Nir Eyal: Bestselling Author of Indistractable

In this episode Charlotte Saulny, acting as guest host, converses with Nir Eyal, acclaimed author of "Indistractable." 

Eyal articulates the vital distinction between traction and distraction, rooted in our responses to internal triggers like boredom or anxiety. 

He emphasizes that mastering distractions involves deeper self-awareness and developing strategies against these internal triggers. 

Eyal proposes practical methods for managing distractions, including planning and scheduling tasks with intent, thus fostering a more focused and productive lifestyle. He stresses that understanding the psychological drivers behind our actions is key to overcoming impulsiveness and achieving our goals. 

By sharing his journey and the principles of becoming "Indistractable," Eyal offers a roadmap for individuals to harness their attention and direct it towards meaningful activities. 

This conversation sheds light on the transformative power of self-regulation and intentionality in navigating the challenges of modern-day distractions.

Transcript

(interview blurb)

Nir: Reminding us that distraction is not something that happens to us, it is an action that we ourselves take. So, traction is any action that pulls you towards what you said 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. The opposite is distraction, any action that pulls you away from what you plan to do, away from your intentions, away from becoming the kind of person you want to become.

(intro)

Charlotte: Hi, I’m Charlotte Saulny, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. I am taking over from Alex Pascal for the next few weeks and I am delighted to be your guest host. My guest today writes, consults, and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. He is the author of two bestselling books, including Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. His books have sold over 1 million copies in over 30 languages. Please welcome Nir Eyal.

(Interview)

Charlotte: Well, hello, Nir. I’m so happy to have you with us today.

Nir: Thanks, Charlotte. Great to be with you.

Charlotte: I have been really excited about chatting with you and all the fabulous work that you’re up to, but, as always, we need to start our podcast today with understanding what you’re actually drinking and what’s in your cup.

Nir: Yeah, I wish I could give you something more exciting. I’m just drinking clean, clear water here. It’s 8 a.m. here in Singapore and so I’m just starting my day and, yeah, I usually start with a big old flask here or whatever you call this full of water.

Charlotte: Listen, I’m impressed. If I were there, I would be having coffee right now so the fact that you’ve decided to start your day with water makes me feel inspired and also slightly guilty for sitting here with a Diet Coke with ice.

Nir: Ah, there we go. That’s nothing to feel guilty about that. That’s great. 

Charlotte: Well, listen, I’m so excited to dive in and talk about all the fabulous work that you’re doing and maybe we could just get started, you’re a bestselling author, you’ve got books out there, I think your first book was Hooked and it was all about building habits and habit forming and this most recent book is about being indistractable. I would just love to hear what started you on this journey, doing all this research for this book and what did you discover?

Nir: Absolutely. So I write books for myself and I’m very glad that people read my books and I’ve sold over a million copies so far so I’m thrilled that people enjoy the books. But to be perfectly honest, I write them for me. I write them for my own problems. And a few years ago, I noticed that I really had this struggle with distraction and I need to reassess my own relationship with distraction. So, the particular incident that incited the writing of the book was I was with my daughter one afternoon and we had just some daddy-daughter time and I remember we had this book of different activities, books that had things like do a Sudoku puzzle together or have a paper airplane throwing contest and one of the activities in the book was to ask each other this question. The question was, if you could have any superpower, what superpower would you want? That was meant to spark conversation between dads and daughters. And I remember that question verbatim but I can’t tell you what my daughter said in response because, in that moment, for whatever reason, I thought it was just a good idea to just check my phone for a quick minute and by the time I looked up from my device, she was gone. Because I was sending a very clear message that whatever was on my phone was more important than she was and she went to go play with some toy outside. And so as I sat there, I realized it wasn’t just with my daughter that this would happen, it would happen when I’d say, “Oh, today is gonna be the day I start exercising. Today is gonna be the day I start eating right,” but I didn’t and I wouldn’t. Or, “Today is gonna be the day when I start working on that big project that I’ve been delaying on,” yet I would procrastinate for yet another day. And so that’s when I realized that if I could have any superpower, it would be this superpower to just follow through, to do what it is that I said I was going to do. How do I become indistractable? And so that’s what set me on this journey. And then, originally, I didn’t set out to write the book. I set out to just fix this problem. And I went around and I read every book I could get my hands on on focus and distraction and productivity and I found that the vast majority of them really didn’t offer tips that were practical in today’s age of constant distraction. The best tips you can get are things like put away your cell phone and stop using social media and stop checking email so much, but that’s not really practical. That’s nice advice for some tenured professor to give, they’re not going to get fired, but for the rest of us, if you stopped checking email, good luck, you’re not going to keep your job. So it’s really not practical advice. And, frankly, when I started digging into the topic more and more, I realized that technology, even though we love to blame our phones for distracting us, the root cause of distraction is much deeper and much more psychologically fascinating and empowering than just saying, “Oh, it’s our devices,” “Oh, it’s this modern age of distraction,” the problem is much more interesting and more empowering and that’s what I really dove into as I researched it and I found that no one was really giving practical advice that worked for me and so I decided to really start from first principles, really going to the research studies, my books are not only full of very practical advice that works for me but also backed by peer-reviewed studies. There’s over 30 pages of citations in the back to peer-reviewed quality studies. And so that’s what I really wanted. I wanted a practical approach but that was also backed in very good research. And so it took me five years to write Indistractable. You know why? Because I kept getting distracted and it wasn’t —

Charlotte: Of course. 

Nir: Right, exactly. I wrote it for me. Research is me search. And it wasn’t until I learned these techniques around the last year of book writing, around year four, that I could really start changing my life. And, today, I’m 46 years old, I’m in the best shape of my life physically, not because I have good genes or amazing willpower but I simply follow through. I exercise when I say I will, I eat right because I say I will. I’m more productive at work because I do what I say I’m going to do. I’m fully present with my family because, again, it’s about intention. It’s about what I said I was going to do. It’s really changed my life in so many ways and so I’m super happy that other people have found value in it as well.

