Zack Arnold

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How to Become ‘Indistractable’ | with Nir Eyal

About Episode

DISTRACTION is a word everyone is familiar with. When your livelihood depends on your ability to be creative and summon superhuman levels of hyperfocus for hours (or even weeks) at a time, there is no greater enemy to your livelihood than distraction. The problem in our 24-7 hyperconnected world of endless notifications, emails, text messages, and 100 other different forms of interruptions is that we are all simply looking for hacks, tricks, and apps to help us eliminate distractions.

But what if instead of trying to eliminate distraction from our lives we instead worked towards having more “Traction?”

When the thought of putting my efforts towards building traction as opposed to avoiding distractions first occurred to me it absolutely blew my mind. And in today’s interview with productivity expert Nir Eyal, bestselling author of the books Indistractable and Hooked, this is simply the tip of the iceberg of mind-blowing ideas to help you become less distracted, more focused, and more intentional with your time and attention.

Episode Highlights

Discover Nir Eyal’s 4 steps to becoming “Indistractable”
Nir explains how the premise of his book: Hooked which focused on the design choices that makes smart phone apps “sticky” (i.e. “addictive”), led to the focus of his latest book: Indistractable.
The opposite of distraction is ______. (HINT: It’s NOT focus)
How to get to the root cause of distraction & frustration at a deep emotional level. (HINT: “It’s not the device in your hand, it’s what’s going on in your head.”)
Most ‘productivity hacks’ are about becoming more efficient versions of ‘busy’, which is like spinning on the hamster wheel faster. Becoming Indistractable is about being more effective.
With all the information at our fingertips on the Internet, we essentially know what to do. The question is, why don’t we do it? Why do we keep getting distracted? The answers may surprise you.
5 years of research reveals that the greatest source of distraction is not the external triggers. It’s internal triggers: The uncomfortable states that we seek to escape.
The case against the “pain vs. pleasure” narrative of human behavior.
The reason we do everything is for one reason only. Everything we do is to help us modulate our ____.
The 3 areas of our lives we must reimagine: the tasks, the triggers, and our temperament.
Practical techniques for dealing with the most important triggers – the “internal triggers”. Follow this advice and the external triggers will lose most of their power over you.
Why many people fall into one of two categories: “blamers” and “shamers” – and the 3rd alternative mindset that makes us more effective.
To reclaim our power, we can accept the fact that we cannot control how we feel. But we CAN choose how we respond… and RETRAIN our brain to respond more helpfully.
HOT TIP: How to apply the “10-minute rule” and what it means to “Surf the urge”.
The truth about willpower as a ‘finite resource’ in light of the latest scientific evidence and how this connects to the idea of “reimagining our temperament”.
Remember this: “If we don’t plan our day, somebody’s going to plan it for us.”
Nir’s unique perspective on using your calendar for time boxing & how it ties into an important lesson from his book: “You cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from.”
ACTION STEPS: Open your calendar and ask yourself: “How do I turn my values into time for next week?” Where values = The attributes of the person you want to become. Do this for the 3 domains of life he suggests.
Work domain TIP: Schedule time to THINK
The life-changing “Schedule Sync” review with stakeholders in your life. (Takes just 15 minutes!)
One powerful reframe for shame/guilt: “The time you plan to waste is not wasted time.” – So enjoy it without guilt!
What to do with coworkers and bosses to set expectations and how to design an Indistractable workplace.
The Power of Pacts – Make a precommitment with “focus friend” (accountability buddy) with Focus Mate

Transcript

Zack Arnold: I’m here today with Nir Eyal, who’s the author of Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, and he also blogs at nirandfar.com Nir you and I. Are going to have some fun today talking about productivity and time management. So, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Nir Eyal: My pleasure. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Zack Arnold: So, I’m super excited to jump into talking about your book, Indestructible. When I was first referred to by one of my former guests, Scott Young, who I have a lot of respect for, and also he’s part of the circle with Cal Newport, who did deep work. This is stuff that I’m really, really interested in, but I got to the point where I thought, oh God, is this somebody else that’s going to talk about, like, here’s a few smartphone hacks, and you know, here’s the way to time block and all that. I’m like, I, I kind of don’t like getting into the weeds on the specifics. I like talking about the meaty stuff. And then I started listening slash reading your book to your book and I thought, oh, this guy’s a man after my own heart, because you just go after the source of things, you’re like, let’s, let’s just not figure out what are the best five smartphone hacks, but let’s really figure out the source of the distraction and the frustration, and like, you really go to a deep emotional level, so that’s why I’m really, really excited to have this conversation today. We may talk about some of the nuts and bolts, and some of the cool hacks and tricks that you have in there, because there’s even a few that I hadn’t heard of, and I thought I was a productivity nerd, and I was like, “Oh, that’s a good one I haven’t heard of. So, we may get into a couple of those, but before we talk about this book, what I’m actually really interested to ask you is about the journey to doing your first book, and then this one, because your first book, which is called Hooked, is almost like the exact opposite. It’s almost like that created the problem, and now here we have the solution. Not that I’m saying that you created the problem, but you know what I’m talking about, right?

Nir Eyal: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Zack Arnold: So, let’s talk a little bit about that evolution.

Nir Eyal: Sure. So, Hooked is about how to build good habits, and so I wrote this book that was the idea behind the book was to steal the secrets from Facebook and YouTube and Instagram and WhatsApp and Slack and Snapchat. All these companies are so good at building products and services that are so engaging, so that we can build all kinds of products and services that improve people’s lives with good habits, and that’s exactly what’s happened, so companies like Fit Bod use the hook model to get people hooked to exercising in the gym, Kahoot uses the hook model to get kids hooked onto in-classroom learning, The New York Times, one of my clients, uses the hook model to get people hooked to reading the news, so we can absolutely use the same psychology to help people form healthy habits, and that’s what Hooked was all about. And in distractible is the opposite side, right? As an industry insider, I know the Achilles heel of distraction, and I have the utmost respect for Cal Newport. I read all his books, but I don’t know, he doesn’t have a social media account, and so that’s troublesome, because I think it’s really nice if you have a job where you don’t need a social media account, but I do need a social media account from my livelihood, and I think a lot of other people are out there, kind of, you know, are in the same situation. We, we can’t just stop using email for 30 days, we get fired. And so the idea with this book is that, you know, with all due respect, we need to go deeper than these band-aid solutions of, you know, put away your smartphone, go on a digital detox, you know, put use gray scale, give me a phone break, like we need to get to the root cause of distraction. The root cause of distraction is not the device in your hand, it’s what’s going on in your head.

Zack Arnold: Well, if we’re only five minutes into talking about productivity, and you already dropped an F bomb. Oh boy, are you and I gonna have fun today?

Nir Eyal: You can delete it out. Sorry, I got excited.

