The Four Research-Backed Steps to Be Indistractable with Nir Eyal
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Hello and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel, all while spending less and saving more. I'm Chris Hutchins, and I am excited to have you on my journey. Today's conversation is all about distraction, something that impacts all of us. And I know because it definitely takes a toll on me almost every day.

So I'm talking with Nir Eyal about becoming what he calls indistractable. Almost sounds like a superpower, right? Now, Nir has quite the impressive background. He's previously taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and their design school. He's co-founded and sold two tech companies. He's an active angel investor. But perhaps most relevant to today, he's the author of two bestselling books. First, Hooked, How to Be a Businessman.

How to Build Habit-Forming Products. And second, Indistractable, How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, which has received critical acclaim, winning the Outstanding Works of Literature Award, as well as being named one of the best business and leadership books of the year by Amazon.

In our conversation, we discuss the hidden psychology that drives us to distraction and what so many people get wrong about overcoming it. Nir also shares his four-step research-backed model for becoming indistractable and how to use it to take back control of your time and start making traction on the things that matter to you in your life. This episode is so chocked full of actionable advice, so let's jump in. Nir, thanks for being here.

Great to be here, Chris. Thanks. Yeah. So I went into reading your latest book and I was thinking that if I could become indistractable, I could just avoid my notifications.

And I quickly realized it is a whole lot more than that. And so I thought a good way to just kick off is how do you actually define distraction? Absolutely. Yeah. So this is a great question because it's a term that I think I thought I understood, but really didn't once I started diving into this research around the psychology of why we get distracted. So the best way to understand what distraction is, is to understand what distraction is not. So what is the opposite of distraction? Most people say, well, it's obviously right. It's focus. Well,

Not true. The opposite of distraction is not focus. If you look at the origin of the word, the opposite of distraction is traction.

that by definition, traction is any action that pulls you towards what you say you're going to do. Things that move you closer to your goals, closer to your values, help you become the kind of person you want to become. The opposite of traction, distraction. Distraction is any action that pulls you further away from your goals, further away from what you said you were going to do, further away from your values, and further away from becoming the kind of person you want to become. So this isn't just semantics. This is super important because I would argue,

Any action, by the way, you notice that both traction and distraction end in the same six letters, A-C-T-I-O-N, that spells action. So I would argue that any action that you do with intent, anything that it uses forethought is traction, right? It's what you plan to do. Anything that is not that is

is distraction. So let me give you an example to drive it home. You know, for years, I would go to my desk and I'd say, okay, I'm going to get to work right now. I got my cup of coffee. I got everything set. I'm going to focus. I'm going to do what I said I'm going to do. I got my list of to-dos. By the way, we can talk about why to-dos are one of the worst things you can do for your productivity. We can get to that later. Now I'm going to get started. Here I go. Right now, nothing's going to get in my way. I'm not going to procrastinate.

But first, let me check email real quick, right? That's a work-related task. I'm being productive. I'm doing email. I got to do that at some point. Or let me do that thing on my to-do list. It's maybe not the top of my to-do list. The most important thing, let me just get some stuff done just to get some momentum going, right? I'm still being productive. And what I didn't realize is that that is the most dangerous, pernicious form of distraction.

the distraction that tricks you into prioritizing the urgent and easy work at the expense of the hard and important work that we have to do to move our lives and our businesses forward. So just because something is a work-related task doesn't mean it's not a distraction. That is the worst kind of distraction because you don't even realize it's happening to you. If it's not what you said you were going to do, it's a distraction. Conversely, everything can be traction as long as you plan for it. So don't believe these chicken...

little tech critics that tell you, oh, technology is hijacking your brain and social media is bad for you. It's all rubbish. It's ridiculous. There's nothing wrong with going on Facebook or YouTube or Reddit or whatever you want to do with your time. Video games, great, do it. But do it on your schedule, not someone else's, not on the tech company's schedule. Doing it according to your values and your schedule, then it becomes traction. Because as Dorothy Parker said,

The time you plan to waste is not wasted time. So as long as it's what you do with intent, with forethought, planned ahead, you can enjoy it guilt-free. As opposed to everything else that's not what you said you were going to do, that is a distraction. So I want to dig into the root cause of this distraction. But before...

Most people who write nonfiction books, their second book is kind of the sequel of their first book. And I'd love to understand how your journey came from writing a book about building habits for products to helping people avoid the distractions that maybe and sometimes are those products that maybe built habits through some of the tactics in your first book.

In fact, when I pitched the book to my agent, she said, oh, okay, so now you're going to write unhooked. So no, no, no, no, no, that's not the idea at all. Because I still stand behind everything I wrote in Hooked, that we can build products that create healthy habits in users' lives. And that's exactly what's happened since I've written Hooked.

you know, companies in every conceivable industry. FitBot uses the Hooked model to get people hooked on exercise. Kahoot uses the Hooked model to get kids hooked onto education. We can use the Hooked model. We can use the same techniques that the social media companies and the gaming companies use. We can use those techniques to build healthy habits in our users' lives, no matter the industry, right? If it's enterprise software, banking, healthcare, there's all kinds of industries that apply the Hooked model for good. So if Hooked is about building good habits,

Indistractable is about how do we break bad habits, but we can have our cake and eat it too, right? We want a language app to teach us a language, but we also don't want to overuse and distract ourselves with social media. And we want to use it responsibly. So that's really where I'm coming from. Hooked is about building good habits. Indistractable is about breaking bad habits. They don't necessarily negate each other. And was there a moment in time where you thought, okay, I have to write this book?

