14. Nir Eyal: How To Become Indistractable & Control Your Attention
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Hey everyone, it's Alex from Alex and Books, and you're listening to The Reader's Journey, the podcast that takes you on a journey to meet amazing authors, discover brilliant books, and learn valuable lessons along the way. Now, let's get started. ♪

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the reader journey podcast today We have near a all the author of indistractable how to control your attention and choose your life near Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Oh my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me So near I think a good place to start would be with the books title because a lot of people know what it means to be Distracted they don't know what it means to be indistractable. So can you explain that to us?

Sure. So being indistractable means that you are the kind of person who does what they say they're going to do. It's the kind of person who lives with personal integrity. They're as honest with themselves as they are with others. So why is this so important? Of course, there's the ethical component of just being honest with yourself. So many people, we all know that we're not supposed to lie to others. We have to be honest. Nobody would want to be called a liar or a hypocrite. And yet when it comes to keeping our promises to ourselves, we're not supposed to be honest.

oh, how often do we lie to ourselves, right? We say we're gonna work out, but we don't. We say we're gonna eat right, we'll start tomorrow. We say we're gonna work on that big project at our job, but that's okay, let me just check email for a bit or scroll the news to see what's going on first. How much more productive, how much happier, how much more fulfilled will we be in life if we were simply able to follow through on everything we said we would do? So an indistractable person

It's not necessarily someone who never gets distracted. That's not what the term means. Being indistractable means that you strive to do what you say you're going to do. So that means that as opposed to a distractible person who constantly gets off track because of the same things day after day after day, an indistractable person understands why they went off track and can do something about it. So Pueblo Coelho has a wonderful quote. He said, a mistake repeated more than once is a decision.

So people who are distractible are deciding to be distractible if they don't do something about it. How long can we complain about Facebook distracting us without doing something about it or whatever new technology? So a distractible person understands the deeper mechanics of what leads to distraction and ultimately controls their attention and controls their life by understanding the deeper psychology of why we go off track so that we can finally stay on track.

Yeah, and that's so wonderful to know. Like, you don't have to be perfect. Like, we're all human. We're going to get distracted. But the things we can do to become more indistractable.

That's right. That's exactly right. Yeah, I still get distracted from time to time. Like new stuff comes up that I haven't faced before, right? There's changes in the world. You know, coronavirus hits. Yeah, that's going to create some changes in your life that may lead you to distraction. The question is, do you have the tools to pick yourself up and not keep getting distracted by the same stuff again and again?

But I know a lot of people listening might be thinking, oh, that is just like you mentioned before, like Facebook or technology is kind of the root cause of all our distractions. But that's not really the case now, is it?

No, no, that in fact, distraction is definitely not anything new that Plato, the Greek philosopher, talked about distraction 2,500 years ago. It's certainly not a new problem. And Plato called it a krasia in the Greek, the tendency to do things against our better interests. And if people have been struggling with distraction for 2,500 years, then it can't be that the fault of

lays at our cell phones and Facebook and social media. It's got to go deeper than that. And frankly, every generation has this struggle. People have been distracted by one thing or another since time immemorial. Yeah, totally. And I love how you share this really good, this cold, hard truth that distraction is really our desire to escape discomfort. And it really comes from something within. And that was just like a really mind-shifting paradigm that I think people need to understand.

Yeah, no, it's a, for me, that was probably the biggest revelation was this deeper reason why we get distracted, which is not just about what we call the external triggers, the pings, the dings, all the things in our outside environment. Those things can distract us, but that's kind of the usual suspects, right? We blame our phone, we blame our boss, we blame our kids, we blame stuff outside of ourselves. And that certainly can lead to distraction.

But the leading cause of distraction, what I discovered in my five years of research, is not the external triggers, but rather the internal triggers. The internal triggers are these uncomfortable emotional states that we seek to escape from. So it's loneliness, boredom, fatigue, anxiety, uncertainty. These uncomfortable feelings that we look for escape from, and whether that escape is with

Too much news, too much food, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook. It doesn't matter. We are always going to find that distraction somewhere unless we understand what is the discomfort we are looking to escape from. Right. And that's such an important fact to know because I realized like yesterday I was working on a hard project and I got stuck.

And then I've started feeling this urge for distraction, like let me check my cell phone, let me check my email. And so the next time someone has this urge to distract themselves, what advice can you share for them to kind of control that distraction habit?

So the best place to understand what distraction is, is to understand what distraction is not. What is the opposite of distraction? So most people think the opposite of distraction is focus, but that's not exactly right. The opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction, if you look at the origin of the word, the opposite of distraction is traction, that both words come from the same Latin root, trahare, which means to pull, and

And they both end in the same six letters, A-C-T-I-O-N, that spells action. So traction, by definition, is any action that

pulls you towards what you said you're going to do, things that you do with intent, things that help you live out your values and help you become the kind of person you want to become. The opposite of traction is distraction. Distraction is any action that pulls you away from what you plan to do, further from your goals, further from your values, further from becoming the person you want to become. Those are distractions. Now, the reason this is so important, it's not just semantics.