Zack Arnold: I don’t want you to apologize at all. That I love having that kind of energy on the show. And yes, we will bleep it out, because I am very proud of my clean tag on iTunes. Good, but yeah, no, we’re.. we will not edit you, and I have that, that same visceral emotional reaction. I just feel like so much of the productivity space and the bloggers and even the courses, it’s so much about just hear all the steps you need to take to do this on your browser or do this with your phone or whatever it is, and even if it’s a matter of getting deeper into time blocking or time management or all of these strategies, all that’s happening is people are becoming more efficient versions of busy, so I just feel like we’re teaching people to spin on the hamster wheel faster. And I hate all that stuff. For me, it’s all about how can I be more effective, not just more efficient, but in order to do that, you really kind of have to dig a lot deeper into yourself. Beyond, oh yeah, I find that the reason that I’m not getting as much done during the day, as I check Instagram a lot, so I’m going to make my phone gray scale, and I’m going to put the screen time blocker, so it reminds me, and I have to do one extra step before I hit the okay button, like, no, you got to go much deeper into the emotional roots of the problem, right? Right, and that’s really what part one of your book is,

Nir Eyal: That’s exactly right, it’s the most important step, so to become indestructible, there are these four basic steps, and this is.. this took me.. this book took me five years to write, by the way, because I was so distracted that my first book did pretty well, and so I started getting lots of phone calls and emails, and lots of demands on my time, and the one thing that I really enjoyed doing and made me successful researching and writing, I did. Any time for anymore, and so that’s really why I wrote this book, and so it was really a personal journey. So I don’t want anybody to think that, you know, I wrote this book because I, I don’t have a problem with distraction, no, quite the opposite. I wanted to find solutions to my own problem, and so what I developed was this idea of, of this four steps to becoming indestructible, and in order to, you know, the good place to start here is to understand what we mean by distraction and why it’s so important. So, the reason I contend that fighting distraction is so important is because there is no more information gap. It used to be, you know, before the internet, maybe you could claim, “Gee whiz, I just don’t know what to do, right? I don’t have the information. Who can say that today? If you want to lose weight, who doesn’t know how to lose weight, for God’s sakes. We all know who doesn’t know how to have a better relationship with their family and friends. You want, you need to be fully present. Who doesn’t know that? If you want to do better at your job, you got to do the work. We all know this. And so, yet the question shouldn’t be, ‘Wow, what am I not doing? What do I.. you know, what do I not know? You basically know what to do. The question should be, why don’t we do it? Why do we keep getting distracted? I think that is a much more important problem, even though it’s not as sexy, right? There’s so many books that say, you know, buy this book or buy this course, and I’m gonna, you’re gonna make millions of dollars. I would contend that the real problem is not the glitzy, glamorous stuff. The real problem is that we keep not doing the things we know we should do, and so, in order to understand distraction, we have to understand what the opposite of distraction is. The opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction is traction. In fact, both words come from the same Latin root, trahari, which means to pull, and you’ll notice that both words, traction and distraction end in the same six letters, a c t i o n, that spells action. So, traction is any action that pulls you towards what you want to do. The opposite of traction is distraction, anything that pulls you away from what you plan to do. So, this is really important for two reasons. Number one, anything can be a distraction, so just exactly like you said, right? So many of us, we’re running like crazy in the wrong direction, and so you know, if you think about what would happen to me every day, every day I would sit down at my desk and I’d say, okay, now I’m going to work on that big project, I’m going to do the thing I know I need to do that I’ve been procrastinating on, I’m finally going to sit down, I’m going to do it, here I go, right after I check email, right, right after I check that Slack notification, right after I do that one quick thing that takes me off track eventually, and so this is why it’s so important to differentiate between traction and distraction, because anything that you did not plan to do with your time is a distraction, even if it feels worky, right, even if it feels like, oh, I got to check email at some point, I might as well do it now, no, that is just as much of a pernicious distraction as people moaning and complaining about social media, or whatever else. They don’t talk about these lesser felt distractions, right? Pretty obvious, if you’re playing Mario Kart at work, that’s clearly a distraction. But what about checking the wrong emails, or going to the wrong meetings? Or that is just as much of a distraction. So, just as much as anything can be a distraction. The other reason this is so important to understand the psychotomy is to realize that anything can be traction, that as long as you plan for that behavior, for that activity, enjoy it, and enjoy it without guilt. Who says that playing a video game is somehow morally inferior to watching a football game, there’s no difference as long as you plan to do it according to your values and on your schedule, enjoy it without guilt. And so I think what we see today is that people are so busy today with all of these things that they are reacting to that even when they have time to enjoy themselves with recreational activities, they feel guilty about it, because they think to themselves, oh, I think I probably should be doing that other thing right now, and they don’t actually get to enjoy the thing that they really want to do in peace. So, we can actually turn distractions into traction by simply planning for them, and so we can get more into that step in a bit. But just to understand the four points, so imagine a number line to the right, you have traction, to the left, you have distraction, and now you have the two things. Imagine an arrow pointing to the center, bisecting that line, and another arrow pointing to the top, bisecting that line. So, pointing to the middle of the midpoint of that line, we have the two things that influence us to do traction or distraction. These are called triggers. So, we have two types of triggers. We have external triggers, and we have internal triggers. External triggers – these are the usual suspects, the pings, the dings, the rings – all of these things in our outside environment that prompt us towards either traction or distraction. Okay, now this is what everybody tends to blame, right? No offense to Cal, this is the big objection, right? It’s Facebook, it’s email, it’s Twitter, it’s this, that all this stuff outside of us. Yes, but what we don’t realize, and what I uncovered in my five years of research, is that when you look at the greatest source of distraction, it is not the external triggers, it is in fact the internal triggers. The internal triggers are what leads us more. Much more frequently, it’s a distraction than the pings and things in our environment. What are the internal triggers? The internal triggers are uncomfortable states that we seek to escape. Okay, it’s a distraction that starts from within us. And so, in order to understand why we get distracted by internal triggers, we have to back up a second and ask ourselves, why do we get distracted by anything? Why do we do everything that we do, and if you ask people what’s the nature of human motivation, what motivates us, they will give you some version of carrots and sticks, right? You’ve probably heard some versions of this. This is, you know, all about why everything we do is about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. This is called Freud’s pleasure principle, but it turns out that neurologically speaking, that is not what is going on, that in fact we are not motivated by the desire to pursue pleasure and avoid pain, but rather the reason we do everything is for one reason only, and that is the desire to escape discomfort. Everything we do is to help us modulate our mood, so physiologically we know this to be true, right? Think about how, if you feel cold when you go outside, your brain says this doesn’t feel good, put on a coat, but when you go back inside, you feel too hot, and now the brain tells you, take off the coat. If you feel hunger pangs, you eat, and when you feel stuffed, oh, that doesn’t feel good, you stop eating. So, if all human behavior is prompted by a desire to escape discomfort, not only do we see this with physiological sensations, we also see this with psychological sensations. So, when we are feeling lonely, we check Facebook. When we’re uncertain, we Google. When we are bored, we check sports scores and stock prices, and the news, and Pinterest, and Reddit. All of these things cater to these uncomfortable emotional sensations. So, if we admit that all behavior is prompted by a desire to escape discomfort, even by the way, the pursuit of pleasure, right, wanting to feel good is itself psychologically destabilizing, craving, desire, lust. There’s a reason we say love hurts, because that is exactly what is going on in the brain, and we can talk about the systems in the brain that they do exactly this, but if we come to grips with the fact that everything we do is about a desire to escape discomfort, that means that time management is pain management. That I don’t care what guru’s techniques you follow, I don’t care what the latest life hacks are. If we don’t acknowledge this fact, that everything we do is about a desire to escape discomfort, and then equip ourselves with the tools to deal with that discomfort. Everything will be a distraction, right? We will always be distracted by one thing or another if we just blame the stuff outside of ourselves and don’t acquire the skills to deal with these uncomfortable sensations in a helpful rather than hurtful manner.