Yeah, so for me, it was shortly after I road hooked and I was getting some notoriety. I was getting a bunch of five-star reviews on Amazon and I was doing speaking gigs and consulting engagements. And I had this afternoon planned with my daughter, just some quality daddy-daughter time. And I remember I had this book of activities that we could play together, like do a Sudoku puzzle or paper airplane contest, things like that. And one of the questions in the book that we were supposed to ask each other was,

was if you could have any superpower, what superpower would you want? And I remember that question verbatim, but I can't tell you what my daughter said. Because in that instance, for whatever reason, I started checking my phone. And when I looked up for my device, I realized that she was gone. She got the message I was sending, which was that my phone was more important than she was.

And she left the room to play with some toy outside. And that's when I knew I had to figure this out. Because look, I know these techniques and tricks from the inside, right? I wrote the book Hooked. I know exactly how they get you hooked. And here I was getting distracted from one of the most important people in my life. And so that was the turning point. I said, I got to figure this out for myself.

And of course, it wasn't just with her. It was when I would tell myself, oh, I'm definitely going to exercise today, right? How many times have we told ourself that and then we skip or, oh, I'm certainly going to eat right, right? Today's the day I'm going to eat healthily. And I wouldn't or I'm definitely going to go to bed on time, or I'm definitely going to work on that big project today. And somehow we don't do what we say we're going to do.

So what I originally did, I think a lot of people do is I blame the technology. I thought, okay, maybe the technology is the problem, right? Like that we just can't stop. And so I took the because that's what all the other books tell you to do, right? Like the digital detoxing and all that. And I kind of bought into that. That was my knee jerk reaction of, oh, the technology, it's evil. They have a profit motive to capture your attention. So I'll just stop using the technology. And I got myself a flip phone.

from Alibaba, this 1990s looking phone that didn't have any apps, no internet connection, certainly no social media. I got myself a word processor off of eBay so that I could write with no internet connection. And I said, okay, great. Now I'm off the technology, right? No internet connection. I'm gonna get started on my work. Nothing's gonna distract me except...

You see, there's that book on the bookcase that I've been meaning to read. Let me just check that out real quick. There's one chapter I wanted to read real quick. Or, oh man, my desk is such a mess right now. Let me just clean up my desk or the trash needs to be taken. And I kept getting distracted because here's the thing. My revelation was, it's not the technology, right? That you don't need the tech tools. That's just the proximal cause. It's not the root cause of the problem. That in fact, when I started researching this topic,

I found that Plato, the Greek philosopher, was struggling with distraction 2,500 years before the internet. People have always complained about distraction. It was the television and the radio and the comic book and literally every technology. People freak out. They have a moral panic around. And they blame the proximal cause as opposed to getting to the root cause.

And so it didn't work for me to just get rid of the technology. Not only that, it's really easy for some professor in an ivory tower to say, stop using social media, but my livelihood depends on it. Like, I can't do that. It's really easy to say, stop checking email. Well, thanks, stupid. I'm going to get fired. So that wasn't a good solution. So I really wanted to figure out how we can enjoy these technologies, get the best out of them without letting them get the best of us. Yeah. I mean, we've all heard that technology is the problem, but what is the root cause?

So the root cause is, it's a great question because you think about it, like, wait a minute, if we know what to do, why don't we just do it?

especially in this day and age, right? Who doesn't know how to lose weight? Come on, find me a person who doesn't know that chocolate cake is not as healthy as a healthful salad. We know you eat right, you exercise. Who doesn't know that to have better relationships, you have to spend quality time with the people you love without distraction. We know this. Who doesn't know that if you want to be better at your job, you have to do the freaking work, right? Especially the hard stuff that other people don't want to do. We know. And if you don't know,

Google it. What's your excuse? It's all there. So the problem is not that we don't know. We know. The problem is we don't know how to stop getting in our own way. We don't know how to stop getting distracted. And so to answer that question of why don't we do what we say we're going to do, despite knowing what to do, we have to ask an even deeper question, which is why do we do everything? What's the nature of human motivation? And this is something that I think most people, I certainly, didn't understand fully, that

Most of us have a messed up conception of what motivation is all about. If you ask the average person, how do you get others or yourself to do something? What's the nature of human motivation? They're going to tell you what Sigmund Freud said, what Jeremy Bentham said, which is the pleasure principle, that everything we do is about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, right? Maybe they won't use that terminology. They'll tell you carrots and sticks, basically. That's what we've all been told. Neurologically speaking, this is not true.

that motivation is not about carrots and sticks. It's not about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, but actually it's just one of those things that everything you do, everything you do is about the desire to escape discomfort.

That's it. The desire to escape discomfort, all human motivation. It's called the homeostatic response. That if you think about this physiologically, that if you go outside and you're cold, then the brain says, oh, this doesn't feel good. This is uncomfortable. You should put on a coat. If you walk back in, now you get too hot. The brain says that doesn't feel good. Take it off. If you're hungry, you feel hunger pangs. So you eat. And if you eat too much, oh, you feel stuffed. The brain says, stop. That doesn't feel good either. So

So physiologically, this is common sense. The same holds true psychologically, that if you feel lonely, check Facebook. If you are uncertain, Google it before you scan your brain to see if you know the answer, you're automatically Googling it. If you're feeling bored, lots of solutions for boredom, right? You can check stock prices, sports scores. Oh, let's worry about somebody's problems 3000 miles away by tuning into the news so that we don't have to think about what's going on in our own head.

And do you think people know that they have this pain all the time or is sometimes this discomfort unknown?

No, no, no. We almost never realize that that's what's driving our behavior, even though it is. That desire to escape discomfort is what gets us to do everything we do. Even people are probably saying, well, yeah, but what about the pursuit of pleasure? What about feeling good? Well, even the desire to feel good, what drives us to get that pleasure is desire, craving, lusting, which is itself psychologically destabilizing.

So even the pursuit of pleasurable sensations, the brain spurs us to action by making us feel bad enough to go get that thing we want to acquire or feel, right? So all human behavior stems from a desire to escape discomfort. And once you understand that, what that therefore must mean is that time management is pain management.