We have to understand that any action can be either traction or distraction. That, you know, my daily routine before I embarked on these five years of research to write Indistractable, my daily routine looked like this. I would sit down at my desk and I would say, okay, I am going to get to work on that big project. I'm not going to get distracted. I'm not going to procrastinate. Here I go. I'm going to get started. Nothing's going to get in my way. But first, let me just check some email.

Right. Let me just do that one thing on my to do list real quick. Let me just do anything but the thing I said I was going to do. And I would justify this by saying, well, this is work related stuff. Right. I got to check email. Email's a work task. Right. I'm still being productive. I got to check a few things on my to do list off. I'm still being productive. And what I didn't realize is that that is the most dangerous form of distraction. The most pernicious form of distraction is the distraction that tricks you into prioritizing the urgent at the expense of the important.

So by telling myself, oh, this is still a work-related task, let me just check email for a minute, I was putting off and off and off the stuff that I said I was going to do with my time. And it is just as much of a distraction, maybe even more so, than playing a video game or whatever else. So anything can become a distraction if it's not what you plan to do. And conversely, anything can be traction.

So these days we hear a lot of chicken little tech critics that tell us technology is hijacking our brains, that social media is bad for you, that, oh my God, all this stuff, it's getting everyone addicted. It is rubbish. It is not scientific. It is completely alarmist. And it is totally disempowering because the fact of the matter is,

If you want to play video games, enjoy video games. If you want to watch Netflix, watch Netflix. If you want to play, you know, if you want to connect with friends on social media, great, do it.

but do it on your schedule, not the tech companies. And that's the big difference, that you can turn distraction into traction by simply planning time for it, by deciding for yourself how you're going to spend your time as opposed to letting someone else decide for you. So now we have traction, we have distraction.

Back to your question around like, well, how do we master these internal triggers? Now that we know that what drives us to traction and distraction are these internal triggers and external triggers, we can just work our way around these four points. Now we have like the four points of a compass. Starts at the top with internal triggers. We master the internal triggers. Then we make time for traction. Then we hack back the external triggers. And finally, we prevent distraction with packs.

And now we have our four ways to become indistractable. This is it. This is the model. This actually took me more time to figure out the model than to write the book was putting together all this research into these four most important steps to becoming indistractable. The first step is to master the internal triggers. And how do you do that?

So mastering internal triggers is all about understanding the deeper sensations that we are looking to escape from. And so there's a lot you can do. There's, you know, there's a big section of the book is just devoted to this area because it's the most important thing. But let me just give you a few very tangible techniques that you can use right away to master internal triggers, starting with noting the sensation.

that psychologists tell us that if we can simply name whatever it is that we are experiencing, boredom, uncertainty, fatigue, loneliness, whatever it is that we are experiencing, if we can write it down, that's a huge first step. Because most of the time, we're not even conscious of that discomfort that we're looking to escape from. So that's the first step. Then what we can do is to explore that sensation with curiosity rather than contempt.

Most people when they feel these uncomfortable internal triggers they blame or they shame okay the blamers blame things outside themselves It's Facebook. It's the news. It's Twitter. It's whatever the modern world. It's something outside of me But of course that's pointless because the blaming isn't gonna change anything right like you you can't go back to some time machine to go to For these things if there was never a time when people weren't distracted so the blaming doesn't work the shaming also doesn't work so the shamers are

They take it on the inside. They say, oh, I must have a short attention span. My brain must be broken. I have an addictive personality. And of course, all that shaming also doesn't help anything because the more we feel shame, the more likely we are to look for more internal, more distraction to take our mind off of these internal triggers. So blaming doesn't work. Shaming doesn't work. What does work is claiming.

So claiming responsibility for your reaction to your feelings. Now, this is really important. Most people don't understand that you do not control your feelings. You don't control your urges. All you can control is how you respond to those feelings and urges, hence the term responsibility.

So that means that in order to do that, we have to understand how we will respond when we experience these uncomfortable emotional states. Will we blame? Will we shame? Or will we claim responsibility for them and use that discomfort in a healthy way that leads us towards traction rather than distraction? So one routine that I follow is when I feel these uncomfortable emotional triggers, I

One thing that I do is I use this technique called surfing the urge, and this comes from acceptance and commitment therapy. It's a wonderful technique. And basically what you're going to do is you're not going to use strict abstinence. It turns out that abstinence oftentimes backfires, that when you tell yourself don't do something –

Many times it comes back with a vengeance. We know that this turns out to be a big part of why people get addicted to all kinds of things, particularly cigarettes. It's actually not the nicotine, believe it or not, that withdraw symptoms. Very few people realize this. The withdrawal symptoms from nicotine are actually not that bad.

that most smokers experience the withdrawal of cigarettes every day. In fact, the nicotine is essentially metabolized in your body after three hours. So if you haven't smoked for three hours, you've already felt withdrawal. So every night when a smoker goes to sleep, they essentially experience withdrawal. What makes cigarettes addictive is the pain of telling yourself not to smoke.