Zack Arnold: Oh man, I couldn’t have said it better myself. I mean, the key word here is discomfort. When I work with people in my coaching and mentorship program, the first thing that I tell them, even before they sign up, as I say, you better be okay with being uncomfortable, because I’m going to push you outside your comfort zone, and you’re going to be asked a lot of questions that you are not ready to answer, and that always freaks people out, but then they realize the reason that they are where they are is because they have worked so hard to make themselves comfortable, and when it comes to the whole distraction or traction conversation, I think the the aha moment that I’ve seen from people so often that feeds into all the things you’re talking about right now is we will go through and do some of the practical steps to help them feel less distracted and manage the phones or whatever, and it’s just like clockwork. The next week they come back to me and they said, “Hey, so I, you know, I turned off the notifications like you said and put the phone in airplane mode and did all these things, but like 15 minutes in I still needed to do something to distract myself, and my phone wasn’t even in the room. I don’t understand what’s going on. I was like, ah, now we’re getting it somewhere, right? That’s always the big moment,

Nir Eyal: Right? I mean, let’s think about this common sense wise. So, you think if Facebook shut down tomorrow, if YouTube went out of business, right? Do we really think people start reading Shakespeare and Chaucer in their spare time? Come on, of course, they’ll do what we’ve always done. Plato talked about distraction 2500 years before the iPhone, right? Distraction is part of the human condition. I think what bugs me so much about the self-help industry and the productivity industry these days is that there is somehow a narrative that feeling bad is bad, and nothing could be further from the truth. We have to acknowledge that we are designed for dissatisfaction. Think about it. If there was ever a group of Homo sapiens that was happy all the time, that was, you know, that was that was satisfied. Everything was great for this particular tribe of Homo sapiens. Do you know those people would have been killed and eaten by our ancestors. Right, there’s no reason no way they would have survived, because it is our perpetual disquietude that gets us to do stuff. Right, it’s what gets us to hunt and to invent and to create and to improve our lot in life. That is what helped our species survive. Five, and take over the earth, because we are constantly looking for more now. If we don’t know how to manage that discomfort, it can get the best of us, because it can lead us to distraction, to try and escape our own heads. So, we drink too much, we watch too much TV, we engage in sports too much, we obsess about our fantasy football. We, we work too much, for God’s sake. How many of us know people who work as much as they work, so that they don’t have to go home and face their home life? Right, there’s all kinds of distractions that we can use to get it out of our heads. So, the idea here is to harness the power of that discomfort, not to shove it down, not to think that we’re bad somehow, or that we’re broken, but to harness that discomfort to help lead us towards traction rather than distraction.

Zack Arnold: So, let’s talk a little bit about the practicality of this, because this really is the heart of what I wanted to get into. So, for anybody that was thinking, “Oh, I’m going to learn all these new hacks and tricks, well, you can probably fast forward to about 59 and a half minutes. We might cover one or two of them, but I love to go much, much deeper. So, let’s talk a little bit about some practical steps that people can use when they start to realize this is a lot more than the external distractions or the external interruptions, because that’s another huge complaint that I get, is you don’t understand them in an open office space, or my, you know, my boss is always coming in and knocking on my door every five minutes, and they need something new. Yes, all that stuff is real, I’m not disagreeing with it, but for now I really want to talk about the internal stuff. So, let’s talk about some techniques that people can actually use to start peeling the layers of the onion and realize that most likely the biggest distraction they have in their lives is inside their own head or inside their own heart.

