Strategies for becoming less distractible and improving focus | Nir Eyal

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.

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