Let me say it again. Time management is pain management. So none of the tips and tricks and techniques, look, I spent five years researching and writing this book, and I've looked at all the literature virtually, right? I've read all the books on time management. I will tell you, none of the techniques work. None of the tips and tricks and gurus and life hacks, none of that stuff works if you don't first understand what is the discomfort driving you to distraction.

that distraction, procrastination, it's not a character flaw. There's nothing wrong with you, right? People love to moralize and medicalize this topic. The vast majority of people, there's nothing wrong with you. It's simply that we haven't learned how to deal with discomfort.

And so once you learn that, once you do what I call master the internal triggers, they no longer become your master. So that's the first step to becoming indistractable is mastering the internal triggers. The second step is about making time for traction. We talked about that earlier. Traction is any action that pulls you towards what you said you were going to do. So, you know, there's some very simple things that all of us can do to make sure we make time for traction in our day. The third step is to hack back what we call the external triggers. The external triggers, this is what people tend to blame

It's the pings, the dings, the rings, anything in your outside environment, like you said, that can move you towards distraction. Studies find, however, that that's only 10% of the time that we get distracted is it because of something in our external environment.

So the other 90% of the time, 90% is not about what's happening outside of us. It's about what's happening inside of us. But there are still things we can do to hack back those external triggers. So that's step three. Step four, and the final step is to prevent distraction with pacts. And so it's when we use these four steps in concert, this is how anyone can become indistractable.

So I'd love to dig in on the four steps. When I read the book this week, and it was fantastic, by the way, to anyone listening, definitely pick up a copy. But I had a few questions that I'd love to talk about. So I'll start with step one, mastering the internal triggers. When you feel an urge to be distracted, you talk about pausing to explore that distraction. But what's the end goal of better understanding that feeling when you're about to get distracted?

It's about having arrows in your quiver ready so that when you feel that discomfort, it's not, you know, oh, meditate about it, right? Sometimes you need to get off your butt and stop meditating and take action. And so what I advise people is to have tools ready at their disposal so that when they feel that discomfort, they know in advance what they are going to do with it.

You know, there's this myth around visualization. We've all heard that if you want to achieve your dreams, you have to visualize your goals, right? If you want to get in shape, you want to visualize yourself with a beach body. If you want to be wealthy, you have to visualize yourself in a Lamborghini or some other materialistic crap, right? Turns out that stuff doesn't work. That visualization of end goals actually backfires. It makes it less likely for you to achieve your goal because you're giving yourself the pleasure of having it without actually doing anything for it.

in your mind. So that kind of visualization doesn't work. What does work is, and this has been shown in studies, that visualizing what you will do

when you are tempted to go off track. So if you have an aspiration to lose weight, for example, don't visualize the beach body. Visualize what you will do when someone offers you chocolate cake at a dinner party and you want to refuse. What are you going to say? What preparation will you take now so that you know what to do tomorrow? So one of the most important lessons of the book is this mantra that I repeat to myself every day, which is that

The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. Let me say that again. The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. So distraction, procrastination is all about impulsiveness, right? It's that we know what to do long-term, but in the moment, ah, we don't do it, right? We do something else. So the antidote is forethought so that if you can plan today,

for what you will do tomorrow, there is no distraction that you can't overcome. Because if you wait to the last minute, right? If you wait till the chocolate cake is on its way to your mouth, you're gonna eat it. If you wait till the cigarette is in your hand, you're gonna smoke it. If you sleep next to your cell phone every night, of course, you're gonna pick it up first thing in the morning before you even say hello to your loved ones.

because it's too late, you've lost. They're gonna get you. You have to plan ahead. So when it comes to these internal triggers, the strategy is to know what you will do when you feel boredom, loneliness, uncertainty, stress, anxiety, fatigue. What are you gonna do? Are you gonna do what most people do, which is try and escape that discomfort with too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook? There's 100 different ways to distract your attention away from what you said you were gonna do. Or are you gonna use that discomfort

as rocket fuel to propel you towards traction as opposed to succumbing to distraction. And there's all kinds of different tools. There's all kinds of different arrows in your quiver that you can use so that when you feel that discomfort, you will know what to do with it. Yeah, so it's funny. My wife and I have a challenge, which is she has a lot of self-control over kind of urges, especially around health things, right? If she bakes two dozen cookies, she has no problem just leaving them on the counter.

Ugh, I can't stand those people. I know, I know. My solution is I'm really good at the grocery store saying, let's just not buy cookies. Like, let's not buy the ingredients for you to bake. And she's like, well, baking's therapy, so I want to bake. And I'm like, well, could you just bake one cookie? She's like, well, if I'm going to go through all this effort, I might as well bake two dozen cookies. And so one of the things I tried this week was, you know, you mentioned the surfing the urge, which...

I just wanted to share like... For people out there in my situation, I said, you know what? Anytime I see this cookie on the counter, now that it's baked, I lose all self-control. But so I told myself, okay, every time I want a cookie, I can have one if I just wait 10 minutes. And you said earlier, it's hard to wait till the last minute. But even in the last minute...

I found a few tactics that were very effective, obviously way more effective for me to just not have the cookies in the house. But that tactic of waiting for 10 minutes made me realize, oh, I have control over not eating this cookie. Now after 10 minutes, I don't want it. And that was fantastic. Right.

So so yeah, so not having the cookie in the house would be an example of hacking back the external trigger, which is great. But the world is full of external triggers, right? So you can't swear off technology, the trigger will be there. Now there's some things you can do to remove some external triggers, right? You can remove certain apps from your phone, you can turn off notifications, things like that. Okay, fine. But there will always be certain temptations.

So what do you do in the moment? What you did is actually you used forethought. You said, next time that I have this urge, I'm going to use the 10-minute rule. And so the 10-minute rule is one of dozens of different techniques we can use. And so the 10-minute rule basically says that I can give in to that distraction, whether it's eating the cookie or smoking the cigarette or scrolling the internet, whatever the case might be, but not right now.

