on call," or, "You're expecting, you know, other people to work for you." No, that's not the issue at all. It's simply that we need to formulate how to fix this problem, just like any other business challenge. The second trait is employees need a forum to talk about this problem. So, in researching, uh, this book, I asked people, "What's the most distracting technology? What, what technology in the workplace do you find to be most distraction- uh, most distracting?" The nu- number two was some kind of group messaging service, and Slack was mentioned the most number of times. By the way, number one was email. Number two was some kind of group messaging platform. And Slack was mentioned the most often, and so I went to visit Slack headquarters. I went to go see my, my friend Amir, who used to work there a- at the time, and I, you know, knocked on the door, and I expected to see a company that was incredibly distracted. Because if it was the technology that was the source of the problem, nobody uses Slack more than Slack. They should be the most distracted company on Earth. But that's not what I found at all, right? Because Slack, in fact, embodied these three attributes. They gave people, uh, psychological safety. They gave people a forum to talk about these problems. How did they do that? They actually created Slack channels at Slack. They had one Slack channel called Beef Tweets. And Beef Tweets was a channel where people could talk about their beef with the company. And it wasn't that necessarily management had to fix every problem. That's not the point. It's that they had to acknowledge that employees' voices were being heard. And how did they do that? Surprisingly enough, they did it with emoji. So, when a problem that an employee mentioned was fixed, they sent the green check mark emoji. And, but if it was a problem that maybe couldn't be fixed, b- but what they w- wanted to acknowledge that management had seen it, they would send the eyes emoji. And so the important thing here is to give employees some kind of forum. Could be a Slack channel. It could be... Uh, uh, another case study in the book is the Boston Consulting Group, which I used to work at. They've, they've gone from one of the most distractible companies to today, they're ranked as one of the best places to work in America. They have these i- um, they have these meetings where they talk about PTO, predictable time off. And so they've completely changed that organizational culture by following these steps as well. The last, the third attribute, which is the most important of the three, is that management must exemplify what it means to be indistractable, because culture is like water. It flows downhill. And so people will look to management to see how they behave, and they will act in accordance with, with their, those expectations. So, at Slack company headquarters, in the company canteen, it says, in bright pink letters, it says, "Work hard and go home." Work hard and go home. That is not something you would expect to see at a hard-charging Silicon Valley startup, but that's what you see there, because everybody in the company... This was before the acquisition. I don't know what it's like now. But when I wrote the book, this was certainly the case, that everybody from Stewart Butterfield on down, the CEO on down, believed that to do people's best work, they had to work without distractions. So, if you used Slack on nights and weekends, you were told, "That's not what we do here." You were reprimanded, because that was not part of the company culture. So, it's really those three traits, psychological safety, a forum to talk about these problems, and management has to exemplify what it means to be indistractable.

20. 1:05:04 – 1:09:36

    Schedule syncing to align with managers

    1. NENir Eyal1:05:04

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:04

       I want to move to a different topic, but before we do, is there one thing or maybe two things that a listener can do, say, today or tomorrow or this week that would make a significant dent on their ability to focus and avoid distraction?

    3. NENir Eyal1:05:18

       I would say, you know, understanding these four steps, of master the internal triggers, make time for traction, hack back the external triggers, and preventing distraction with pacts, if you can do one small thing in each of those four strategies, one small thing, that's a wonderful, wonderful first step. It doesn't - you don't have to do everything in the book. I'm giving you many of different options. But one small thing in each of those categories is huge. Now, when it comes to the workplace, one of the benefits of making a timeboxed calendar is that you have a physical artifact, right? You have something that you can print out and show to other people. And so I hear this a lot when it comes to people who say, "Okay, I'm indistractable, but my boss isn't. What do I do?" Right? "I have- I'm constantly pinged and dinged from my boss. H- how do I get control over my time?" Here's what you do. This is called schedule syncing or managing your manager. Here's what happens. You print out your calendar or you show it to them on their screen, o- on your screen, and you say, "Hey, boss, I need 10 minutes with you Monday morning. Is that okay? Can I get 10 minutes with you?" And now, what you're gonna do is you're gonna show them your timeboxed calendar for your working hours. You're gonna say, "Okay, boss, you see, here's my time for email. Here's my time for that meeting you asked me to go to. Here's time for that big project I'm working on. Now, you see this other piece of paper? Okay, you see this other p- uh, list here? This is a list of things you've asked me to do that I'm having trouble fitting into my calendar." So, what I'm helping you do here is avoiding the worst piece of personal productivity advice. The worst piece of personal productivity advice is, if you want to be better at time management, you need to learn how to say no. What kind of stupid advice is that? Only a tenured professor who can't get fired would give you that kind of stupid advice. If you tell your boss no, you're gonna get fired. That's dumb. You don't tell your boss no. You ask your boss to help you prioritize. That is your boss's most important job, is to prioritize. So, you're not saying no. You're saying, "Here's my calendar. Here's this list of stuff you've asked me to do. Help me prioritize." And here's what's gonna happen. Your boss is gonna look at your calendar and say, "You know what? That meeting, you really don't need to be at that meeting. But that thing on that piece of paper that you listed over here, that's way more important. Can you swap that out?"And let me tell you, I've, I started three companies. I've sold two so far. And bosses, your manager will worship the ground you walk on because we're all wondering, "What is it that you're doing?" And I know we have to trust our employees, et cetera, et cetera. Yes. But we're still wondering, "Hey, that thing that you said was gonna, was gonna be done isn't done. Why not? How, what, how are you spending your time?" So if you can proactively sit down with your boss so that they understand how you are spending your time. And again, this takes maybe 10 minutes. You do this schedule sync process that not only works really well in the workplace, it's life-changing. It also works really well at home. So my wife and I used to have conflicts over, you know, "Did you, uh..." You know, "Who's gonna pick up our daughter?" And, "Why didn't you take out the trash?" And we would have these conflicts because we didn't synchronize our schedules. Well, now we take maybe five minutes a week, Sunday evening, we sit down together. "Let me look at your schedule." "Let me look at my schedule." "Okay." Now we're synchronized. It's amazing. We prevent so many conflicts just by doing this simple schedule sync process.

Episode duration: 1:24:41