Nir Eyal: Absolutely, so we can totally get to that, but I do want to acknowledge that everything you just said, the boss that won’t interrupt you, the open floor plan office, I deal with that in my book. I give, I know exactly what to tell you to fix that. There are solutions that that will actually help you solve those problems. So, let’s get to this, but stay tuned, because we want to get to those other questions as well. Everybody has all kinds of excuses about why they can’t, and in fact, you can, and we’ll get to that later. So, let’s talk about the internal triggers first, because that is the most important first step. If you don’t deal with the internal triggers and master them, then you will always find distraction in one thing or another. So, there’s a few techniques we can use. I break down this section in the book in terms of how do we reimagine these three aspects of our lives. We can reimagine the triggers, we can reimagine the task and we can reimagine our temperament and so that when it comes to reimagining the triggers the idea here is to see the discomfort differently and then deal with it in a more healthful manner so in this section of the book I draw upon you know 4050 year old research from what’s called acceptance and commitment therapy and I give people this toolkit that I use myself every day. I mean, look, everything in this book, I didn’t want to write one of these productivity books that’s based on, oh, you know, I take a shower every morning at 4am at freezing, you know, freezing cold water. Why? Because it works for me, so it’ll work for you. I don’t know, that doesn’t cut it for me. I wanted everything in the book to be backed by peer-reviewed studies, so there’s 30 pages of citations in the back of the book, where you can look up all of these peer-reviewed published studies that utilize many of these tactics, and so the first tactic has to do with the way we think about the trigger itself. So many people today, when it comes to distraction, they fall into two categories. We call them either the blamers. The blamers say, “Oh, it’s my technology, it’s my boss, it’s my.. it’s Facebook, it’s the iPhone that does it to me. Those are the blamers. They blame things outside themselves. And then you have what’s called the shamers. The shamers are the people who say, “Oh, maybe there’s something wrong with me. See, I’m lazy, maybe not cut out for this job. I have a short attention span. They shame themselves into thinking that’s the problem, and of course this totally backfires, because as we just talked about, if all human behavior is prompted by a desire to escape discomfort, what are you doing when you shame yourself? You feel even worse about yourself, you have more internal triggers, and so you are even more likely to seek escape, and you, you go down this distraction of vicious cycle of the worse you feel, the more you want to get your, your head out of that state, and so you look for a distraction. So we don’t want to be blamers, we don’t want to be shamers, we want to be what’s called a claimer. A claimer acknowledges that this isn’t your fault. Okay, you didn’t invent the iPhone, you didn’t invent email, right? That’s not your fault, but it is your responsibility, because these tools aren’t going away, and we can learn to use them better. And so we do that by claiming responsibility for these things. It’s not your fault, but it is your responsibility. So, how can we begin to claim responsibility? The first thing we do is to understand that you cannot control how you feel, you cannot control how you feel. What you can do is control how you respond to your feelings. So, what we want to try and do is to change our impulsive action of every time we feel discomfort, we in. Impulsively reach for something to take our mind off of that bad feeling, right? When we’re feeling stressed, anxious, lonely, fatigued, uncertain, we constantly reach for something to solve that bad feeling. So, what we want to do is to try and retrain ourselves to respond to something more helpful, as opposed to something that ends up hurting us. Now, how do we do that? Some people will use what’s called strict abstinence. Strict abstinence says absolutely not. I will not do that thing. Okay, so whether it’s I’m not gonna eat the chocolate cake or I’m not gonna smoke that cigarettes or I’m not gonna check Google right now. Here’s what happens, and this is this is again why I don’t like the 30 day digital detoxes, because what happens when you tell yourself I’m not going to do something, it’s kind of like taking a rubber band, okay? And if you put that rubber band between your two fingers, and then you pull at it with your other hand, and you pull, and you pull, and you pull, and you pull, and you pull, until finally you can’t pull anymore, it’s gonna come loose, and then the rubber band doesn’t go where it started. No, the rubber band ricochets even farther out, and so that’s what happens when we use strict abstinence. We tell ourselves, don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it. Okay, fine, I’ll do it. And when we give in, we are actually training our brains to feel the relief of discomfort as pleasure, and so we are essentially training our brains to like the thing that we are trying to resist, and that’s why strict absence backfires, particularly when it comes, you know, some things you can use strict absence, right? If you’re, you know, if you’re, if you had a problem with alcohol, for example, you can abstain completely from it, you can remove it from your environment. But how do you stop eating food? How do you stop using technology? You can’t. There is no strict absence approach to those types of potential distractions, so here’s what you do instead. You use what’s called the 10 minute rule, and I use this 10 minute rule almost every day. 10 minute rule says that you can give in to any distraction in just 10 minutes. Now, for those 10 minutes, your job is to do one of two things, you can either get back to the task at hand or do what’s called surf the urge for those 10 minutes. Surfing the urge acknowledges that emotions, you know, when we feel a certain state – boredom, anxiety, stress, fatigue, loneliness, whatever – it feels like it’s going to last forever, but of course it never does that, that emotion, these uncomfortable emotional states, these internal triggers, they crest and then they subside like a wave, and our job is to surf the urge, so for just 10 minutes, what I want you to do, you can, you know, if it’s, oh, I really want to eat that chocolate cake, I know I don’t need, I really want to go check my email right now, and I, what I really need to do is to focus on writing or preparing a presentation, whatever it is that you need to do. Focus work for you’re with your kid and you want to spend quality time with them, as opposed to getting distracted by some stupid email. You say, “Yes, I can give in. I can do that thing in 10 minutes. Now, for those 10 minutes, I want you to just explore that sensation with curiosity rather than contempt. Don’t beat yourself up, don’t make yourself feel bad about feeling that state. Just sit there and explore that sensation, feel what it is that is triggering you, and be with that state for just 10 minutes. At the end of those 10 minutes, you can give in to that distraction, but what you will find nine times out of 10 is that by just focusing on that sensation with curiosity rather than contempt. By the time the 10 minutes are up, you won’t even desire that distraction. You’ll be back at the thing at back at work or back doing the thing that you originally wanted to do. So that’s that’s one of these three big strategies for mastering these internal triggers.

Zack Arnold: Well, speaking of this idea of trying to like summon the strength, or dare I use the word willpower to get through these 10 minutes. I want to talk a little bit deeper, beyond just this, and I love this idea of being more aware and being intentional about really looking inside yourself and saying, what is it that I’m feeling? I actually did an extensive conversation about this as it relates specifically to food, and as you’re talking about food, is pretty much just another form of distraction, right? And we have all these emotional urges, and whether it’s trying to, you know, fill loneliness or boredom, or, you know, lack of pleasure, or whatever it is, food can be one of those big distractions, and I had a very, very long involved conversation about how you can just be present with what it is that you’re feeling inside, but I feel like so many people say, well, that all sounds great, but I just.. I don’t have the willpower to go 10 minutes, and one of the things I love in your book is you kind of dispel this idea that everybody talks about, that willpower is a muscle, right? It’s a thing that you strengthen and you lose over time, and even I have talked about the same concept, so this really kind of opened my eyes. So I want to learn more about this idea of willpower and what it is that you’ve learned in the research.

Nir Eyal: Sure, absolutely. So when it comes to willpower, I’m not a big fan. I think that willpower is probably the idea of willpower itself is a myth, and it sounds crazy. It sounds like. I’m losing my religion here, but it really is a very shaky thing to hang your hat on, and some of the science that used to support this idea, we call it ego depletion, that will power. I’m sure you’ve heard this, it’s kind of a piece of folk psychology that that will power runs out like gas in a gas tank, that if you spend a lot of time, a lot of effort on a willpower task, that at the end you just, you feel like you, you, you, you don’t have any left, and so you’re more likely to give into temptation. So, there was a psychologist who actually tested this, and he had some interesting results, and he even found that it had some, some magical properties, like if you drank a sugar sweetened beverage, that you could somehow replenish your willpower. It all sounded amazing until a bunch of other psychologists said, “This sounds fishy, let me replicate these studies. So, this is what happens in the social sciences: somebody gets a result that sounds too good to be true. So, a bunch of other psychologists get together and they rerun the study, and they could not replicate these studies, they could not replicate them, except for there was one case of people who did actually experience ego depletion, one type of person, everybody else didn’t, it was a myth for the, for the vast majority of people, but one type of person did actually exhibit this effect, this willpower effect of when I, that I depleted my willpower like gas in a gas tank, and by the way, this would happen to me. I didn’t know at the time it was called ego depletion, but you know the typical example is, you know, I come home from work, say, ‘Wow, what a hard day, I’m spent, I have no more willpower, give me that Ben and Jerry’s, I’m gonna eat that pint of Ben and Jerry’s while I watch Netflix, right, because I’m spent, I’ve got nothing left in me. So they tested these studies, and they found that they didn’t replicate, except for that group of people who it did replicate with, and those people, believe it or not, were the people who believed in ego depletion. So if you were the type of person who believed that I’m spent, I deserve this, I have no more willpower left. Give me that, Ben and Jerry’s. You were the kind of person who was affected by this idea of ego depletion, that you really did run out of willpower, and so that’s why it’s so important to do what I call reimagine our temperament. So many of us walk around with these self-limiting beliefs that really don’t serve us, and I think we see this propagated today in the media when we hear about how technology is hijacking your brain, how Facebook is addicting everyone. What this is doing is leading us towards learned helplessness, that ironically, by thinking we are powerless, just like those people who believed in eco depletion and believe that they were spent. It becomes so, and so that’s why we have to stop telling ourselves these ridiculous narratives about how we are somehow broken and deficient, or there’s nothing we can do about it, or this other force is controlling our brain. We are making it true when we believe that stuff.