In 10 minutes, right? So what you're doing is you're building self-efficacy. You're showing yourself, wait a minute, I can wait a few minutes, just 10 minutes. You're not telling yourself no, because in fact, we know that abstinence can oftentimes backfire, that telling yourself don't do something only makes you want it more with many behaviors. Instead of saying no, you're telling yourself not yet.

And so then the 10 minute rule becomes the 11 minute rule, the 12 minute rule, the 15 minute rule. And so you're able to build that self-efficacy to not get distracted later on. But there is no magic bullet. People always want, tell me the one thing I need to do. And when you look at the research literature, it's not just about one thing. It's these four things in concert, right? It's knowing, okay, what am I going to do with that internal trigger? How do I make time for traction? When is it okay for me to eat that cookie, right? Maybe there's a time and a place when it is okay. And you have that planned ahead. Remember,

removing the external triggers, hacking back the external triggers, and then preventing distraction with packs. What many people do is that they exert some kind of contract with themselves or with somebody else to make sure they don't go off track. So these four techniques in concert is really what's essential.

Yeah, you started with saying earlier that to-do lists are kind of the worst. And I'm curious, you know, making time for traction and being kind of intentional is great. To-do lists, my understanding from the book, you know, it's just a list of things, but there's no kind of firm commitment. Is it the to-do list that you hate? Or is it the fact that most to-do lists don't actually have

timing when and where and how in it. And if a to-do list did have all those things and you kind of archived everything that didn't have that filled out, would you like to do this again? Yeah. So there's nothing wrong with writing things down, right? Getting things out of your head and putting them on a piece of paper or an app. That's a great idea.

What most people do, however, is that they run their life on a to-do list. They wake up in the morning and they say, what am I supposed to do today? Oh, let me look at my to-do list. And they start ticking off little cute boxes. That's terrible. Because if you wake up in the morning and you look at your to-do list before you look at your calendar, you have already lost. You made a big mistake.

But principally, the big problem with to-do lists is that there's no constraints. You can always add more to a to-do list, right? It's never ending. Whereas with a calendar, with a time box calendar, which is what I'm a big proponent of and what the studies find turn out to help people be much more productive and effective in their days and do what they say they're going to do, there is a constraint.

It's the same 24 hours that we all have in a day. So it's not a coincidence when you think about how we use the same language with time as we do with money, right? You pay attention, you make money, just like you make time. So there's lots of terminology that's the same. And yet we're so cheap with our money, right? We scrimp and save, people won't pay 99 cents for an app. And we split our checks with our friends when we go out to lunch. Like we're so cheap with money, but we give our time to whoever wants it. And it should be exactly the opposite.

right? That we, you can always make more money. So you should be generous with your money. You should be stingy with your time because you can't make more time. We all get the same 24 hours in the day. So by having a constraint on your time, by deciding in advance, okay, I only have this much time in my day. How am I going to spend it according to my values? How can I turn my values into time? Now we impose those constraints. We force that decision. And so that

That helps us decide for the first time in many people's life, what is traction? You know, I meet with so many people who tell me how distracted they are. And I say, well, what did you get distracted from? Show me your schedule. And there's a bunch of white space. Well, wait a minute. How can you say you got distracted from something if you didn't know what you got distracted from?

right? If you can't see in your calendar, what is traction, you can't define distraction. So that's why it's one of the reasons that that time box calendars are so much more effective than to do list. Another big reason, this is probably even the more important reason is that to do list reinforce a negative self identity, meaning, you know, this happened to me all the time, I call this the tyranny of the to do list, I would come home from work,

And it'd be a hard day. I'd feel exhausted. And so, man, I was so busy today. And then I'd look at my to-do list and see, you know, what I still didn't finish. And there were still a hundred things on that to-do list that I didn't do. And so day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, I was reinforcing that I wasn't doing what I said I was going to do. Loser. And so over time, you begin to believe this stupid narrative that, oh, I must not be very good with time management.

Right? Maybe I have an attention problem. Maybe there's something wrong with me that I can't finish this stuff. And for the vast majority of people, there's nothing wrong with them. It's just that they haven't learned the proper techniques to make sure that they follow through on what they say they're going to do. So that's why calendars beat to-do lists by far. And it's funny, you know, whenever I used to tell this story, somebody would say, well, what about Mark Andreessen? Mark Andreessen wrote a famous story. You know Mark well. You know, he wrote a famous blog post about how he leaves his days open, right? He wants to be spontaneous. Right?

And then I just saw a couple months ago that he changed his mind. Now he shared in an interview, his time box calendar. And I Yes, I was so happy to see that you want him over. Yeah, well, I don't know if I did, but he changed his ways, which is fantastic. And does that mean that if I, you know, if you shared your calendar, it would be fully scheduled, you know, including sleeping 24 seven the whole week?

Yep, absolutely. Yeah. No space for distraction, you know, or I guess you can have intentional distraction, but you can have diversion.

Yeah, exactly. So there's so distraction is never good. Okay, distraction is always when you don't do what you said you're going to do. Now, you can get diverted. A diversion is very different from a distraction. A diversion is a refocusing of attention. So last night, I went to go see Dune, right? I went to go see a movie with with my friend and with my daughter. And that was a diversion of attention. I paid to go to a movie theater and have my attention diverted from real life into this fictional world. It's fun. It's great. Nothing wrong with it.

But guess what? That time was in my calendar. I knew that that's what I was going to do. So you can have time for prayer, for meditation, for spontaneity, right? It sounds like an oxymoron. I have planned spontaneity in my calendar. So every Saturday afternoon, I spend time with my daughter. We call it that time planned spontaneity. Why? Because I don't know what we're going to do. We might go to the park. We might go get ice cream. We might go take a walk. We don't know what we're going to do.