All right. Don't smoke. Don't smoke. Don't smoke. Okay, fine. I'll do it. And that relief is registered in the brain as pleasure. Right. It's almost like when you really have to go pee. And finally, you know, you hold it, hold it, hold it. If you're on a big road trip and finally you get to the rest stop and relief.

And that's the same thing that happens to us when we resist with abstinence. We tell ourselves, don't do it, don't do it, don't do it. Okay, fine, I'll do it. And that relief feels good. It's the same with our phones. It's the same with a chocolate cake that we know we shouldn't have, whatever the case might be. So instead of that, instead of using abstinence, what you want to use instead is called the 10-minute rule. And the 10-minute rule tells us that we can give in to any distraction, but not right now. Okay, so we're not saying no, we're saying not yet.

If I can just wait for 10 minutes and then I will give it right, then I will have that chocolate cake. Then I will check my email. Then I will check the news or whatever the case might be, whatever is that potential distraction in 10 minutes. And what you will find is if you just sit with that sensation for 10 minutes, experience it, figure out where is that coming from? What is this urge and surf the urge like a surfer on a surfboard nine times out of 10?

that urge will have crested and then subsided just like a wave. And so what you want to do is surf that urge for those 10 minutes. And once the 10 minutes are up, you can give in. But I'm telling you, once you develop that skill nine times out of 10, you don't even want that thing at the end of the 10 minutes. Yeah.

Wow, you just dropped like a goldmine of information there. And yeah, like the 10-minute rule is such a simple but so effective thing to do. Like I realized even yesterday, so I was working on the project and I get this urge to, you know, check Instagram. And I'm like, okay, remember the 10-minute rule, just wait 10 minutes. And then I get back to work and I forget like 15 or 20 minutes later. And then I'm like, why did I even want to check Instagram? Yes, yes. Isn't that incredible?

Yeah, it's and for everyone listening, it's such a simple but effective tool. Highly recommend using it. And also what you mentioned earlier, just being conscious of like, why do I want this distraction? Like what feeling? Like you said, you can't control the feeling, but you could control the response to it. So that gives you the power.

Yeah. And another thing you mentioned is like this toxic guilt that some people have that they just say, oh, I don't have the willpower or I don't have the self-control. Like that's not the right mindset to have, because as you mentioned in the book, like the willpower battery analogy like that was false. Yeah.

Yeah, it's crazy, actually. I mean, I, for years, believed this because everybody in the psychology believed in this idea that we call ego depletion. Ego depletion says that we run out of willpower like gas in a gas tank. And you still hear people saying this today. Yeah.

And for a while, people believed this because there were studies that one psychologist in particular espoused that seemed to show this effect that you ran out of willpower like gas in a gas tank until…

The study sounded a little bit too good to be true. And so what we do in the social sciences, if a study sounds too good to be true, we run it again. And what people found was that it could not replicate. And there was one study in particular that was really amazing done by Carol Dweck, who I'm sure you've read her book, Mindset. She's fantastic. So she conducted this study at Stanford that found that

this phenomenon of ego depletion does exist. There are people who really do experience ego depletion, but it's only one group of people. The only people who really do run out of willpower like gas in a gas tank are only people who believe

that willpower is a limited resource. That's it. Everybody else, it's not true. And so it's a wonderful example of how our temperament, the way we view ourselves, affects our behavior. That behavior change requires identity change. So if you believe, oh, I have no willpower left, give me that pint of ice cream, I'm going to sit on the couch and watch Netflix for the rest of the night,

If you believe you're powerless to resist, that is going to be the case. And this is exactly what we hear today with this ridiculous argument that technology is addicting us and hijacking our brains. You're essentially teaching people that they're powerless. You're teaching learned helplessness. And so that's why we have to stop with that victim mentality and realize that we have much more power than the tech companies do. We are way more powerful than these distractions.

Yeah, and it's like that famous saying, it's like the man that thinks he can, the man that thinks he can't are both right. And yeah, that's just such a, like so many breakthroughs I had when I was reading your book. I just loved it. And I just want to keep going on this. And you have this great quote in the book where you say is, you can't call something a distraction unless you know what is distracting you from. And you also talk about the importance of knowing your values and planning ahead. Could you kind of share how that kind of prevents us from getting distracted?