Charlotte: Well, I love the research is me search. It reminds me that old adage, you teach what you need to learn. And it’s —

Nir: So true. That’s why I’m an author. 

Charlotte: You’re right where you need to — yeah, absorb, maybe. But, so I’m curious, how did you go about the research? You’ve read a lot of peer reviews but share with us a little bit more around that journey of how does one research this topic of distraction, really.

Nir: So I’ve been in this field for well over a decade now. So my first book, Hooked, was published exactly 10 years ago. And before that, I taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and, before that, I taught at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford and so I’ve been studying human decision making and habit formation and, specifically, how do you build products and services to get people hooked. Not in a bad way but what I wanted to do was to steal the secrets of Silicon Valley so that we can make all sorts of products habit forming so that it’s not just social media and video games that are so engaging but how do we make a fitness product like Fitpod, is a product that used the hook model to get people hooked to exercise. Duolingo, one of my old clients that uses the hook model to get people hooked.

Charlotte: My husband uses that to learn French. Yeah.

Nir: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So that’s really what Hooked was for. So I was steeped in this side of the equation around how do we build good habits. But then I found that I had many bad habits and so I didn’t see enough research out there in the popular literature around how do we break these bad habits. Two different products, because we want to get hooked to the good habits, we want to get hooked to a language learning app, to a fitness app, to whatever helps our lives, but we also want to disconnect and we want to fight the bad habits around distraction. And so I was in this research kind of field for a long time and so it was looking at the other side of the coin around Hooked was good habits, Indistractable is about breaking bad habits. So that was my kind of entry point from a research perspective. And then how do you actually do it? You spend a lot of time with very boring academic studies of varying degrees of quality and that’s why I have a job because I interpret hundreds, if not thousands of studies that are not written for the layperson, they’re written in academic speak, many of them are overly complicated, because it’s a very insular academic world that actually reads research reports so I always put things through two filters. One, is it a good study? Is it something that I think will replicate, that will stand the test of time? A lot of studies that you see out there after a few years, they can’t replicate it, they’re just kind of gimmicky. And then also, two, is it practical? So I’ve worked with thousands of clients over the years with this methodology and so I’ve refined not only myself but also with the people I work with that this toolkit around fighting distraction and doing what you say you’re going to do, that it actually works in the real world, because a lot of academic research just doesn’t translate into the real world.

Charlotte: That makes sense. So I’m curious, you do all this research, you make all these discoveries. What surprised you the most? What was the most surprising discovery you made?

Nir: Yeah, that’s an easy answer. Going into this research, I thought that the root cause of the problem was our technology. That was the evil that was in my hand when I was supposed to be with my daughter so that’s what I immediately blamed. And I think that’s what many, many people do today. In fact, originally, I was going to call my book Unhooked, like I was going to repent in a way from these techniques, so Unhooked. But then the more I dove into the history of distraction — what do you mean the history of distraction? That if you look back, people have been complaining about distraction for at least the past 2,500 years, that Plato, the Greek philosopher, was complaining 2,500 years ago about how terribly distracting the world was and how it’s the kids these days and how the world is just so full of these ephemeral temptations that we can’t avoid. He called it akrasia, the tendency to do things against our better interests. And so that really was a lightbulb moment for me because if people had been struggling with distraction for the past 2500 years, it can’t be caused by our devices, it can’t be something that social media companies or email or Slack cause because it is part of the human condition. In fact, more interestingly, it is something that only the elite suffered from. If we think about it, for the past 200,000 years of human history, the vast majority of people were living hand to mouth. They didn’t have time to be distracted. They didn’t have the luxury of being distracted. It was the elites, it was the monks who were trying to transcribe the Bible, it was the philosophers who were trying to stay focused. That was a very high class problem. And, today, of course, now, it’s a mainstream problem, at least in the industrialized world, thankfully in countries where we have leisure time, where we have — where knowledge workers are using their brains rather than their brawn to get their work done. So it’s actually something to be thankful for that we even have the opportunity to be distracted. And so I think that lens was very empowering to me to know that, hey, this is a new problem, maybe it’s the price of progress, the price of living in a world with so many interesting things to do all day, is that we have to learn these new techniques around how to get the best of these devices without letting them get the best of us. So the biggest surprise was it ain’t the tech. There’s a deeper reason why we get distracted. It has to do with our human psychology.

Charlotte: So it’s to do with our human psychology. Same word, if the root is not our tech, what is the root?