But I know what I will not do with that time. And that's why I booked that time in advance. I will not be checking my phone. I will not be taking work calls. I will not be on social media because I have planned ahead that my daughter is the person who I will devote that time to. Yeah, that's fantastic. And do you ever just change plans? Is that okay in this kind of world of I was supposed to do this thing and I just had a really long day and I don't want to do it anymore, but I'm choosing not to do it?

Not in the moment. Okay, so if you give it in the moment, then that's an impulsivity problem. But you can reset the day for the day ahead. Okay, once you set that schedule, stick with it, right? Even if you go off track, you don't have to think about what should I do next, you just go to the next thing on your calendar, you follow the plan once you make that plan, right? So as much as possible, you don't divert from it. Now, do we make mistakes? Of course, I still get distracted from time to time. The difference is,

that an indistractable person knows why they made that mistake, why they got distracted, and they do something about it. So Poelo Coelho has a wonderful quote. He said, a mistake repeated more than once is a decision. How many times do we get distracted by the same freaking things before we say, wait a minute, wait a minute. Okay, how many times can we blame social media? How many times can we blame email? How many times can we blame the news? How many times can we blame Netflix before we say, stop, okay, I get what you're doing to me. Of course they want your attention.

Are you going to just let them keep taking your attention and your time? Are you going to do something about it? So a distractible person through their actions is deciding to be distractible because they keep getting distracted by the same thing again and again and again. Unless, you know, little asterisks, if there's some kind of medical disorder, which about one to 3% of the population has ADHD. Okay, fine. There's an exception there perhaps. For the vast majority of us, 97, 99% of the population, we are deciding to be distractible. Whereas an indistractable person says, okay,

I see what you did there. Now I'm going to do something about it. I'm going to figure out what internal trigger prompted me to get distracted. I'm going to make time for traction. I'm going to hack back the external triggers and I'm going to prevent distraction with packs so that it doesn't happen again.

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Yeah. And that next section that we didn't really talk much, while it falls so in line with the show, right? We're all the hacks like that is what people, you know, come here to hear. There's eight chapters that talked all about different triggers, external triggers like email and group chat.

I don't want to just run through the list because there's literally a book where you could buy it and run through that list. My favorite was something I tried doing today, which was I started sending all my emails up until like four or five o'clock. I just scheduled to send it five o'clock so that I wasn't getting all the replies during the day. I wasn't distracted. It was kind of planning ahead. I didn't know if there was one in that list that you want to flag as something you thought was kind of unique or something most people don't know about and you'd share.

Sure. So that's the most kind of nuts and bolts chapter of the book where we actually go through all the potential external triggers that people encounter. So we talk about how simple stuff like your phone, you know, two thirds of people, the smartphone never changed their notification settings. That's come on, that's kindergarten stuff. Of course, change your notification settings. Can we can we really complain that phones are addicting us and hijacking our brains if we haven't changed the stupid notification settings? That's that's easy stuff. But the stuff that people don't think about, it's the stuff like meetings.

How many meetings do we go to that are a complete distraction from what we really need to be doing with our time and our attention? Group chat, right? People struggle with Slack or other group messaging services. Email, oh my God, email. The email was when we did surveys, the number one distraction that the average knowledge worker faced, by the way, number one before COVID was other people. That was the number one distraction in the workplace. That was number one. Number two was email.

And so there's all kinds of things we can do to hack back email that using these techniques of folks have reported saving 90% up to 90% of the time they spent on email, they no longer spend. And there's all kinds of things we can do. I'll give you I'll give you one quick hack for this. So the idea here, what we find in terms of when you look at where people waste time on email, it's not the replying. It's the checking and specifically the rechecking. That's where we waste time on email. What does that look like?

Well, you get an email, you know, you get this notification on your phone, you open the email, you read it, you put it away, you open the next email, you read it, you put it away. Then you say, wait, what was that in that email again? So like 20 minutes later, you check it again. And then, you know, six hours later, you check it again, but you're not taking action on it. So that's where people tend to waste the most time on email is the checking and the rechecking.

So what you want to do from now on is you want to label emails. And if you don't know how to label emails, just Google it. Every email service provider will let you do this. You want to label emails not by topic. Most people use labels by topic. That's the wrong way to use labels. What you want to do is to label emails by the most important factor from a time management perspective, which is when does it need a reply? When does it need a reply? So

If an email is, oh my God, your house is on fire, you have to reply right now, it's about less than 1% of emails are actually super urgent, right? Because if your house is on fire, somebody's not gonna email you, they're gonna call you or do a find or reach you, try to reach you another way. If it is absolutely super urgent, 1% of emails, okay, you can respond in the moment.

But everything else, 99% of other emails do not respond to the email. You know, some people think, okay, if something takes less than two minutes, just do it. That's a bad rule. And that's an antiquated rule because, look, most emails take less than two minutes. But when you get 100 emails per day, well, that's a lot of time if each one takes two minutes. So the rest of your emails tend to fall into a few different categories. The first is if it's something that never needs a reply, okay, a spam or whatever, well, that's easy. Just archive it or delete it. The rest of your emails fall into two categories.

things that you need to reply to today and things that you can reply to sometime this week. So everything you need to reply to today, when you first check that email, you label it as today, okay? And then you put it away, okay? Just label it as today, put it away.

The emails that you need to reply to sometime this week, same thing. You label it as this week and you put it away. Now, the goal is that every email you touch, you only touch twice. Once when you label, the second time when you return, when you reply. Then you go back to your time box calendar and you have time in your day

to reply to only urgent emails, only the emails they need to reply to today. Statistically, it's about 20% of your emails. The rest of your emails, the other 80% are emails that don't need to reply today. They need to reply sometime this week. And you schedule time in your calendar for that. So for me, it's message Mondays. Every Monday, I have a three-hour block of time when I run through all those emails that can wait. Now, you say, well, where is the time saving, right? Where am I saving time here? Here's the thing.