Zack Arnold: I think the funny thing is that you’re saying that the only people that are going to experience the willpower depletion effect are the ones that actually believe that it exists, and this is something that is just being perpetuated over and over and over nowadays. So, anybody that reads the internet at all, or has any focus on productivity, or learning about growth, this is what they’re being told, myself included, right. So this is something that I’ve perpetuated, and I’m thinking, oh crap, how many of my blog posts do I have to go back and rewrite now? Damn it.

Nir Eyal: Well, this is the beauty of science, right? Science is not religion, because you can find evidence and then retest, you know, replicate these studies and look for new evidence. And so that’s the scientific process. It’s great. I mean, we, we should all be thankful when we learn something new, and we have our apple carts overturned. That’s a good thing. That’s scientific progress. And I get this, you know. I think the reason this is so important to preach from the mountaintops about why this is not true is because I still get questions all the time. Actually, just yesterday somebody asked me and said, you know, what about this stuff about energy? Right, I’m a morning person, and shouldn’t I maximize my energy, not my time. We see an article like every week about don’t maximize your, you know, don’t don’t worry about your time, maximize your energy, whatever, which is fine if it works for you. And I think the problem is when we label ourselves with a self-limiting belief, for example, even something as benign, seemingly, as I’m a morning person or I’m a night owl. Okay, maybe you enjoy working at night, maybe you enjoy working in the day. Maybe that’s true, but when you label yourself with a certain identity, then what happens if you have to change something, right? What happens if your morning is now busy? Well, you see, I’m a morning person, there’s no way I could possibly work in the evening. I’m a morning person, and so when we label ourselves these this way, not based on any kind of real evidence, we are really limiting our ability to do what we want to do, because we make it true, right? It becomes almost like this placebo effect, or what we call a nocebo effect, where our beliefs about our capability. These make them come to fruition.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, when it comes to the whole like time energy management and all that, I agree for the most part. The one area where maybe I’ll push back a tiny bit, and this is something that I talk about with the people in my program as well, is that you’re not a morning person, you’re not a night owl, it’s not like everybody either wants to wake up and get everything done at 5am or at 2am people trend towards certain areas, and I’m, are you familiar with Daniel Pink’s book? When I’m assuming, yeah, so you know one of the things that he talks about is how you know there are these large spectrums, and we kind of have a default setting where we may trend to one or the other, but I’ve had this conversation with many people that say, oh, I could never get anything done in the morning, I’m a night owl. I said, well, I trend towards being a night owl, and that’s my default tendency, but through a few practical applications and steps, and slightly shifting your circadian rhythm, but more importantly, shifting your mindset to believing that you can actually be productive in the morning, I now get the most important work that I need to do, where I’m in the zone and I’m creative, I now do it in the morning, and if I’d looked at myself 10 years ago, I would have said, “Oh, that is never going to be possible, I am such a night owl, but I realized that it wasn’t just my behavior patterns or my habits that caused me to be a night owl, it was the label, isn’t that so true, capable of right,

Nir Eyal: Yeah, exactly, and that’s you’ve, you’ve made the point very, very eloquently, is that is that we only want to have labels that serve us in our life, and actually I talk about in the book how we can use these identities and these labels for good, right, that we know that when people, when religious people label themselves a certain way, when someone says, oh, I am a devout Christian, or I’m a devout Muslim, or even I’m a vegetarian, it actually makes it easier for them to stay on track, because they label themselves a certain way, right? A vegetarian doesn’t wake up every day and say, hmm, I wonder if I should have that hamburger, no, I am a vegetarian, I do not eat meat, it makes the decision easier to make every day, and so that’s fine, I think, actually, but that’s the reason I called my book Indistractable, is because that’s the new label, right, that’s the new moniker that we should use to describe ourselves, is no, I am indestructible, I am the kind of person who lives with personal integrity, I strive to do what I say I’m going to do, so labels can be a very effective technique, the thing is we want to make sure we choose those labels and don’t let the labels choose us.

Zack Arnold: Probably the most common label that I hear from people when they come to me in my program is they say I am just bad at time management, disorganized. It’s like, no, you’re not, you just don’t have the rules and the strategies, but you weren’t born genetically deficient in your ability to manage time,

Nir Eyal: That’s right, that’s exactly right,

Zack Arnold: And a lot, a lot of it too. And this is a conversation that I’ve had with my mother, ad nauseam, and she’s a devout listener of the show, and she may actually be listening through the other other side of the wall right now. Who knows, she’s actually visiting, but the point being that a conversation we have all the time is this idea that the way that we have structured our society is that we basically give people the first 22 to 25 years of their life, we, we give them all of the structure that they need on a silver platter, then we shove them out into the world and say, you have no more structure whatsoever, just figure it out for yourself and manage your own time and your goals and your aspirations, and you know that’s why I think so many people seek out full time employment when it’s really maybe isn’t the best fit for them, which is a discovery that I came across, where I had been doing full-time employment not that long outside of college, and I’m like, this doesn’t really work well for me. I’m more the entrepreneur mindset, and I like to have freedom of my time and be able to choose what I’m doing with my time, but there are other people telling me micromanaging my time all day long, and in my brain this isn’t jiving well. So, so many people come to me that say, I just, I can’t stand the nine to five, and it’s not working for me, and I want to do my own thing, or be freelance, but I have no tools to do it, which is going to be the segue to part two, which is helping people understanding how to make time for traction, because, oh my god, did I geek out when you started to talk about time, but I love it, not just in the sense of, well, here’s how to create a block, and blah blah blah, like you go into the psychological depths of how to do it, as opposed to just the, you know, like the buttons, so to speak. So, let’s talk a little bit about this idea of making traction,