Nir: So let’s back up real quick and I’m kind of a word nerd so let’s make sure we’re on the same page in terms of what does this word even mean. What is distraction? The best way to understand what distraction is is to understand what distraction is not. What is the opposite of distraction? Now, if you ask most people what’s the opposite of distraction, they’ll say, “Easy, focus. I don’t wanna be distracted, I wanna be focused.” But that’s not exactly right. If you look at the origin of the word “distraction,” the root of that word is trahere, which means to pull, which shares its root with another word, traction. So the opposite of traction is distraction, right? Of course, when you look at them like that, I never did before, but when I started writing the book, I said, “Oh, wow, that’s really interesting.” Traction and distraction. Both come from this Latin root, trahere, which means to pull, and they both end in the same six letter word, ACTION, that spells “action,” reminding us that distraction is not something that happens to us, it is an action that we ourselves take. So, traction is any action that pulls you towards what you said 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. The opposite is distraction, any action that pulls you away from what you plan to do, away from your intentions, away from becoming the kind of person you want to become. So this isn’t just semantics, this is super, super important, because I would argue the difference between traction and distraction is one word and that one word is “intent.” As Dorothy Parker said, the time you plan to waste is not wasted time. So what many people do is that they categorize certain behaviors as bad, okay? Playing video games, that’s bad. Going on social media, that’s bad. There are certain behaviors that are somehow morally reprehensible and that is ridiculous. That’s just not true. Because who am I or you or anyone else to judge how people spend their time? Why is playing a video game somehow morally inferior to watching sports on TV? I don’t know. Whatever you decide to do with your time and attention is fine as long as you do it according to your values and your schedule, not someone else’s. So anything can be traction as long as you’re doing it with intent. Now we’ll talk about exactly how to do that in a minute. The opposite of traction, distraction, just because something is a work-related task doesn’t mean it’s not a distraction. So just because we think something is morally okay, “Oh, you’re working, you’re so productive, you’re so industrious,” doesn’t mean it’s not a distraction. I’ll give you a perfect example. For years, before I did this research and wrote this book, I would sit down at my desk and I would look at my to-do list — by the way, we can talk about why the way most people use their to-do list is awful and hurting their productivity, we can talk about that later on, but I would sit down at my desk and I look at my to-do list and I’d say, “Okay, there’s that big, important task that I said, oh, I gotta do and I’ve been procrastinating on it. No more. Here I go. I’m gonna get started. I’m gonna get to work. Nothing’s gonna get in my way. I’m not gonna get distracted. But, first, let me check some email.” Has that ever happened to us? Happens all the time. We say, “Oh, I’m being productive, I’m checking email. Email is a work-related task. Look at me, I’m super productive. I gotta do it anyway at some point so I’ll just do it right now.” And what I didn’t realize is that that is the most dangerous form of distraction, because you don’t even realize you’re distracted. Because we justify it with saying, “Well, it’s a work-related task, I’m being productive.” But if it’s not what you said you were going to do with your time in advance, it’s just as much of a distraction as playing video games or going on Facebook. So now we have traction and we have distraction. We can think of it as two arrows pointing in opposite directions. Now, what prompts us to take these actions? We have two kinds of triggers. We have what we call external triggers. These are the things that are outside environment, the pings, the dings, the rings, everything in our outside environment, which is where most books about distraction, specifically tech distraction, focus, the pings, the dings, the rings. They do affect us, of course, and it can lead to traction or distraction, but studies find that they only account for 10 percent of our distractions. Do you know that 10 percent of the time that you check your phone, is it because of an external trigger, ping, ding, or ring? So what’s the other 90 percent? The other 90 percent of the time that you check your phone or that you get distracted, it’s not because of an external trigger, it’s because of an internal trigger. What are internal triggers? Internal triggers are uncomfortable emotional states that we seek to escape. So this was a huge revelation for me, that distraction is not a moral failing, it’s not a symptom of some kind of societal conspiracy, it’s simply the fact that we have not learned how to regulate our emotions in a healthy way that leads us towards traction rather than distraction.

Charlotte: It’s like emotional eating.

Nir: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. And in fact, if you back up and we ask ourselves, wait a minute, not only why do we get distracted but why do we do anything and everything? What is the seat of human motivation? We used to think it was about carrots and sticks, but it turns out, neurologically, that is not true. It’s not true. That in fact, everything you do, it’s not about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain but rather everything you do, you do for one reason, and that is the desire to escape discomfort Even the desire to feel good, wanting, craving, lusting, hunger, these are all pursuits of pleasurable sensations that are psychologically destabilizing. The brain makes you feel bad in order to get you to move, to get you to act. So that must therefore mean, if all human behavior is spurred by desire to escape discomfort, that means that time management is pain management. Money management is pain management. Weight management, as you said, is pain management. So if you don’t understand the root cause of that problem, if you are doing these maladaptive behaviors trying to escape discomfort constantly and you’re blaming it on your phone or society or your kids or your boss or whatever and you’re not getting to the root cause of the problem, everything else won’t work. We have to figure out what the root cause of the problem is and the root cause of the problem 90 percent of the time is an emotion dysregulation problem, because we haven’t learned. Nobody’s taught us how do I deal with discomfort? So what do people do? They drink it away, they click it away, they smoke it away, they scroll it away. But what you have to do is to figure out what is that root cause? And so, for all of us listening, for ourselves, certainly for our coaching clients, when people know what to do, we’ve all seen this, they know exactly what to do, they will reiterate exactly the plan, “Here’s the steps I need to take, I know that,” the problem is not that they don’t know what to do, the problem is that we keep getting in our own way. We don’t know how to stop getting distracted. So the root cause of the problem that must be addressed is what are those internal triggers? And, most importantly, what are we going to do about them? Are we going to escape that discomfort, loneliness, boredom, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety? Are we going to escape it with distraction or do we use it as rocket fuel to propel us towards traction?

Charlotte: When I was doing a little bit of research on the book, I looked, of course, as one does at the Amazon reviews, which were fabulous, by the way, as I’m sure you know, but two of them actually very specifically mentioned the quote that you have in a book which is if we want to master distraction, we must deal with discomfort, which is a really interesting thing. So, talk to us a little bit about, because you’re right, coaches come up against this all the time with their clients, you have clients that know what they’re meant to do but for some reason just can’t bite the bullet and get it done and there’s always some sort of underlying issue which is just preventing them from taking the action, so on and so forth. So, share with us how do you get to sort of the root cause of managing discomfort and regulating our emotions. What are some of the things that people can do to start down that journey of becoming more aware?