Most people play email ping pong. Email ping pong is when you get an email, you send an email. You get an email, you send an email. It goes back and forth and back and forth. And they do this without necessarily prioritizing what's urgent and what can wait. And there's a magical thing that happens when you let emails simmer. About half of those 80% of your emails that need to reply sometime this week, half of them will no longer need to reply. Why? How does that happen? What's this magic?

Turns out, people figure out their own stuff, right? Something that was urgent earlier is no longer urgent because it got crushed under the weight of some other priority. So when you let the emails that don't need a reply today, just simmer for a little bit, just let people figure it out on their own for a little bit. And don't reply impulsively based on what's at the top of your to do list or what's at the top of your email inbox or what's easiest to reply to. And just let them simmer, what you will find is that you'll get a dramatic reduction in the number of emails that actually even need a reply in the first place. Furthermore, you

You won't be checking email all day long anymore. What many people don't realize is that they do what's called context switching. They work on a big project and then they check email and they work on something else and they check email and they're constantly checking email all day long because they're worried there might actually be something urgent as opposed to saying, look, I check my email twice a day.

Okay, check in the morning, check in the evening. That's it. That's it. So the rest of the day, I can work without distraction. I can be indistractable knowing, okay, I'm going to look back at my email inbox at another time. By the way, it doesn't have to be twice a day. It can be three times a day, four times a day, but plan it ahead. Put it in your calendar so you're not doing it, which is how most people check email when they feel uncertainty, right? They feel that internal trigger of what am I supposed to do? I don't know. Let me go check my inbox so my email inbox will tell me what to do. Well, that's a terrible way to run your life.

Yeah. And there's a side benefit, which is a lot of times we all run to our inbox, refresh, see what's there. The longer you wait between refreshes, the higher the likelihood that some email that you're actually excited about, that's actually important to your life is sitting there. And so I've actually found the less I check my email, the more I feel good getting to my email versus going there for just one email. It's just not worth it.

And then I know we both worked in tech. I'm sure you know the concept of rubber duck debugging, but it reminded me of what you just said, which is, you know, engineers would have a rubber duck that you could talk to to try to solve an engineering problem. And so at my last startup, I gave everyone this little small duck to put on their desk

And I didn't actually expect them to speak out loud to solve their problem with the duck, but it was more of a signal of, hey, you could probably think about this and maybe solve it. And that I didn't do any quantitative measurements, but I want to say at least 10% of pings and questions and things went down because it was just a symbol of, hey, could you solve this if you just thought about it for a few minutes?

Oh my gosh. And so what you're doing by saying, look, I don't check email every 30 seconds that I actually plan my time to check email. What you're doing is training your colleagues to think for themselves. You're actually that's part of the company culture that you're changing. There's a whole section in the book on how to build an indistractable workplace.

And so one of the things that we can do, certainly if you're in a position of leadership, but all of us, by exemplifying what it means to be indistractable, we're actually promoting this culture of helping people work without distraction. So doing things like that, right? Telling people, look, this is when I'm available. Then they do, they are prompted to think for themselves as opposed to, it's just so easy to be like, hey, answer this stupid question for me so I don't have to think. People are cognitive misers, all of us. We don't like to expend energy thinking.

So when you add a bit of friction to contacting you, you get people to actually think for themselves and planning that time to think. This is super important for yourself as well. I mean, for all of us.

There are two kinds of work. There is what we call reactive work and reflective work. Reactive work is reacting to the emails, reacting to notifications, having some kind of external factor tell us what to do with our time. And most people live their entire life that way, certainly their work life. They love being told what to do because thinking is hard work. They just do reactive work all day long.

Those tend to be low performers. High performers make time in their day to think. They do what we call reflective work. Reflective work is the kind of work that can only be done without distraction. Thinking, strategizing, planning can only be done when you are focused.

So you have to plan at least some time in your day. It doesn't have to be your whole day, but 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour of your day has to be set aside for working without distraction, doing that reflective work. If you don't, you're going to run real fast in the wrong direction. Yeah. It's hard to block time in your calendar for just thinking. It seems so counterintuitive to productivity. But when I was running my last company, it was like, you just have to do it. Otherwise, you just will never, you'll never make time for that. I

I have what I'll call a burning question. It'll make sense in a moment on this last category of preventing distraction with packs. So I was reading through it. And the thing that really hit me was this burn or burn calendar you have. And so for anyone listening, you create a calendar of things you want to do for in your case, it was exercise. And you taped $100 bill and said, if I don't do this thing that I said, I'm going to light, I have to light the $100 bill on fire.

And for so long, I've heard all of these kind of price-based packs where you, you know, gym pack and you have to pay a dollar if you don't go to the gym. And none of them felt as visceral as lighting a $100 bill on fire. But it also seemed so, you know, of course I can commit to working out. So I would do this and if I could hold myself to it. So I'm curious, did you ever have to burn the $100 bill?

So the reason this technique is so effective, and by the way, this isn't something I just made up out of thin air. This is actually, it comes from the most effective smoking cessation study in history, right? So the most effective study ever conducted on how to get people to stop smoking was one where people had to put in $150 at stake that if they didn't smoke for six months as verified by your analysis,

they got the $150 back. That turned out to be more effective than patches and gums and therapy and all the other smoking cessation programs for this thing that we think, oh my God, cigarettes are so addictive. Well, it turns out you can buy breaking that addiction with as little as $150. How crazy is that? And so that's where this idea came from for this burn or burn technique. I want to say as a disclaimer real quick,