Sure. So the second step to becoming indistractable is making time for traction. So after we've mastered the internal triggers and we just touched the tip of the iceberg, there's a lot more there. But the next step is to make time for traction. So we talked about how traction is any action that pulls you towards what you want to do, things that move you closer to your values and help you become the kind of person you would become. So the truth here is that what I want people to remember is that you cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. Meaning,

If you have a bunch of white space in your calendar, right? If it's just open free time to do whatever you want, don't be surprised if everything is a distraction because what did you get distracted from exactly? If you've got nothing on your calendar, if you have no plans,

Everything is a distraction, right? So you have to plan your day or somebody's going to plan it for you, that whether it's the news media or social media or your boss or your kids, somebody has a vested interest to take your time from you. You know, there's a reason we call it spending time and paying attention. We use the same words, spending and paying, that we use to describe what we do with money, right? We spend money.

our money just as we spend time. We pay attention just like we pay with dollars and cents.

And we wouldn't just give anybody who wants it our money, right? We have to be judicious about what we spend our money on. But when it comes to our attention, sure, whatever. Take as much of it as you want. Whoever wants it, no problem. Some stupid thing on Twitter, okay. Some drama on TV, whatever. The news, this and that, okay, sure. And we just give it out to whoever wants it. Whereas an indistractable person realizes that you have to plan your day or somebody else is going to plan it for you. So how do you do that?

The first step is to start with your values, is to understand that we have to turn our values into time. How do we do that? We ask ourselves, what are our values? What are our values? How do you define them? Values are defined as attributes of the person you want to become. Let me say that again. Values are defined as attributes of the person you want to become. So we have to ask ourselves, how would the person I want to become spend their time?

And I give people these three life domains that help us on this journey. So first, the most important life domain is the one at the center, you. If you can't take care of yourself, you can't take care of others. We have to make sure that we first and foremost take

Make time to live out our values as they concern ourselves. So, for example, how much time do you want on your calendar for proper rest, for exercise, for learning, right, for prayer, for meditation, whatever is important to you, even video games, right? Let's say it's part of your values to say, I want to spend time playing video games.

Great, put that time on your schedule, okay? Take care of you first and plan the time that you invest in living out your values. Second life domain is your relationships. Part of the reason we have this loneliness epidemic in this country is because we have a precipitous decline in the amount of time that people spend in organized activities.

And this is not something that social media did. Social media was a reaction to this existing disease. This has been happening since the 1990s. There's a wonderful book called Bowling Alone written by Robert Putnam. He talks about this, that civic organizations, the church club, the bowling league, the Kiwanis, these clubs that people used to have on their calendar –

The younger generation doesn't do. And so we are terribly lonely because we don't see friends on a regular basis. So put that time in your schedule, especially now that so many of us are in quarantine. Get those Zoom meetings booked, right, with your family, with your friends, with your spouses, even with your with your kids. Make that time for the people who are important to the important relationships in your life.

And then finally, the work domain, right, which is where most of us spend our time. Work can be subdivided into two types of work. We have reactive work and then we have reflective work. Reactive work is reacting to all of those pings and dings, right? The emails, the Slack notifications, the phone calls. Reactive work is how most people spend their day. The problem is that those people...

Spend a lot of energy and a lot of time running real fast in the wrong direction because they have no time for reflective work. Reflective work is the planning, the concentrating, the thinking. And if you don't make time in your day to think, well then,

How do you know you're doing the right stuff? Right? You have to plan time to think in your day. If you want a huge competitive advantage over everybody else in your workplace, make that time to think because I bet you nobody else is doing it. Nobody else is making time to think. But you have to have that time and you have to do that without interruption.

And so make some amount of time, even if it's 20, 30, 45 minutes, have that time in your day for that reflective work as well. Yeah. And it's funny you mentioned that because I had a similar conversation with Greg McKeown where he said, you have to ask yourself, what's the most essential thing to do every day? And like kind of step back to think like,

What is important to me and what do I want to get done? And it's just, yeah, people are so busy doing work that they forget to ask themselves, am I going the right direction? Am I doing the right thing? And just as important a piece of advice to know.

Absolutely. Yeah, I think Greg and I went to business school together the same year. We're buddies, and I think we share many similar philosophies, and I think our books really complement each other. I think his book is more of like the – he talks about the importance of philosophy.

of this mindset, as does Cal Newport, actually. He wrote that great book, Deep Work, which was a big inspiration for Indistractable. I wanted to make it very practical. I wanted to show people, okay, you believe in this stuff, okay, but what do you do? I show you step-by-step exactly. Read those books, too. They're fantastic. But I was trying to, in my book, make it very, very practical and concrete. Yeah, and that's what I loved about your book, and that's what I want to segue to next, which is like...

How, because I know, especially now, since everyone's working from home, they're spending a lot more time on email. And so like, and you share some great advice in your book on how to like hack back email. So I was hoping you could share that with us. Sure, sure. Yeah. So the next part of the step three to becoming indistractable is to hack back the external triggers. So we talked about the internal triggers. We talked about making time for traction. Now the next part is to hack back the external triggers. So all the pings, dings and rings, everything.