Nir: Absolutely, yeah. So, let’s dive into that, but just to kind of frame the model, that’s not enough. That’s step number one. Step number one is master internal triggers or they become your master so we’ll get back to how to do that in a minute. Step number two is make time for traction. So if the big question here is how do I help my client or how do I myself do what it is I know I need to do? How do I get out of my own way and stop getting distracted and do what it is I say I’m going to do? Step number one, master the internal triggers. You need to have techniques ready, you need to have tools in your toolkit ready to go so that you know what you’re going to do when you experience these uncomfortable sensations. That’s step number one. Step number two, making time for traction, turning your values into time. So this is part of why to-do lists are so bad for our personal productivity is because to-do lists don’t have a time-based component. They don’t have the constraints. They’re just a wish list of all the things we want to get done, all the output, but we don’t have the input. So if you go to a baker and say, “Hey, I’d like a dozen cupcakes for my kid’s birthday party,” the baker’s going to say, “Okay, I need flour, I need sugar, I need butter, I need all these ingredients, all these inputs to make the outputs.” Well, for knowledge workers, what’s our input? We’re not working with butter and sugar and flour. What are we working with? We’re working with only two things, the inputs, our time and attention. But where are they? Where are we budgeting them? Where do we get that? And so unless we in advance make time for traction, and I show you exactly how to do that and we can get back to that in a minute, that’s step number two. We’ve got to put in the inputs by making time for traction on our schedule, and I can tell you exactly how to do that. Step number three is hack back the external triggers. So even though they only account for about 10 percent of our distractions, we do have to take care of all of those ping, dings, and rings, that’s simple stuff. In my book, there’s only like a page or two about how to set up an indistractable phone and computer. That’s kindergarten stuff. But the distractions, the external triggers we don’t think about are things like stupid meetings we didn’t need to attend, emails that didn’t need to be received or sent. Kids. Kids can be a huge source of distraction. We love them to death, they’re wonderful, but they can be a huge source of distraction. Other people. All of these external triggers are things that systematically, one by one, we can hack back so that we can help these external triggers serve us as opposed to us serving them. And then, finally, the last step to becoming indistractable is to prevent distraction with pacts. A pact is a pre-commitment device, it’s the last line of defense, it’s the firewall against distraction, and so we need to set those up as well. So just to kind of frame the model, so step one, master internal triggers; step two, make time for traction; step three, hack back external triggers; and step four, prevent distraction with pacts. So when we put these four steps together and we do one small things and we help our coaching clients, they don’t have to do everything all at once, nobody does everything in my book, not even me, the idea here is that you can pick from this menu of different strategies for each one of these four steps and as long as you do one thing from each of these four steps, then you’re on your way, then you can become indistractable, then you will see some noticeable results in your day-to-day behavior. So, now that we’ve set the stage, let’s go back to your question around, okay, what do we do about these internal triggers, these uncomfortable emotional sensations? So there’s over a dozen different things you can do and I’ve brought in research from cognitive behavioral therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy, all kinds of research-backed techniques you can use. Let me just give you one technique that I use every day that I find very, very effective, which is called the 10-Minute Rule. And the 10-Minute Rule starts like this: so the idea is, step number one is simply acknowledging the sensation. So, if you can help your client and yourself figure out what is that preceding emotion before the distraction? I’m trying to write my novel, but I’m feeling insecure about if anybody’s going to like it. I need to do work on that big presentation for work but it’s kind of boring and tedious and I don’t really feel like doing it. I need to go exercise but it’s hard and sweaty and gross, I feel like it’s going to be exhausting. So, identifying that preceding uncomfortable sensation, and if you can simply write it down, that’s a huge step, because now you’re bringing awareness to the fact that it’s not an objective reality that says, “I can’t do this,” it’s simply a feeling. It’s all it is. Just a feeling. And when we realize that that’s all it is, it’s just an emotion, it’s just a psychological response to discomfort, it becomes much more empowering because now we know what we’re up against. We can see the monster in our face, we can identify it as just a feeling, boredom, anxiety, uncertainty, stress, that’s all it is. The next thing we can do is to have some tactics ready to go so that we know what we will do, arrows in our quiver, so to speak, whenever these internal triggers rear their ugly head. So, let me give you a very personal example. So I’ve been a professional speaker and author for over a decade now and writing is always hard. I’ve written two bestsellers, I’ve written thousands of articles and let me tell you, it’s always difficult. I don’t know what people are talking about when they say you should build a writing habit because habits are behaviors done with little or no conscious thought. They make it sound like habits can be — you can put anything on autopilot and now you can get things done with no problem. I don’t believe that. There are certain behaviors that cannot be habits and these behaviors are things that are difficult because, again, the definition of a habit is a behavior done with little or no conscious thought. So some things can be habits, but anything that requires conscious thought ain’t a habit. So there’s no such thing, for example, as a meditation habit. That’s an oxymoron. Because you cannot meditate with little or no conscious thought. The point of meditation is to bring conscious awareness to your thoughts. If you are meditating out of habit, you’re sleeping, you’re doing it wrong. Writing, you can’t write out of habit, unless you’re doing stream of consciousness, I don’t know how you can write without thinking. If you’re trying to push yourself in the gym to a personal record of some kind, that requires a lot of thought and effort. So what that means that you have to not try and escape the discomfort but rather lean into it, figure out what to do with that discomfort in a healthy way. So, for me, when I’m writing, and all I want to do when I’m writing is go Google something or go check email for a quick minute or go see what’s happening in the news, I use this 10-minute rule and the 10-minute rule says that I can give in to any distraction but not right now. I’m going to give in to that distraction in 10 minutes and that distraction could be, for me, it’s checking the news or email. It can be trying to avoid that piece of chocolate cake if you’re on a diet. It can be trying to not smoke that cigarette if you’re trying to quit, whatever the case might be, whatever that distraction might be for you. It works for any distraction. And the idea is you’re going to tell yourself, “I can give in to that distraction but not right now. I’m gonna wait 10 minutes,” and if 10 minutes is too long, make it the five-minute rule or the two-minute rule, it really doesn’t matter. And in that period of time, what you’re going to do is you’re going to set a timer, I do this almost every day, I set a timer for 10 minutes, okay, and now my job is to surf the urge. Surfing the urge, this comes from acceptance and commitment therapy, surfing the urge acknowledges that our emotions, these unconscious physiological reactions, they crest and they subside just like a wave, and so your job is to surf that urge, like a surfer on a surfboard, because in the moment, we think that these emotions are going to last forever. If I feel stressed, I feel like I’m going to always be stressed. If I’m angry, I feel like I’m always going to be angry. If I’m uncertain, I feel like I’m always going to be uncertain. But, of course, that’s never the case, that these emotions always crest and subside. So what you want to do is to surf that urge like a surfer on a surfboard. Here’s one technique that I use in that 10 minutes is I repeat a mantra. Now, this is my mantra, you can make up your own mantra, you can steal this one if you want, but every time when I do this 10-minute rule, I set the alarm for 10 minutes, I take a deep breath, and I repeat my personal mantra, which, again, you can make up your own. This is mine. I take a deep breath and I say to myself, “This is what it feels like to get better. This is what it feels like to get better.” And if I can just do that for just a few seconds, reminding myself that that discomfort is a gift, that the fact that I feel bored, the fact that I’m anxious whether anybody is going to like my writing or the fact that I’m stressed about a deadline, whatever the case might be, and I’m looking to avoid that discomfort, that means this is really important to me and it’s work that other people can’t do, which makes it special. And it’s because I think it’s so important that I’m getting these uncomfortable sensations. So this is what it feels like to get better. So having that technique, knowing, okay, whenever I feel bored and stressed about writing, this is my go-to technique and there’s over a dozen different techniques you can use in the book but that’s the one that I use almost every day. And what that allows me to do is that within those 10 minutes, invariably, I would say 99 percent of time, I’ll get back to the task at hand within those 10 minutes and I’ll get back to work and now I’ve successfully surfed the urge. So the whole point of this exercise is that, over time, you are teaching yourself that, wait a minute, you do have control, you do have agency, you’re not beholden to the distraction, you don’t have to give in to everything that you want to do, that over time, you’re building that agency, that control to say, “You know what, I’m going to make the 10-minute rule into the 12-minute rule, into the 15-minute rule, into the 20-minute rule,” and now you’re fully in control. You’re not beholden to these internal triggers that are taking you off track.