You have to do this last. Okay, you have to do this last. If you jump to do this, it oftentimes will backfire because if you haven't prepared yourself for how to master the internal triggers, making time for traction, hacking back the external triggers, and you fall off the horse, it becomes really, really tough to get back on it. Okay, so this is where you can, I can't emphasize this enough, you have to do this as fast

after you've done the other three techniques first. But once you've done that, it can be an incredibly effective technique. So there's different kinds of packs, effort packs, price packs, and identity packs. What you're mentioning is a price pack. And yeah, for me, I knew I needed to exercise. I didn't really like it, but I just needed to do it, right? So what I did was I took this calendar, I

taped it to my wall. And every day there's a hundred dollar bill taped to it. And I've been using this technique for what, three and a half, four years now. I'm 43 years old. I'm in the best shape of my life. I used to be clinically obese today. I'm not saying this to brag because I don't think I have any good genes or anything. It's just that I do this because I intentionally do what I say I'm going to do. If I say I'm going to exercise, I want to actually do it. And so by having that hundred dollar bill that I stare at every day,

And knowing if, hey, if I don't do some kind of physical exercise and, you know, what you do is up to you. For me, it's do 20 pushups, go on a quick run, take a walk around the block, do something physical every single day. If I don't do it, I burn the money. And I'm happy to report to you that after, what, three and a half, four years now, I've never had to burn the money. Why? Because when I look at it, I say, oh, okay, fine. Let me just...

do some pushups real quick, or let me just go take a quick walk. And so it's that pact that I made with myself. And of course, could I cheat? Yeah, of course I could cheat. But what's my integrity worth to myself? Right? Could I look at myself in the mirror knowing I cheated? No, that's why that pact works. But again, you have to do this after you've done the other three steps first. Yeah.

Definitely. For me, I did one once where it was donate to charity. And it was like, for any day you didn't go to the gym, you had to donate $5 to charity. And I was like, you know what? Donating $5 to charity is not that big of a deal. And then I thought about... That's why that doesn't work. I thought about what it would take to burn a $100 bill. And I was like,

I mean, this has to work because I would never, I couldn't possibly do that. It would drive me crazy. Exactly. Exactly. So yeah, having that visceral reaction of, ah, it's right there. Can't you just go do some pushups? Silly, just do it. It makes it much more likely that you'll follow through.

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I just want to thank you, Quick, for listening to and supporting the show. Your support is what keeps this show going. To get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners, you can go to allthehacks.com slash deals. So please consider supporting those who support us. Yeah. So there's some other great packs in there. So definitely check it out. I want to ask a little bit about...

relationships. And if you have a partner and you want to kind of bring this to light and you want to start talking about this, do you have to do it together? Is it something that can be a problem if one person is like, I really want to be indistractable and the other person's like, you know what? I'm not that big of a... It's fine. I'm fine without doing this.

Yeah, so I'm not a big proponent of intentionally seeking to change people, but that there's a psychological quirk that we all have called reactance. And reactance says that when we are told what to do, we tend to rebel. And we all feel this to some degree, that if your mom ever told you to take your umbrella because it's going to rain, don't tell me what to do. I'll figure it out.

Or if your boss micromanages you. Nobody likes that. We hate being told what to do. So intentionally going and saying, hey, honey, guess what? We're going to become indistractable now. Right? That won't work. The best thing to do is to lead by example. That most of us, you know, whether it's with helping our kids be indistractable, helping our spouses or helping our colleagues at work be indistractable, the best thing you can do is to be indistractable yourself, especially when it comes to our kids. Because kids come installed with

what I call hypocrisy detection devices. I talk to parents all the time and say, oh, my kid won't stop playing Fortnite or they're always on social media. And while they're telling me this, they're checking email on their phone. So we can't be hypocrites. We have to be able to be indistractable ourselves. So that's the best thing you can do. And then talking about some of these techniques and asking them if not,

to join you on the journey to help just to understand that you are on this journey to become indistractable and knowing that for yourself as well, we all will get distracted from time to time on the road to becoming indistractable. Being indistractable doesn't mean you never get distracted. It means that you're the kind of person who strives to do what they say they're going to do. So you're learning from this process. You're iterating. You're a scientist, not a drill sergeant. A

You test them and then you see what works and then you run the experiments again to make it better and better over time. And so understanding this process is not a one and done type thing, that it is a journey, is a great way to help yourself become indistractable. And it tends to be a little infectious, right? And especially if there's something where there's something in it for them too. So let me give you an example. So let's get a little personal here. We've been talking for almost an hour, so I'll divulge a little bit here. You know, I've been married. I just celebrated my 20th anniversary to the same woman.

Congratulations. Thank you. Appreciate it. A few years ago, our sex life was suffering because, you know, every night we would go to bed and she would caress her iPhone and I would find my computer and we weren't being together. We weren't being intimate. We were going to bed later and later, you know, maybe watching Netflix or checking email or doing whatever in bed and we would collapse exhausted and we didn't have time to be intimate.

So we follow these steps in the book to regain our love life. And so we went through step by step. Okay, what are the internal triggers? Why are we doing this? We made time for traction. We started scheduling a bedtime. We hacked back the external triggers. We don't sleep with any devices in our bedroom. All that stuff is outside. And then finally, we made a pact. And so how do we make this pact? This is called an effort pact. I went to the hardware store and I bought a $5 outlet timer.

And this outlet timer, anything you plug into it will turn off at a certain time of day or night based on what you set. And so in our household, every night at 10 p.m., the internet shuts off automatically, right? And this is called what we, this is an effort pact. Could I turn the internet back on? Of course I could, but I'd have to go under my desk, unplug the router, replug it in, this timer thingy, and only then could I get online. So I could do it, of course, but it takes effort, right?

right? So by making that, adding some friction to something I don't want to do with this internet timer, we all kind of know that, hey, the internet's going to shut off at 10 p.m., right? Like, quick, finish what you're doing so that we can have traction as opposed to distraction doing what we said we're going to do. Getting to bed on time means we get more sleep, and now we have a sex life again.

That's fantastic for you. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. So a debate that I often have with my wife is whether we as kind of humans and she would argue women better than men can be good multitaskers, or is that just a massive form of distraction?