And I walk through all of these various areas of your life where you can encounter these external triggers. So, you know, your notifications on your phone or your computer, email, meetings. Oh, my God, how much time do we spend on stupid time wasting meetings? Even your kids. Right. We love them. But, you know, your spouse, your roommate, your kids, they can also be a source of distraction. So I walk you through every single one of these areas and a few others for how you can hack back these external triggers. Why do I call it hack back?

I call it hackback because to hack something means to gain unauthorized access, right? So when someone hacks your attention, right, like your kid barges in on you during a meeting when you're on Zoom or, you know, you get a notification on your phone when you're right in the middle of concentrating writing something, they are hacking your attention. They are gaining unauthorized access to your mind.

And of course, all the media companies, that's their business model. They sell your eyeballs to advertisers. But just because someone can hack you doesn't mean you can't hack back. And so that's why I call it hacking back. There's all kinds of tools we can use. Most of them are absolutely free.

to help us hack back these external triggers. So you asked specifically about email. Now, email is, interestingly enough, why did I spend so much time covering email in the book? Because email was rated as the number one source of technology distraction in the workplace.

Number one. Number two was group chat, Slack, all that stuff. But number one, nobody likes email, and yet we all have to put up with it. So let's go very concrete in terms of what you can do to hack back email. So there's a bit of a math equation.

That's important to understand in terms of where the time goes with email. So the total time spent on email equals the time we spend per message times the number of messages. So I think of it as TNT, big T, like big T is the total number of time, a total amount of time. N is the number of messages times the time spent per email. So TNT, that reminds me how email can blow up an otherwise productive day.

So here's the method you use for email. Okay. In order to understand how to, how to manage email, you have to understand that where we waste time with email is not the checking. It's not the replying, but in fact, it's the rechecking. That's where we waste the most time, right? This is what most people do. They open up a message, you read it, you put it away, you open up the next message, you read it, you put it away.

30 minutes later, you look at your inbox again. What was that message about? And what was in it again? I forgot. Oh, you open it, read it, put it away. And most people touch each email five, six, seven times without even realizing it. That's where we waste the most time. So the rule is you only touch each email two times. The first time you touch that email, you have to ask yourself the most important question from a time management perspective, which is when does this need a reply?

It's not what's in it, not nothing else. When does it need a reply? That's it. Now it's going to fall into a few categories. Either it never needs a reply, in which case delete it or archive it, right? That's many emails just don't need a reply. Okay, put it away and never see it again.

The other answer is sometimes it needs a reply. Oh, my God. Right now, your house is on fire. You have to email me. That's pretty rare. OK, like we think that might be the case. But if you actually look at it, that almost never happens. Right. If your house is on fire, they're not going to email you. They're going to call you. They're going to text you. They're not going to email you. So but that's like one percent of emails. OK, fine. If that's really bona fide. Oh, my God, your house is on fire. Fine. Return the email.

Most emails fall into two categories. 99% of emails that are not the ones you don't have to reply to fall into one of two categories, either emails that need to reply today or emails that need to reply sometime this week. And what I want you to do is to categorize, use a label. If you don't know how to use labels, you can just Google it. Every email service provider can do this. Label it by one of those two tags, either today or this week.

And what I want you to do is to time box. We talked about this earlier, making time for traction. You are going to time box that time on your calendar for only the emails that need to reply today. So maybe it's 45 minutes. Maybe it's an hour. I don't know. It depends on how much email you get every day. But you're only going to reply to their urgent messages that need to reply today, today. And then all the ones that can wait, you're going to reply in one day, today.

All the rest of them. Okay. So in my calendar, I call it message Monday. So on message Mondays, I have three hours where I.

go through all of those emails that can wait a bit. And you say, okay, well, where's the time saved? I don't get it. Where am I? Aren't I just pushing? I'm just kicking the can here, right? Wrong. Here's where the magic happens. What you will find is if you just focus every day on the emails that need to reply today, that'll probably be about 20% of your emails. So right there, you will dramatically reduce the number of emails you have to reply to every day, right? To just 20% of them. Now for the existing 80%,

that need a reply sometime this week, there's an amazing magical thing that happens. That emails biodegrade. Here's how that works. They decompose because when you give emails a bit of time to rest, about half of them will no longer need a reply.

People will figure out their own issues. They'll ask somebody else. What was urgent then turns out to not be so urgent, and now it was crushed under the weight of some other thing that's now urgent. So by giving those non-urgent emails just a bit of time to rest, let them decompose, about half of them will just magically disappear. You won't even have to look at them. But

them. But if you had replied to them in order as you got them in your inbox, you would have wasted that time throughout your week. So this will open up hours and hours of time for people who use this technique. It's such a fantastic piece of advice. And I mean, yeah, everyone uses the email, so everyone could find that section in the book super helpful. And I think after email, probably the second biggest distractor for people is their smartphone. And I know this personally from my...