Charlotte: It’s a beautiful reframe. It’s a beautiful reframe to sort of associate that emotional experience with something that is positive for you and it’s a gift. Yeah, it’s beautiful. So wonderful. So you learn — so you sort of get into a habit or not a habit, I should say, but you become very intentional around managing your emotional state when you get distracted and really labeling it and looking at it. It’s a beautiful technique that you just shared. Share with us a little bit about step two. I mean, mastering time for distraction — or traction, I should say,

Nir: Right, making time for traction. So this has to do with making sure that whatever it is that’s important to us, and, again, I’m not here and I’m sure none of us are here, none of us as coaches is here to tell people what to do, that’s not our job. Our job is to help people do the things that they themselves want to do but for one reason or another aren’t doing. And so that starts, I believe, with identifying your values. What are values? Values are attributes of the person you want to become. Those are values. An attribute, that’s my definition, attributes of the person you want to become. And so the idea here is that you are going to turn your values into time. If you want to know what someone’s values really are, you want to look at two places. You don’t hear what they say, you don’t listen to the words coming out of their mouth, that’s not accurate. You look at two things: you look at how they spend their money and how they spend their time. And so what you want to do is to help your client turn those values into time by making time for traction. Now, how do you do that? This is where this, I think, incredibly underutilized technique of timeboxing comes in. Now, I didn’t make timeboxing, it’s been around for decades, there are thousands of peer-reviewed studies about how effective this is and, basically, it uses a technique called setting an implementation intention, which is just a fancy way of saying planning what you’re going to do and when you’re going to do it. So, if your client is just using a to-do list or if you’re just using a to-do list, you are shooting yourself in the foot. To-do lists are one of the worst things you can do for your personal productivity because the vast majority of people use them incorrectly. Now, what’s not bad, what’s a good idea is to get things out of your brain and on to a piece of paper, wonderful. Put that in an app, for example, very good. The problem is if you run your life on a to-do list, meaning you wake up in the morning or you get into work and you look at your phone, okay, what am I supposed to do, let me look at that to-do list, what you’re probably going to do, you know what you’re going to do, you’re going to do the easy stuff, you’re going to do the fun stuff, you’re not going to do the hard and important work that you have to do to move your life and career forward. And so to-do lists don’t help you prioritize. They don’t, because there’s no constraint, there’s no limitation. You can always add more to a to-do list. And so this yields this awful phenomenon that I call the tyranny of the to-do list. The tyranny of the to-do list is when you have all these things that you added to this to-do list, “I wanna write my novel and I wanna get in shape and I wanna be a great father and I need to start a business,” all these things, so your to-do list essentially becomes a wish list, right? Like something you hand have to Santa Claus. It’s never gonna happen, it’s a dream. And because you have this list of things that you think you want that you’re trying to accomplish every day but you get home from work and you’ve been working your tail off and you look at this to-do list of all these things you still didn’t do that you promised yourself you were going to get to and you still have not done, what does that do to your psyche? Day after day, week, after week, month after month, year after year, you still didn’t do what you said you’re going to do.

Charlotte: You feel like you don’t feel productive at all. 