So yeah, so this is one of those productivity orthodoxies that I want to kill the sacred cow that it is not true that you can't multitask. Of course, you can multitask, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. And the question is, how do we multitask? So what you cannot do is you can't have

sensory input on the same channel at the same time. You can't listen to a podcast in each ear and figure out what's going on. You can't watch two television shows at the same time. You can't do two math problems at the same time. But you absolutely can have what I call multi-channel multitasking. So you can definitely listen to a podcast while you're exercising.

So this is a technique that's called temptation bundling that Katie Milkman researched this technique. What it basically involves is using a reward from one area of your life to help incentivize you to do something in another area of your life that maybe you don't want to do as much. So for me, I never read articles on the web. So when I'm on my desktop, I never read articles because I know that the New York Times and CNN and I

whatever media company, they design their product to get me hooked, right? To keep me reading and reading and reading with their clickbait headlines. I don't want to do that. So when I see an article online I want to read, I save it to an app called Pocket. And then I only consume those articles while I'm doing something else, like while I'm exercising.

Okay, or while I'm taking a walk. That's the only time I can consume those articles. Well, how does that happen? It comes with a text-to-speech feature that will read to you those articles, right? Just like a podcast. So that's fantastic, right? So I've taken something that I don't want to do, which is get distracted while I'm on the internet. And I've used it as a reward in another area of my life by using multi-channel multitasking. So you absolutely can multi-channel multitask. You can take a phone call or a Zoom meeting while you're taking a walk, for example. You can definitely do it on different sensory channels. And it's a great way to get more out of your day.

Yeah. Okay. So we're pretty much at time, but I have to believe that if you spent years writing a book to solve this problem in your life, you're the kind of person that thinks carefully about other ways to make life better, happier, healthier. So I'll end asking if you have any favorite kind of optimizations, life hacks, things that you do that might not be obvious to everyone or normal for everyone. Yeah.

That might not be normal for a lot of what I do is not normal. Right? A lot of people think, oh, it's crazy to timebox your day. That's too rigid. A lot of people think that, oh, here's something that if you have many of us before the pandemic found that colleagues were interrupting us. Now, many of us are working at home. And now it's our kids, it's our spouses, it's our roommates that are the sources of distraction. So one thing that we do in our household with my daughter is when she was only six years old,

we started using what we call the concentration crown. The concentration crown is this headpiece that we got on Amazon for like $5. It has these little LED lights. And when my wife wears a concentration crown, you know, you can't miss it when she's wearing, it literally lights up. When she is wearing that concentration crown, we told my daughter, look, when mommy's wearing the concentration crown, that means that she can't be interrupted and she will be with you within a half an hour, right? All her time boxes are half an hour or less.

And so this works like a charm because look, your kids give them a break. They don't know if you're on your computer, if you're doing something that requires focus and concentration or whether you're watching YouTube videos or something and you can be interrupted. So by putting on the concentration crown, what you're doing is interrupting the interruption.

It works incredibly well with kids. It also works really well with spouses. So when I want to interrupt my wife, but I see she's wearing the concentration crown, I also leave her alone. And I also have a concentration crown. It's not as pretty as hers. I just wear a silly hat. Anybody can do this. Just look for a crazy looking hat around your house. Tell your kids what it's for or your spouse or your roommate what it's for. And it works like a charm.

That's fantastic. And the last thing I didn't see in the book, you have a whole chapter about raising kids to be indistractable. How early do you think that actually starts? And I ask as the father of a 14-month-old. Yeah, I would say when they're that young, of course, all their screen time is up to you. I would say it's about the same rule as when a kid is ready to go swimming. Right?

Pools are incredibly dangerous. Thousands of children die every year because they drown in a pool. But as a responsible parent, you're not going to say pools are deadly. I'm not going to let my kid ever learn to swim. No, you're going to teach them how to swim. And so it's the same rule with, I think, digital technology and specifically how to control their attention. So I would say around five or six, this is a conversation you can have with your kid on how to help them learn to become indistractable. And look, if you think the world is distracting now, right?

Just wait a few years, right? The world that our kids inhabit is only going to become more distracting. So it's absolutely essential that they learn how to control their attention because it truly will be how they choose their life. Awesome. So I got a few years to practice. Before we go, where should people find you online? What are you working on right now that people should check out?

Yeah, so my website is nearandfar.com. Near is spelled like my first name. So that's N-I-R and far.com. There's actually a free 80 page indistractable workbook. We couldn't fit it into the final edition of the book. So it's yours for free. It's complimentary. And you can download that at near and far. And the book is called indistractable how to control your attention and choose your life. And that's available wherever books are sold. Yeah, links to everything in the show notes near. Thank you so much for being here. Oh, my pleasure, Chris. Thanks so much.

Wow. I hope you enjoyed that one as much as I did. I already know it's going to be one of the episodes I need to go back to and listen myself so I can take notes. And that's coming from someone who just read Nir's book also.

Okay, so to all the listeners out there who've been writing in with questions and sharing your hacks, thank you so much. Please keep them coming, especially anything you want to know about points and miles, because I'll be interviewing Brian Kelly, aka The Points Guy, next week, and I'd love to include some of your questions. I'm also going to be sharing some of your hacks and wins in the newsletter, which should be coming out this week or next. So keep those coming too.

And if you're not subscribed to the newsletter, you definitely want to because there are a few other cool things I'll be sharing in there. Like top new hacks I'm finding and info about some live episodes I might do on a new platform called Fireside, where you can jump in and ask your own questions and participate. You can get signed up at allthehacks.com slash email.

I'm also considering setting up a Facebook group, Discord, or private Slack channel for listeners to be able to ask me, maybe other listeners questions and get more real-time feedback. If that's something you're interested in, please reach out and let me know. As always, you can find me at chris at allthehacks.com. That's a lot for this week. Good luck becoming indistractable and see you next week.