My own experience is when the pandemic happened, it's like my screen time went from like two hours to almost five hours a day. And unfortunately, since then, I've been able to bring it down with the advice you shared in your book. But I was also hoping you could share a couple of advice for listeners on how to like hack back your smartphone.

Yeah. First of all, you know, if you intend to spend that time on your device, I don't have any problem with it. Right. If you want to spend hours, you know, many people use their phone for work. And if, you know, you're checking emails and, uh,

you know, messages and conducting business on your phone, doing phone calls. There's nothing wrong per se with screen time. That's not the right metric. The metric should be, is this what I plan to do? Is it traction or is it distraction? Is it not what I plan to do? And I think what you're describing is, you know, this pandemic hit, the elections, there's all this crazy stuff happening in the news. And now we feel compelled to constantly check our phones because we are looking for escape from

Not because we need to know, but because we can't deal with these emotions, right? It's uncertainty about the elections. It's fear about the pandemic. It's feelings, fundamentally. I think it was Neil Postman that said that the difference between news and entertainment is what you can act upon. And so much of what we consume and we think is news and we need to stay informed citizens is

It's not news. It's entertainment. Right. Like once you know who you're going to vote for, do you really need to keep up with every little thing? Right. Like you're not going to do anything about it. Like there's not much more you can do. And so that's where we really need to understand, OK, how do we prioritize our time in according to our values, which we talked about earlier, meaning, hey, if you want to check the news, that's according to your values. Wonderful.

But put that time in your calendar. I am going to check the news from 9 to 9.30 and that's it. That's my time for news checking. Fine. Put it in your calendar. But let's say...

You find yourself getting constantly interrupted with all these pings and dings on your phone, as you mentioned, all these external triggers. There's a few things you can do. So one thing is to remove all the apps that are just slot machines, okay? Like the ones with the infinite scrolls, the ones that you can just use and on and on and on and on. Make a pledge to use those things, but again, according to your calendar and not necessarily on that device. So let me give you an example. Facebook, okay?

I love Facebook. There are so many people that I would not be in touch with had it not been for this wonderful tool. But I don't want it on my phone because I know if I have it on my phone, I'm going to use it when I don't want to, when I'm with my daughter or when I'm trying to get work done. So I don't use Facebook on my phone. I use it on my desktop. Another thing you can do is to have a home phone and an away phone.

So an away phone is the phone you take with you that has the essential functions, right? Of, you know, um,

you know, phone calls, text messages, things, uh, Google maps, GPS, like things that you are away. And then you have a home phone with social media on it. Right. And, and, and you used to be like, Oh my God, two phones. That's very expensive. Not anymore. Right. You can get, you know, old iPhones for, or Android phones for like 50, 60 bucks these days. They're very inexpensive. So what you want to do is essentially, you know, insert some friction to hack back,

the devices in a way that serves you as opposed to it's you serving it. Another tool that I use all the time is an app called Forest. And this goes into that fourth step of becoming indistractable, of preventing distraction with PACT. Forest is this wonderful app that when you open it up, it has this cute little virtual tree on the screen.

And it allows you to set the number of minutes that you want to do reflective work for. Let's say it's 45 minutes. And as soon as you hit a little button that says plant, this timer starts ticking off and you see this cute little virtual tree on your screen. Now, if you pick up your phone and you do anything with it, the virtual tree gets chopped down. It dies.

And you don't want to kill that cute little virtual tree. You don't want to be a virtual tree murderer. So it's enough of a reminder to tell you, oh, you made a promise with yourself. You said you're not going to pick up your phone right now. And it just reminds you of that promise you made to yourself.

And there are all kinds of free tools like this that I talk about in the book. There are just dozens of them. Many of them are, you know, don't cost a thing. Yeah. And yes. So just to double down on what you said, it's like first, like remove the apps that like you don't need. Like I found myself using Twitter too much and like Facebook. So got that off my phone and also like rearranging your like the apps on your home screen because a lot of people, you know, they want their house to be clean. But you look at their phone and it's just a mess everywhere and just finding something takes forever.

And there's so many great tips that you shared about there as well. So you also have this great section towards the end of the book about teaching kids how to be like indistractable because I think too many parents just say, oh, like technology is making kids addicted. And it's like, you know, there's no hope for them. But you're like, no, you like all you guys like you have to like take responsibility for this. And you like you could teach your kids to be indistractable. And you share this great story of how you helped your daughter who was only five years old, like manage her iPad time, which was incredible. Yeah.

So I think, although I'm not a parent, I'm sure a lot of listeners are, and they would love to hear some advice on how to make their kids indistractable.