Nir: Exactly. You feel like you’re lying to yourself, you don’t have personal integrity. And so that’s when you hear people saying silly things like, “Oh, I’m no good at time management,” or, “I probably need some kind of diagnosis for some disorder, there’s something wrong with me.” There’s nothing wrong with you, it’s a stupid time management technique we keep using. A much better technique than using the to-do list is timeboxing, which means you’re going to take those things on your to-do list based on your values, based on what’s important to you in work and at home, and you’re going to put it in your calendar. And I mean down to the minute. And I know that sounds extreme. “Oh, what do you mean? I’m gonna plan every minute of my day? That sounds crazy.” Yes, I’m sorry. Unless you’re a child or retired, if you feel like you’re not living up to your full potential, if you know you’re capable of more but it’s not getting done, you’ve got to plan your day. Why? Why is that so important? Because you cannot say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from. I’m going to say that again. You can’t say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from. So if you look at your calendar and there’s whitespace in that calendar, what did you get distracted from? What was it that you planned to do? What was the traction in order to have distraction? If you didn’t plan what you’re going to do, everything is a distraction. And, of course, if you don’t plan your day, in this day and age, somebody’s going to plan it for you, your boss, your kids, the media, somebody is going to eat up that time, you know it, unless you plan what you’re going to do in advance. So I walk people through this process of how do you figure out what your values are, there’s a very simple process to do that, it’s not some big vision board, it takes just a few minutes, and you’re going to translate that into time in your calendar, because calendars have constraints. We all have the same 24 hours in a day. So timeboxing, unlike to-do lists, forces you to figure out what’s more important, how would the person you want to become spend their time? And by making those constraints, we identify your priorities. And so that technique of timeboxing, and I’m going to show you exactly how to do that, that is absolutely critical to living out your values. I think so few people have felt the immense joy, the weight that is lifted, when you do what you say you’re going to do. I used to do this all the time, I would come home from work, I’d be exhausted, I just want to relax, I want to spend some time with my daughter, maybe I want to watch something on Netflix, but I was always thinking about that to-do list. I was always thinking about the things that I left undone. Today, that doesn’t happen because I have in my schedule time for social media, time for Netflix, time to do whatever I want to do. It’s in my calendar so I can do without guilt. So what did I do? I took the distractions and I turned them into traction by planning them in advance. And I know — by the way, I know what people are thinking. They’re saying, “Oh, my life is too hectic,” or, “My client’s life is too hectic. I can’t plan my day.” I’ve heard every excuse in the book. I wrote the book. And let me tell you, these are nothing more than excuses. What’s happening is your brain is so scared that you might actually have to do the thing you fear that it’s erecting resistance. It’s telling you all these excuses about why, “Oh, that would never work for me,” “I’m in the client services business,” “I have a family that might need me at any moment,” “You need to make — my clients might need me,” I’ve heard it all before and none of these excuses are insurmountable. Basically, it’s about planning that time for what’s called reactive work, reacting to notifications, reacting to emails, reacting to kids, reacting to bosses, I get it, I get it. Everybody’s day has a good portion of that day that’s spent doing reactive work. But what people are not doing is that they’re not planning time for what’s called reflective work. And that can be 20, 30 minutes, maybe an hour. If you are not planning time in your day to do reflective work, the kind of work that can only be done without distraction, planning, strategizing, thinking, for God’s sakes, if you do not have that time in your schedule, I promise you, you are running real fast in the wrong direction. So we’ve got to plan that time, both for reactive work as well as reflective work.

Charlotte: See, I love that because I think one often thinks that reactive work is, “Oh, I’ve gotta respond in the moment,” or, “I’ve gotta do that right then and there,” and the notion that you can actually plan for reactive time or plan for that within your calendar sort of shifts your way of thinking about it to make it, to your point, more intentional, more intentional around how you’re spending that time. And I love this question, how would the person you want to become spend their time? That’s a really good question. 

Nir: Exactly. Exactly. And it’s not about outcomes. This is a big mind shift for folks. Because the to-do list paradigm of “I’m gonna evaluate my self-worth by how many cute little boxes I checked off,” doesn’t work. You know what happens. I used to do this all the time. I used to finish a task and then write it on my to-do list just so I can check it off. How stupid is that? So dumb. That doesn’t make any sense at all. We’ve been trained in a way to think, okay, that’s what it means to be productive, is checking off cute little boxes. But who says those are the right boxes? Because we haven’t even bothered to prioritize first what’s important to us based on our values, not just the workie stuff but our self-care, our relationships, that stuff needs to be taken care of as well. So where does that fit into our life? By changing the frame and saying, look, I’m not going to assess myself by how many cute little boxes I check off. Rather, the goal is to not necessarily finish. What are you talking about? How can I be productive if I don’t finish what I need to do? The goal should not be, “Did I finish?” the goal should be, “Did I work on whatever it is I said I was gonna do for as long as I said I would without distraction?” That’s it. Not, “Did I finish?” but, “Did I do what I say I was going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction?” And here’s the kicker. People who just focus on that, just on that one metric, finish more, they actually get more done than that to-do list people. Now why does that happen? Because here’s what happens with the to-do list people. You’ve got some big thing you’ve got to accomplish so you start working on it for five minutes, you keep going great, great, and then you get an email or a colleague comes over or you get a thought in your head that you need to go research real quick or do something else, and then by the time you get back to that task, what was that task again? So you never figure out how long things take you. As opposed to when you use a timebox calendar, what you’re doing is essentially saying, “Okay, I have this task, I’m gonna work on it without distraction. That’s it, I’m just gonna do that task.” And then you can reassess. Now you have a feedback loop. You can say, “Okay, I worked on this slide presentation for 30 minutes and I did three slides and the slide presentation needs to be 30 slides long so I need 10 more time blocks of that time to get the whole task done.” Now you have a feedback loop. You know how long things take you to finish. You just can’t get that with a to-do list. 

Charlotte: Yeah, I love that, the notion that you can build your own intelligence, because I do think people struggle with that too, knowing how much time to block for what and either significantly underestimating or overestimating what that time is. So the notion that you build that feedback loop then is I think so, so helpful. So, being clear on your values and helping that be what drives how you spend your time, and I’m curious, understanding that, you said that there was one final step that people had to sort of be aware of which is about hacking back their external triggers. Do you have any sort of insights on that front? What’s something that someone can do to sort of help hack that back? Even recognizing that it’s only 10 percent of what distracts us.

Nir: That’s step number three of four is hack back external triggers. And so this is where we start with all the pings, dings, and rings, all the things outside of us. So there’s some very simple things you can do to your phone, takes maybe, if you spent 30 minutes doing what I say in the book, it says step by step by step here’s how to make your phone indistractable, here’s how to make your computer indistractable. I think the more intractable problems are things like stupid meetings that didn’t need to be called. How many of us go to meetings that really were not necessary? Emails that didn’t need to be sent and received. How do we spend less time on email? So we can systematically go through each and every one of these external triggers and figure out how to hack back. Is there one in particular, is any of these external triggers something that resonates with you that you’d love to figure out?

Charlotte: I think definitely the less time on email. I struggle with email most of all.

Nir: You want to do that one? We can tag into that. 

Charlotte: Yeah, I think so. I mean, and I’m sure that other people in today’s day and age struggle with this one too, but there are so many different communication vehicles by which we interact with one another. There’s things on Slack, there’s Teams, there’s emails and keeping track of — I mean, for me, keeping track of what correspondence or communication has happened where or when and, I mean, it can become somewhat overwhelming. But, yeah, let’s talk about email. I’m sure that’s something that most people struggle with. 