Nir Eyal: Yeah, and I love your point around how so many of us, you know, we go from a school environment, we have these very rigid schedules, and then when we get out into the real world, if we try our hand at something where we don’t have a very defined schedule, if we don’t go, you know, punch a clock somewhere, what many people interpret, if they do trip up from time management perspective, they reinforce their identity to say what you just said. I’m just not very good at it, right? There’s something wrong with me. I’m deficient, I’m lazy, I have a short attention span, I’m not good at time management, right. And so we’re reinforcing this identity, which, of course, makes it true. And so part of the lesson here is to ask ourselves, you know, look, if we don’t plan our day, somebody’s going to plan it for. Us that you know, I spoke to many people in the five years of researching this book, I spoke to many people who are very good about managing their time and barely ever get distracted, and then I spoke with a lot of people who constantly get distracted, and one of the things that was so interesting, it was pretty much black and white, that this trait that everybody I talked to, who was, who has having trouble managing distraction, they would tell me, oh, you know, the everything’s so distracting these days, I can’t get anything done. My kids want this, and my spouse wants that, and my boss is asking for this, and you see what happened on Twitter, and the news is this, I just can’t get anything done. And then, when I would ask them, I would say, you know, that’s that’s really difficult, I’m sorry to hear that, but can I see what it was you plan to do today? Can I see your calendar? Nine times out of 10, they would take out their calendar, and there’d be nothing on it, just white space. And it turns out that two thirds of Americans don’t keep any sort of a calendar, and even the 1/3 that do keep a calendar, maybe they keep a workplace calendar, but when it comes to everything else in their life, who knows, it’ll happen when it happens. I mean, you think about how ridiculous this is. I mean, you know, we spend so much money on security systems for our home and alarms for our cars, and we keep our money in vaults in a bank somewhere, so it’s nice and safe. But when it comes to our time, yeah, sure, come on over, take as much of it as you want. And so, here’s, if here’s a very important lesson from this book is that you cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. So, if I can’t see what is traction in your day, you don’t know what is distraction. Everything is a distraction if you haven’t planned out what you want to do with your time. So, that’s where we start with this technique called time boxing, and this is something that Cal and I definitely agree on, is that we definitely want to time box our day. So, I’ll give you a link for the show notes. I created this tool because I found a lot of people had trouble using Google Calendar or Outlook, or whatever. You can use any tool you want, but I found a lot of people have a tough time getting started. So, I created my own tool. You don’t have to pay anything, totally free, don’t sign up for anything. It’s just an online tool anyone can use, and the idea is, is that we use this tool to block out every minute of our day. Now, it doesn’t mean you have to be super rigid and you know, punch yourself in the face if you get off track once in a while. No, that’s not the idea. The idea is that you will finally know what is the difference between traction and distraction for every minute of your day, so that you can finally look at that and say, “Oh, everything on my calendar is what I plan to do. That is traction, by the way, even if it’s having fun, right? Especially if it’s having fun, if it’s playing a video game or watching a YouTube video or watching the football game on TV, whatever it is you want to do, do it, but make time for it in your schedule. So here’s how we do that, you know, instead of these five year plans and these vision boards, and the, you know, the big hairy goal that we’re supposed to have. Let’s start with next week, okay? Let’s just start with next week. And what I want you to do for next week is to ask yourself, how do I turn my values into time for next week? How do I turn my values into time, starting with these three domains. The first life domain is you. If you can’t take care of yourself, you can’t take care of other people, you can’t do your best work. So, ask yourself, how do I live out my values in reference to myself? So, what are my values in reference to myself? So, values are defined as the attributes of the person I want to become, the attributes of the person I want to become. So, is physical fitness one of my values? I’m not saying it should be. It’s totally up to you. I’m not going to tell you what your value should be. Only you can decide. But if taking care of your body, if you value your physical health, do you have time on your calendar for a walk, to go to the gym, for whatever it is that you want to do to take care of your physical health? Put that on your calendar. Do you have time for proper rest? Is that in your calendar? Right, do anything that you want to do for prayer, meditation, painting, journaling, whatever it is that’s important to you to live out to your values to yourself. Put that on your calendar, just for next week. The next thing I want you to do is to put things that help you live up your up to your values of your relationships domain, so if being a, an available friend is important, if being a devoted parent is important, if being in a confidant to your spouse is important, if those are your values, put that in your calendar too. Time for regular interactions. I think the part that most people neglect is time for their friends, right. That’s why we’re going through this loneliness epidemic. You know, psychologists tell us that loneliness is as detrimental to our health as smoking and obesity. So, we have got to nurture those friendships, you know. We can’t just say, “Oh, yeah, we’ll get coffee sometime. Yeah, that’s never gonna happen. So, put that time in your calendar for regular interactions with the people you care about, who care about you. Then finally, the last domain. This is where most people start, but I actually think this should be the last thing we do. We need our work domain. So look at your work tasks, right? What’s important for you to do at work? You know, email is important. Okay? Do you have a time block for that? Don’t just check email all day long. Put time for checking email on your calendar, time for meetings, time for office hours, and time, most importantly, to think. Thinking is a competitive advantage these days, because nobody is doing it. We are constantly reacting all day long, reacting to emails, reacting to Slack notifications, reacting to meetings that we have no time for reflection, so make sure you have that time in your day as well. Okay, so now we’ve, we’ve made our time box calendar. What is super important now to do, and now I haven’t seen anyone else discuss this. This is a super important technique, is a life changer. We want to do what’s called a schedule sync. A schedule sync is when we show our calendar, our time box calendar to stakeholders in our life, starting with our family. So, my wife and I, every week we have 15 minutes, that 15 minutes is planned for on our calendar, where we sit down together and we review each other’s time box calendar. This practice saved my marriage. We would constantly get into fights a few years ago about why I wasn’t pulling my weight in our marriage, right? Why wasn’t I picking up the trash, or take, you know, doing the laundry, or taking care of our daughter, whatever the case might be. We never have those fights anymore, because we know exactly what’s going to get done and when it is going to get done by synchronizing this schedule. It takes 15 minutes, and it has saved my marriage. We can do the same exact thing at work, let me tell you, your boss would love you to do this. They won’t ask you to do this, because they don’t want you to feel like you’re being micromanaged. But if you do this voluntarily, if you take your schedule to your boss and say, “Hey, boss, here’s my time box calendar, here’s all the things that I’m doing with my time, you see where everything goes now, here’s the stuff I won’t have time for. Okay, here’s all the tasks you asked me to do that I won’t have time for in this schedule. That you can see here, where am I? Where are the priorities incorrect? Help me reprioritize and put some of the things in place that you think need to be there. You would be so shocked how many times your boss will look at that and say, wait a minute, that’s not important, take that off your day, but you know that other thing that’s really important, can you get to that sooner? Right. This is a revolutionary practice. It will absolutely help your work-life balance. It will make you so much happier. It’ll make your boss so much happier with you. So, please try this practice. It’s very, very effective. So, that’s what making time for traction, the second step to becoming indestructible, is all about.