Yeah, I mean, this is probably the most important section of the book if you have kids, because if you think the world is distracting now, I mean, just wait a few years. It's only going to become more distracting with virtual reality and augmented reality and who knows what other reality like in the world is only going to become a more potentially distracting place. And so I think if you want to give your kid the skill of the century.

Teach them how to be indistractable because there will be two kinds of people in the world, people who let their time and their attention be controlled and manipulated by others, and people who say, no, I decide for myself how I will control my attention, how I will control my life by understanding how to become indistractable. So the way you raise indistractable kids starts with, and this is somewhat uncomfortable advice for parents, is first and foremost is that we have to become indistractable ourselves.

that children are born with these hypocrisy detection devices. And they're constantly scanning to see where we screw up.

And so we have to set an example. If you are checking Facebook, you can't tell your kid to stop playing Fortnite, right? Like you have to lead by example. So you can't be a hypocrite. And then what we can do is we can think of it kind of like with a pool, okay, with a swimming pool. You know, swimming pools are deadly. You know, far too many children drown every year

because of swimming pools. Now, does that mean that we will never let children swim in swimming pools? No, we teach them how to swim. So at first, we make sure that we observe them, we make sure that they understand how to dip your toes in the water and then how to go in and then how to wade and how to doggy paddle and we guide them. In the same way, when it comes to online technology,

You know, any form of media needs supervision to make sure it's age appropriate. You know, as wonderful as reading is, I wouldn't let my kid go into a library and just read any book. She's not ready for every book out there. There's a lot of books that a 12-year-old little girl is not ready for.

So any form of media requires parental supervision to make sure it's age appropriate. So please do not make the iPad into an iNanny. Make sure you know what your kid is consuming. And today there are so many tools out there. Many of them are free to help us make sure that we can moderate what our kids are using and making sure it's age appropriate. So that's very important.

And then what we can also do is to empower them to learn this skill of becoming indistractable. So with my daughter, you know, some of her first words were iPad time, iPad time.

And it got to the point where it was too much because it was crowding out other things in her life. So as opposed to bringing down the hammer and telling her, we're parents, we know best, we're gonna take it away from you. We wanted to figure out how we can help her learn this skill because this isn't something that is suddenly gonna go away. Distraction is going to be a struggle for her for the rest of her life. That's just part of living in the modern world. So what we told her was, look,

These technologies, they're not melting your brain. They're not evil. We didn't want to scare her into not being comfortable with technology. We want her to be very comfortable with technology. Her future livelihood is probably going to depend on it. But what we wanted her to understand was that using these technologies too much comes at a cost

Of something else. It's an opportunity cost. It's time with your friends. It's time playing outside It's time with mommy and daddy. That's the cost of too much time on on a device So we asked her how much time would you like to spend with the device? Okay, and we put the power in her hands and I could see she was like, oh wow What's what's going on here? And since she said two episodes, I

So two episodes on Netflix, she was talking about Netflix episodes of a kid show that I knew was age appropriate that she loved. That's 45 minutes. I have no problem with 45 minutes. But what I told her was, look, that's fine. But how will you monitor that time? Because I can't be the person who tells you 45 minutes are up. How will you make sure that you spend the amount of time that you yourself said is the right amount of time for you?

And so she came up with a brilliant idea. We used to have a microwave that was below the countertop and she could walk up to it just at, you know, five, six years old and she could set the timer to beep after 45 minutes. Today, the iPad comes with this, by the way, you can program the, you know, they have screen time features that will tell you this, or sometimes she'll use Amazon Alexa and say, you know, set a timer for 45 minutes. And in that way, she has learned this skill and

to self-moderate. And that's an incredibly valuable skill because, you know, remember parents, we are not raising children. We are not raising children. We are raising future adults. And so we have to empower them with this skill set so that they can monitor themselves even when we're not around, right? When they go to a friend's house or they go off to college or they leave the house, they have to learn this skill for themselves. And this is a wonderful way to teach it to them. Yeah.

Yeah, and I think that's such an important point to me. It's like, you know, technology is going to be with them for the rest of their lives. So instead of like saying, like banning all technology and like you can't use a smartphone until you're 16, it's like, no, give them a smartphone, teach them how to use it properly because you're going to be using it for the rest of your life. And that's why I love, even though I'm not a parent, like I was reading that advice and I'm like, that's so wonderful. And I wrote a note like, you know, come back when you have kids and I'll be back. I will say though, however, we should consider

You know, I said I said very deliberately age appropriate. And I think many of many parents make the mistake of not considering what really is age appropriate. You know, I see kids at 10 years old on Instagram or TikTok. And that is a big mistake because the companies themselves tell you the minimum age is 13.