Nir: Yeah. And by the way, there’s a section in the book not only on email and not only on distraction from your partners or other people but also group messaging. That’s a big one. You’re absolutely right. Apps like Slack can be a huge source of distraction. So how do you hack back external triggers when it comes to group messaging, very, very important. But let’s do email for the sake of time, we’ll dive into that one, because you’re right, that is the second most distracting, the second greatest source of distraction in the modern American workplace when we do surveys. Number one is other people. That is the number one source of distraction, other people. Number two is email. So let’s dive into email. So, first, let’s start with the fact that according to HBR, Harvard Business Review, we know that about 50 percent of the emails that the average American knowledge worker gets, they didn’t need to get and about 50 percent of the emails they send, they didn’t need to send. 

Charlotte: Wow.

Nir: So it’s a huge, huge time sink. Now, what do we do about those distractions? So let’s start with where does the distraction come from with email? What’s the source of where we waste time on email? Turns out when we do time studies, the problem with email is not the checking, it’s not the replying. Where you waste time with email is the rechecking. What does that look like? I used to do this all the time. You open an email, you read it, you put it away, 30 minutes later, “What was that email again? Oh, let me check it again,” then maybe a day later, “Oh, what was in that email? Let me check it again,” and we keep opening and reopening these emails, sometimes even subconsciously, as opposed to the right way to do it is to decide right now, right here, that you only touch each email maximum of two times, maximum. What does that look like? When you receive an email, the right question to ask is not how do I reply or what’s in this email, that’s not really pertinent. What’s most important to decide is when does this need a reply? What is the reply? Most people think, “Okay, how do I reply?” That’s not the right question. The right question is when does this need a reply? If an email never needs a reply, we’ll just go ahead and delete and archive it. That’s easy. Now, the vast majority of your email will fall into two categories: things that need a response today and things that need to have a response sometime this week. Now, there’s a tiny percentage of email, less than 1 percent, that is crazy urgent, that you need to reply to right now. Now, most of us think that almost all of our emails are urgent. That is just not true. If you actually look at this critical frame of when does this need a reply, if something is, “Oh my god, urgent, your house is on fire,” they’re not going to email you. They’re going to call, they’re going to find a way to reach you not over email. So almost none of our emails are, “Oh my god, call me right now.” Less than 1 percent. So the vast majority of our emails are either what we find is about 20 percent of our emails are emails that need a response today, 80 percent need a response sometime this week. So what I want you to do is to start labeling emails as such, so you’re going to have two labels. One label says today, one label says this week. And what you’re going to do is every time you receive an email, if it never needs a reply, you delete it, and then you don’t answer right away. I’m not a big fan, probably people have heard this, two-minute rule, something that takes less than two minutes, just do it right away. Bad idea. Antiquated idea. Why? Because every email takes about two minutes. So if you say, okay, one email, one email, two minutes, two minutes, two minutes. Now you spent your whole day doing email. Bad idea. Do not apply the two-minute rule to email. Rather, what you want to do is when you get that email, you either label it as something that needs a reply today, about 20 percent of your emails, or something that needs a reply this week. Now, where’s the magic happen? What happens next? What you’re going to do next is you’re going to use that technique we talked about earlier about timeboxing and you’re going to plan time in your day to reply to email. If you don’t, you’re going to do what most people do is that when you don’t know what to do next at work, the internal trigger of uncertainty, what do you do? Well, let me check email. Email will tell me what to do. Email is going to make me not uncertain. But, of course, you’re letting other people decide your agenda for the day. They decide your priorities. That’s ridiculous. Why should you do what they want? You should be doing what’s important to you on your schedule. So I want you to put time in your calendar, it could be once a day, it could be 10 times a day, doesn’t matter, but have pre-apportioned time in your calendar to check and label your emails. Then, another time in your timebox calendar for when you are going to reply to emails. Now only I want you to reply to those emails that you labeled as emails that need a reply today. This is going to be 20 percent or less. Let’s say a hundred emails per day, which is the average amount that the average American knowledge worker receives, now you’re only going to reply to 20 of those emails. Now, sometime in your week, I want you to put a big timebox to go through all those emails that require a reply sometime this week. So, for me, it’s message Monday. On message Mondays, I have a three-hour time block where all I’m doing is going through emails that didn’t need a reply immediately, they needed a reply sometime this week. Now, here is where the magic happens, here’s how you’re going to save tons of time not replying to emails, because this magic thing happens when you let emails marinate. When you let emails marinate, they simmer away, they evaporate. How does that happen? And by the way, we find that about 50 percent, 50 percent of the 80 percent disappears. You don’t need to reply to them. How does that happen? Because when you let email simmer and don’t reply to everything right away, you stop playing this email ping pong game, because what we find is that if you want to receive fewer emails, you have to reply to fewer emails in a given period of time. So stop playing this email ping pong game to get emails out of your inbox and into someone else’s inbox so that you will get fewer emails in a period of time. And so what happens is that when you let those emails marinate, about 50 percent of the emails were not so important anymore or were crushed under the weight of some other priority or people figured it out on their own and you don’t even need to reply to them. And so that’s where you save hours upon hours of not needing to reply to email is by timeboxing the time you’re going to reply to those emails and only reply to those emails by when they need a response, either a small amount of time if it’s something that needs a reply today, and then a bigger time one time per week. And what you will find is that you will save hours of time because there’ll be all these emails that otherwise you would have replied to that really didn’t need a response.

Charlotte: So true. That’s so true. You step back from it and you didn’t need to be involved.

Nir: Right, exactly. And it turns out if you let people kind of think it through or figure out their own problem, nine times out of ten, they do. It’s when we stick our nose into everything and we realize.

Charlotte: Oh, that is a fabulous technique. You have my commitment to trying that next week. Actually, not even next week, tomorrow’s Wednesday, I’ll do it per week. 

Nir: Yeah, let me know how it goes.