Zack Arnold: Oh my god, you are my productivity brother from another mother. Oh my god, just to reflect a little bit of this back on you. It’s when I was listening to the book, as well as, like, oh my god, I went from being like, oh yeah, I guess I’ll check this book out, maybe I’ll have a decent podcast guest, to oh my god, I cannot wait to talk to this guy, reason why. So, as I was reading this, let me just break down one of the things that I recently just did, because I was having this same argument with my spouse about pulling the weight to just like the little stuff, right? Everybody thinks that the dishes on the counter, that’s not, you know, what the what the big argument is about, and that’s correct, but you still have the dishes on the counter. So, for my 40th birthday, my wife said, “What do you want to do? And I said, “What I want to do is, I want the two of us, without distraction, no kids, no family, to just go out to dinner, and I want us each to talk about everything that we feel that we’re responsible for, and I want to make sure that we have an understanding of who needs to do what, and we know who’s going to be responsible for it, and when it’s going to be done, and she’s just like, that’s what you want to do for your 40th birthday, and like, yes, that’s what I want, because there’s just.. there was a lot of tension created around all the little stuff, and since we’ve done that, it’s made a huge difference, but the other thing that you talk about is this idea of creating, and this is an entire module in the program where I work with people, called creating the ideal weekly calendar, right? So I’ve noticed, like you said, is that I’ll ask people when they’re starting to work through my program, they’re starting to learn how to manage their time better. I’ll say, all right, so pull out your calendar, like, well, I don’t really use my calendar. All right, well, show me what you got, and it’s a doctor’s appointment for one day in the month, right, because that’s important. So it’s got to go on the calendar, and I will force them to fill all 24 hours of all seven days, like, what am I supposed to fill it with? You can fill it with whatever you want, but you need to be intentional about what would go there if this were the perfect week. When are you waking up? When are you having your morning routine? When do you brush your teeth, right? Like, really granular level, making sure they understand this is never going to happen, but you need a place to start with intentionality. So, going back to what you had said about this idea of, you know, social media is an example. Social media inherently is not bad, it’s the fact that it’s distracting you from something else. I’ll tell people that if there were a camera in my office, there’s going to be about a 20 minute period in the afternoon, probably three to 330 ish, where I’m just going to be on my couch surfing social media, and they’re thinking, but you can’t do that. You talk about deep work and being indestructible. It’s like, yeah, but that was on my calendar, and I have it there as what I call a palate cleanser.

Nir Eyal: I love it.

Zack Arnold: If I’m writing or I’m editing intensely, my brain just hits a place where it’s like, don’t know. Make me think anymore. All right, great. Well, I know that’s going to hit me in the afternoon. That’s when I’m just going to check in on social media and Instagram, right? But it’s I’m intentional about it, so I don’t feel guilty saying, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t be doing this. No, I plan for it.

Nir Eyal: That’s exactly right. So, what you’ve done beautifully is you have taken a distraction, something that you would check throughout the day, or at least I used to check throughout the day, because I was spurred by an internal trigger, I was bored, lonely, uncertain, anxious, right? And I would check these tools as a distraction, and now you have turned it into traction, and that feeling of, you know, what you can enjoy this guilt-free, right? You can, you can have fun. There’s nothing wrong with having fun. There’s nothing wrong with downtime if you plan for it, there’s a great quote that says the time you plan to waste is not wasted time, so enjoy it without guilt.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s one of the keys to this. I had somebody else that ran through my program, and she had sent me a message, like a month or two into it, saying, “Oh my god, like I just.. I watched Netflix for three hours, and I was in my pajamas, and it was amazing, because I had everything done that I was supposed to get done, and there was no guilt. I’m like, yeah, it’s not like I don’t watch television or go on social media or do anything else, but it’s after I’ve done the things that I’ve actually planned on that are important, which brings me to the other part of this thing that I’m so excited that you talked about, because I talk about this, is this idea of not only syncing with your spouse, but syncing with your boss, because I’m so fastidious about blocking out my time and breaking it down on a granular level. I’ve had this conversation before, technically not a boss, but somebody that I collaborate with in my department, and they’re basically the one that makes sure that the trains run on time, right? So they make sure that all the episodes get dispersed accordingly, and goes to the right people at the right time, and they’ll give me a deadline, and I’ll say I can’t meet that deadline. Well, what do you mean you can’t meet that deadline? And I’ll say, come on over to my office, and let me show you my calendar, and I’ll say, like, here are all the things that you expect of me on these days, and then they’ll look at the calendar, and they’re like, oh yeah, you can,

Nir Eyal: Yeah,

Zack Arnold: But it’s putting in the time to do that, that makes that conversation happen. It’s because I’m setting more realistic expectations, and everybody’s on the same page, which eliminates so much of the stress and conflict in our department.

Nir Eyal: So true, so true. I think a lot of people don’t do this. I’m not really sure why most people don’t do this. I mean, it’s such a.. maybe it’s because they just don’t know that this is an important thing to do. Maybe they’re insecure about, hey, if I show people my calendar, they’ll think I’m slacking off. Of course, it’s exactly the opposite. I mean, this is exactly the question that you had earlier, of my boss keeps interrupting me. Well, the way you get your boss to stop interrupting you is to show them when you are doing your focus work time and say, hey, boss, you know what? I have these office hours that I’m scheduled every single day at this time. If you need something, can you just wait until around that time of day? I’m going to be here in the office, like that is my time when I am interruptable. Come by with a question, as opposed to sending me an email, come by just to chat, whatever you want to do. But from this time to this time, from 9am till 1030 or whatever, that is my focused work time. So that’s the time when I need to really concentrate without distraction.

Zack Arnold: Yes, and that’s actually a conversation that I have with all the people that I’m collaborating with, that could knock on my door, and I go so far as to, and I know that this is going to get a lot of guffaws from the audience, but I turn my email off, so people can’t get ahold of me via email while I’m in that deep workspace, and I either close or I put my Slack in snooze, and I put a do not disturb sign on my door, so unless something is absolutely important and urgent, it’s a matter of if they don’t get a hold of me in the next hour, then the show doesn’t go on the air, or whatever it is that happens, or what it does is it forces people to think one step ahead and say, oh wait, he doesn’t want to be disturbed, does he really need to be told this now, and people are so afraid of not being available, but once you give that other person that one extra step, they’re like, oh, you know what, I can just wait an extra hour,

Nir Eyal: Yeah, exactly. So this actually leads to the third step, which is to hack back the external triggers. So the external triggers are these pings, dings, and rings, all these things in our environment that can lead us towards traction or distraction, and the idea here is that we can hack back these external triggers, not just the ones on our phones, of course. We have to turn off notification settings, of course, we have to change our, our computer settings, so that we’re not constantly pinged and dinged, but also these external triggers that come in the form of other people. So one of the most common causes of distraction in the average knowledge worker’s day is the other people, right, his colleagues. It’s, it’s, it’s the open floor plan office. What a crazy hotbed of distraction working in an open floor plan office. So, what do you do? So every copy of Indistractable comes with a screen sign, it’s right in the book, it’s a piece of card stock that you pull out of the book, you fold into thirds, and you put it on your computer monitor, and it’s bright red, you can’t miss it, and it says, “I’m in distractible, please come back later, so that your colleagues know, kind of like you’re putting a sign on your door that says, “Hey, I can’t be bothered right now, please come back later. We can do the same thing, even if we work in an open floor plan office, and it’s has a huge, huge impact, and you say, “Well, some people say. Uh, well, that’s what I put on earphones for, right? But here’s the thing: when you put on headphones, people think you’re watching YouTube videos, so you want to send a more explicit message to say, ‘Nope, this is the time when I need to do focus work. I’m not saying you should do this all day long, but for the time when you need to do focus work, that is when you want to use this sign. So, whether it’s a half an hour, an hour, two hours in your day, make sure you protect that time to think