Why the heck would you let your kid use a product that the manufacturer is telling you the minimum age for? So at least listen to that. I personally think, look, middle school, high school is hard enough without social media. I

I'm not sure I would give even a 13 year old access to social media. I don't know if it's age appropriate, but that's, that's something you need to discuss with your teenager, but certainly, you know, a, a, a, a pared down, uh, smartphone or a flip phone, um, that doesn't have all the bells and whistles. Uh, you know, I don't think a kid needs to have access to social media at, at, in their teen years, frankly, uh, it can wait a little bit longer. Um, but, but, you know, giving them a phone without those features and making sure, you know, that how do you know a kid is ready for a device when they know how to turn it off?

Right. Can they come to the dinner table and understand that that's a no phone zone? OK, do you leave it behind when they have homework to do? Do they know how to use that do not disturb feature so that they can concentrate? That's how we make sure that kids know how to use these are ready for these technologies. Yeah, that's great advice. And I'm happy. I didn't like social media. Don't really take off until I was in high school. So I got I just crossed that line. So I got I ended up OK, hopefully. Yeah.

And so near we're coming close on time here. So I want to ask my closing question that I asked all my guests, which is a word or two books that had a major impact on you as a young adult. And how did those books shape you? Oh, as a young adult has to be young adult or can it be a more recent book? It could be a more recent book if you want to put one. I mean, a book that I read that, um,

uh, two books I read that I really enjoyed. One was factfulness by Hans Ronsling that I think everybody should read it. It's a wonderful book. I think it's, you know, it's a book basically quick summaries. It's a book about reality and the state of the world. And he basically shows how, uh,

College professors, when they take a multiple choice test on the state of the world, so female inequality around the world, education around the world, health around the world, when college professors take these tests, they do worse than a monkey taking the test. They do worse than random because so many of us have this very skewed perception of how terrible the world is when actually the world is getting better and better.

By almost every metric. But we don't ever think about that because the news is all about negativity bias. So anyway, so that's a great book. And then I recently finished a wonderful book by my friend Rory Sutherland, a book called Alchemy, which is wonderful. He did such a great job with that book. And basically the idea behind Alchemy is how can you add value to something without

material costs, right? So like, you know, turning lead into gold. How do you change the product without putting more money and resources into it? And it's a great read. I highly recommend it. Yeah, I listened to Rory's TED Talks and those were fantastic. Yeah.

He narrates the audio book too with that wonderful voice. Oh, awesome. I'll have to check that out. And the book Factfulness, you mentioned earlier, I think Bill Gates highly recommended it and he gave it out to a graduating class. Oh, did he? Yeah, the world isn't as bad as people think. Because of the news, they only hear about the bad stuff and none of the good stuff. So those are two great book recommendations.

Thank you. Yeah, I really hope people check them out. Yeah. And Sunir, this has been a wonderful conversation and one that I'm going to have to go back to and listen to, even though I read the book and I just loved it and all the information that you shared. And I'm sure listeners would like to learn more about you and connect with you. Where's the best place for them to go?

Yeah, so my blog is at nearandfar.com. Near is spelled like my first name, N-I-R-andfar.com. And the book is titled Indistractable, How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. Right. And you also ran a book called Hooked. Can you just share a little bit about that?

Sure. So Hooked was my first book, How to Build Habit-Forming Products is the subtitle. And that book is for product makers. So if you're looking to build a product, it's mostly for tech product makers. If you're looking to build a product to create healthy habits in people's lives, helping them exercise, eat right, save money, connect with loved ones, be more productive at work, we can use the same techniques that I share that I basically stole from the big social media companies to teach people how to build healthy habits using these tech products.

Awesome. So those are two books people should definitely look into and learn more about. And is there anything else you have on the horizon coming up? At the moment, I'm still trying to spread the word about Indistractable. I think it's an important message because I'm really fighting against this powerlessness that I think a lot of people are hearing these days, that there's nothing they can do, that it's addicting them. And I really want to empower people to understand that there's so much we can do, that we are way more powerful than these distractions if we know what to do. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, totally. I agree. And everyone listening like you have that power. Read the book Indistractable, learn how to become indistractable. And you're going to see a lot more improvement in your life. And you're not going to look at technology as like this evil thing that exists out there. It exists and like you could use it for good. Or, you know, if you don't know how to use it, like you said, there's gonna be two types of people. Those are distractible and indistractable. So Nir, I just want to say thank you so much for coming on the Reader's Journey podcast today. I learned so much and I'm sure listeners did too.

Thank you so much, Alex. It was my pleasure.

Hey everyone, I hope you enjoyed this episode of The Reader's Journey. You can learn more about what's covered in today's podcast in the show notes below. If you enjoyed this podcast, the best way you can support it is by subscribing and leaving a positive review. If you're looking for reading tips or book recommendations, head over to alexandbooks.com. If you want to join my reading journey, you can follow me on Instagram and Twitter by searching for Alex and Books. That's all for now. Thank you so much for listening, and I hope to see you soon. Read

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