Charlotte: I love that. So you can tell I’m taking bunches of notes, can’t you, Nir? I mean, I hope you know that that is what I’m doing right now and —

Nir: I can’t wait to hear how it goes. Yeah. So that’s super practical in terms of one source of these external triggers. Now, I do the same type of analysis with Slack groups and meetings. Meetings are a huge source of distraction. How do you make sure that your meetings are actually productive and need to be called? The vast majority of meetings are a big waste of time, people don’t understand the fundamental reason why we meet, it’s not just to get together and brainstorm. In fact, brainstorming turns out should not be done. You know what the optimal size of a brainstorm meeting is? What’s the optimal group size for a brainstorm session? 

Charlotte: That’s a great question. I mean, my guess would be three to four?

Nir: It turns out two or less. Meetings are not for brainstorming. Meetings are for one reason and one reason only, and that is to gain consensus. That’s it. That’s the only purpose of a meeting. Meetings are not the same as brainstorming sessions. It’s much better, it turns out, to not brainstorm as a big group of eight people, most brainstorming sessions I’ve been in are like eight people, which is way too much, because what tends to happen is that the loudest, the highest paid, most dominant person tends to lead the conversation and we don’t really hear from other people’s opinions. So it turns out, it’s much better to ask people to brainstorm on their own then bring their insights to the stakeholder that wants to call the meeting and then that person synthesizes the insights and then comes to the group with a decision, with a consensus to be formed. That’s actually the purpose of meetings. And so just as we did with email, we analyze how to have good meetings and it saves so much time on people’s calendars because, again, most meetings are a big, fat waste of time. 

Charlotte: I’m sitting here taking bunches of notes. What I’m realizing is so much of what you’re sharing is so incredibly practical and I know that you mentioned that that is probably part of your brand and how you write and what’s important for you is giving practical and accessible tips and sort of techniques for people so they can put this into action. But I’m curious, if people wanted to learn more or sort of do a deeper dive with you into this, how can they do that?

Nir: Sure. So just reach out. My blog is Nir and Far, so my blog is nirandfar.com, and I work with companies, I work with individuals to help them become indistractable and so, yeah, please do reach out. 

Charlotte: You know, it’s funny, I was looking at indistractable, of course, and I’m sure this was intentional, but it’s a lovely thing anyway, it immediately sort of brings to mind indestructible, indistractable.

Nir: Yes.

Charlotte: And so for me when —

Nir: That’s very intentional.

Charlotte: — I saw that, I thought that really is a superpower. You being indistractable makes you in many respects indestructible. There’s a level of sort of intentionality that is derived from going about your work with intention.

Nir: Yeah, that’s perfect, actually. So that was very much my intent with the title of the book. It’s a made up word, indistractable is not a real word, I made it up, and it is absolutely supposed to sound like indestructible. And so this actually leads to the fourth and final technique, one of the ways to make a pact, the last step to becoming indistractable is to prevent distraction with a pact, a pre-commitment. One of the pacts you can make is called an identity pact and this is fascinating, this comes out of psychology of religion, that we know when people start identifying themselves with a moniker, with a noun, when they start describing themselves as a thing, they become much more likely to reach their goals. So, for example, a vegetarian doesn’t wake up in the morning and say, “Hmm, I wonder if I should have a bacon sandwich for breakfast?” because that’s not who they are. “I am a vegetarian. That is who I am.” I’m not a vegetarian, but I’m just saying in the voice of a vegetarian, that becomes much easier for them to make a decision according to their values because it’s their identity and that’s exactly why the book is called indistractable. It becomes an identity. It is who you are. And is it that weird? Is it that odd that someone might say, “Hey, you know what, if we’re gonna have lunch together, let’s be here both in body and mind, let’s put our phones away,” or, “You know what, I’m indistractable, I’m not gonna respond to every text message every 30 seconds, because I’m indistractable, it’s part of my values, it’s who I am.” Is it that different from someone who has a special diet or wears religious garb? No, it’s who they are, their identity. And so that’s exactly the point, I’m so glad you picked up on that. This is one of those pacts we can make. There are other pacts, effort pacts, price pacts that I described in the book, but this identity pact, we like to say in the behavior change community that long-term behavior change requires identity change, that people conform to their self-conception.

Charlotte: Identity pact. I love that. One more question before I let you go. If you were to give one piece of advice to a coach around how they could best help their clients get started with being indistractable, one small thing, how would they do that? What would you recommend that they start with or do?

Nir: The most impactful thing you can do is to inspire and sustain the belief in personal agency. Where we see people fall off the rails is when they don’t believe they can change and, of course, society is telling them that they can’t change, that this is who they are, that it’s insurmountable. The food industry and the media industry and everybody is conspiring against them. And so what does this lead to? It leads to what’s called learned helplessness, that when you believe there’s nothing to be done, what do you do? Nothing. What’s the point? If I can’t affect change anyway, then why should I even try? And so the best thing you can do is to help people understand that the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. I’m going to say that again. The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. That distraction of any kind, whether it’s, “I said I was gonna work out but I didn’t,” or, “I said I was gonna work on that big project but I didn’t,” the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought, because all distractions, 90 percent of them, are simply an emotion dysregulation problem, that we don’t know how to properly respond to this discomfort. It’s an impulse control issue. It’s not a moral failing, it’s an impulse control issue. The good news is that there is no distraction we can’t overcome if we plan ahead with forethought, if we decide in advance. If you leave it to the last minute, you will lose. If you’re trying to quit smoking but the cigarette’s in your hand, guess what? You’re going to smoke it. If you’re trying to lose weight but the chocolate cake is on the fork on the way to your mouth, it’s too late, you’re going to eat it. If you sleep next to your cell phone every night, it’s going to be the first thing you reach for in the morning before you even say hello to your loved one. So if you leave it to the last minute, you will lose. But if you plan ahead, there is no distraction you can’t overcome. So the idea here to become indistractable is to take steps today to prevent getting distracted in the future. 

Charlotte: Fantastic. Nir, this has been amazing. I’m thrilled. I walked away with so many incredibly tangible tips that I can leverage so thank you for taking your time to share your wisdom and your insights. We are just delighted that you were able to join us today. Thank you. 

Nir: My pleasure. Thank you so much. My honor.