Zack Arnold: Well, and again, the most important component to all of this, I believe, is having the conversation beforehand, so people understand the intention, because if they think it’s just a matter of, oh, they don’t want to be bothered, well, yeah, then you might annoy your boss or your coworkers, but if you’ve had that important conversation, especially with a boss or a supervisor, and you make it all about them, and it’s like, listen, the intention of doing this is so I can produce better work for you in less time, i.e. less money. Then they’re very receptive to listening, and all of a sudden they stop bothering you, but it’s because they understand that it’s not just, oh, I don’t want to be bothered, and maybe I’m on YouTube or Facebook, or whatever it is. When they get that you’re protecting your creativity, what they do is they realize the value in not bothering you, so that’s why it’s so important. In the analogy that I use is, I call it the tie on the door technique, you know, the age-old adage of being in college and your roommate has to tie on the door, and we all know what that means, but you certainly don’t want to interrupt that, so it’s kind of the same thing, right? You put the do not disturb sign, or there was an example I think you had in your book of a woman that, like, wears a light up tiara.

Nir Eyal: Yeah, that’s my wife,

Zack Arnold: Exactly. All this crazy stuff, but it works. And when you realize how much more productive you are in less time, you’re like, oh my god, I’m so glad that I had these conversations, or you know, figured out these techniques, even though it takes a little bit of time up front. The return on your investment of your time of doing all this setup and having these conversations is nothing short of life changing.

Nir Eyal: That’s absolutely right. And you can start small, right? I’m not saying you have to do this all day long. So start with 30 minutes of putting up this screen sign. Can your, can your boss, you don’t even have to have a big conversation with anybody, but just try that sign for 30 minutes and see what happens. And then when people ask you about it afterwards, so here’s the thing, when they come up to you and disturb you during your focus work time, you can just point to the sign, and they’ll usually say, “Oh, sorry, let me get back to, let me let you do what you’re doing, and then afterwards, make sure you go up to them, be like, “Hey, I just want to let you know that you know I need these 30 minutes to kind of just think for 30 minutes, so when you see the sign, that’s what that means, you know, it’s a very small action, what we find is when people start implementing these small tactics in their day, making a calendar and doing a schedule sync using this screen sign, for example, these small actions people begin to notice, and that actually disseminates outward that this is how we begin to change company culture. There is, I have to have a little asterisk here, because you know, not everything, you can’t solve distraction all by yourself, that there is, you know, I do acknowledge that even after I give you all these techniques and tactics, that if you work in a workplace environment that does not respect your time and attention, that’s not necessarily something that you can change overnight, and I talk about in the book about how you can build an indestructible workplace, it’s a whole section in the book about how you can actually begin to change company culture, and I profiled two companies, the Boston Consulting Group and Slack, about how they built an indestructible workplace, despite the fact that they use tons of technology.

Zack Arnold: I was gonna say Slack is like the most ironic place to talk about being indestructible, right?

Nir Eyal: That’s what, that’s why I chose them as a case study. Exactly. Yeah,

Zack Arnold: That’s amazing. Well, you have one more pact, and I realize that we’re running out of time, and both being productivity and time management experts, I do want to respect that. But very, very briefly, I want to talk about part four in this idea of preventing distraction with pacts, and the one that I think that’s the most beneficial to my audience, which is one of those things that I hadn’t heard of, that I said, ‘Oh, I need to start recommending this. Is this idea of doing focused work time via teleconference? So, talk to me a little bit more about this idea, or in general, just about what it means to create a pact to be more focused.

Nir Eyal: Absolutely. So, the four.. okay, so we talked about the first three steps: master internal triggers, make time for traction, hack back external triggers. The final step is to prevent distraction with pacts. So, this is where we make a pre-commitment, we make a promise to ourselves or to someone else that can, in that moment when we are about to get distracted, can help us do what we say we’re going to do, as opposed to going off track. And so there are several ways we can, we can use these packs. There’s what’s called an effort packed, a price pact, and an identity pact, and by using these various packs, we become much more likely to do what we say we’re going to do. So, one of the many techniques I talk about in the book is finding a focused friend, so that can be a colleague at work, where you say, “Hey, you know, let’s get together for an hour a day, and let’s keep each other accountable to just do our focused work. What you can also do, if that’s not an option for you, maybe you work from home, or maybe you don’t feel comfortable doing this with someone at work, you can go to Focus mate.com which is a product I loved so much that I invested in the company. You can sign up to find a certain time slot in your day, so let’s say it’s 8am in the morning, you really want to get to work on that big project you’ve been putting off, you are matched with another person, and in that time you will see their face on. On the screen, when you log in, and your job is to just do what you’re going to do, and they’re going to do what they’re going to do, but you keep each other accountable by just seeing that other person work, and it sounds simple, it sounds like it’s, it can’t, it’s too good to be true, but let me tell you, it’s unbelievably effective, particularly for people who have a tough time getting started, which this is most people right that once you’re in the flow you find it’s easy, but to get started is hard. So, what they institute this mechanic in Focus mate.com that if you don’t show up on time, you get a bad review, like an Uber driver, right? So that’s what your incentive is to show up on time and get to work, and so that accountability buddy can be very, very helpful.

Zack Arnold: Well, I cannot express enough how just excited I am that we connected with each other, and that’s why I like to put good stuff out into the world, because luckily people like Scott Young, who creates a lot of great material, connected me with you, and I’m glad that I found you, and so excited about this conversation, so excited to share it with people, and I can assure you that at this point, in distractible is just going to become required text and curriculum, and all of the work that I’m doing going forwards, because it really is a fantastic resource for people that it covers all the various bases. If somebody wants to find the book, or they want to find you specifically, where can they look?

Nir Eyal: I appreciate that. Thank you so much. So, my website is nirandfar.com but Nir is spelled like my first name, n i r, so n i r and far.com And if you want more information on the book, of course, it’s available wherever books are sold, but if you go to my website, indistractable.com that’s spelled i n the word distract a b l e.com indestructible.com If you go there, there’s actually a ton of resources that you can get, there’s an 80 page workbook that’s free, you don’t even have to buy the book to get that, as well as if you do get the book and you enter in your order number, there’s a free intro course, a video course that you can get as well, all at indestructible.com

Zack Arnold: Wow, that’s awesome. I love people that are willing to give away some of their best stuff for free, just for the greater good. So,

Nir Eyal: Absolutely, no, I’m really hoping to create a movement here. My goal is that people will proudly call themselves indestructible, right? Be the kind of people who do what they say they’re going to do. That’s how we need to start this movement. So, that’s that’s really what I’m looking for right now.

Zack Arnold: Well, just consider me somebody that’s going to evangelize that movement as much as humanly possible. And I have been for a long time already, and now I have new tools to share. So, that’s awesome.

Nir Eyal: I really appreciate it. Means a lot to me. Thank you.

Zack Arnold: Thanks so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.

Nir Eyal: It was fun. Thanks.

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