The Jordan Harbinger Show - 48: Nir Eyal | How to Manage Distraction in a Digital Age

Episode Date: May 29, 2018

Nir Eyal (@nireyal) helps teams design more engaging products as demonstrated in his book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, and shows us how we can break away from the distraction of this engagement if it's not serving us. What We Discuss with Nir Eyal: The never-ending struggle between traction and distraction. How variable rewards are used to keep you glued to social media like B.F. Skinner's lab pigeons. How to ensure you're moving closer to your goals even if your daily activities include what might, on the surface, seem like tangents. Triggers that cause you to lose your way and how to program your environment to avoid and mitigate these triggers. Why you're not really addicted to technology -- and why it's dangerous to say you are. And much more... Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course!  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! Full show notes and resources can be found here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer Jason DePhilippo. On this episode, we're talking with my good friend, Neer Ayal. He's been a friend of the show for a while, and he's the author of the book, Hooked, and the forthcoming book, Indistractable, which is coming out here in a few months. We're actually getting a sneak peek. Today, we'll explore the tension between what Near calls traction and distraction, I see what you did there, and how to ensure that you're moving closer to your goals, even if your daily activities include things that might, on their face, seem a little bit like tangents. We'll also explore some of the triggers that cause us to lose our way and how to program our environment to avoid and mitigate those triggers by building effective barriers around you, distracting technology, and your goals. And finally, we'll discover why you're not really addicted to technology and why it's actually dangerous to say that you are. Don't forget, we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of all the key takeaways here from Near Ayal. The link to the worksheets is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. Now here's Near Ayal.

So when I met you, your knowledge was a double-edged sword. It was like, oh, I talk about distraction and how apps are, controlling our brains and how these social media companies and things like that dig their hooks into us. And your book, your first book that I read was called Hooked. And I thought, oh, that's really interesting. And then I thought, oh, well, you speak a lot. Who do you speak to? Oh, I do a lot of consulting for social media companies. I was like, wait a minute. So, well, the Hooked was really about how to build these products. And just, just for the record, I've never done any consulting work for Facebook. I've never worked for any of these big social media companies. My consulting clients are the kind of companies that are building fitness apps.

They're building personal finance software. They're building stuff to help people eat healthier, psychotherapy apps. These are the kind of products that benefit people if they would use them. And so that's the big struggle that a lot of tech companies have. And I had when I was running my last company was that we were building a product that would be wonderful for people's lives if they would just freaking use the product. So the vast majority of companies don't have this problem where they're addicting anybody. The vast majority of companies out there are just struggling with getting people to give a shit about their product. And if you're making some boring SaaS software, you know, trying to get your users to use the product is your most important challenge.

So that's what Hooked was really for. Hooked was this book on how to build the kind of products that people want to use that improves their lives. Now, it just so happens that my model for how to do that came from the best in the business, right? If you want to get really good at something, if you want to be an amazing runner, maybe you call Usain Bolt, right? If you want to be an amazing investor, you call Warren Buffett. So the best in the business when it comes to consumer engagement and retention are these social media companies, right? It's companies like Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and Snapchat and Slack, you know, these companies that are really the masters of getting people to come back. So those are the archetypes for how to do this, but it certainly was never meant to be an endorsement of these companies.

look, if these companies aren't benefiting you and if they're distracting you, then, you know, we need to put them in their place. And so that's kind of the line of thinking for my next book is that I kept hearing from people who said, great, you know, you taught me how these products are built. And for many people who read the book, you know, I was surprised because I wrote the book for people who make products. But then a lot of people read the book and they, you know, more of a mainstream audience that doesn't necessarily build apps or websites. And they tell me, my God, my eyes were open because I never knew that this was being done to me. Yeah. And so they would ask me, okay, now that I know what's happening, how do I do do I do more about it? How do I make sure that I don't use these products when they don't serve me? So that's kind of what led me to this next book. So what was, what is being done to us, right?

Because yeah, okay, I get a push notification. Got it. The little red dot on my phone sucks me right into the app. But what else is going on with these companies? Well, there's a lot of psychology at work. I mean, and there's there's a few ways to look at it. You know, if I describe to you, you know, how variable rewards work, right? This Schenarian mechanism where, you know, B. F. Skinner back in the 1950s, he took these rats and pigeons and he put them a little box and he gave them a disc to peck at. And every time the pigeon would peck at the disc, they would receive a reward. They would get a little food pellet.

And what Skinner observed was that when he gave the food pellet to the pigeon on a predictable schedule, meaning every time the pigeon peck at the disc, they would get a reward, they would peck at the disc when they were hungry only. But if he gave the food pellet on a variable schedule, meaning sometimes a pigeon would peck at the disc and they wouldn't get a food pellet and the next time they would get a food pellet, when there was some uncertainty, when there was some amount of mystery there, the pigeon pecked at the disc much more often, much more frequently, even if they weren't necessarily hungry. Oh, okay. And so that's the exact same psychology that we see in all sorts of things that are engaging. Slot machines? Slot machine is a perfect example, right?

When you pull the handle of a slot machine, although you don't pull handles anymore, now you just push a button. The handle is way too much work. Yeah, exactly, exactly. People get tired. So, you know, you can't stop watching those turning wheels because you want to know the outcome. Sports, right? The reason that we like watching sports is this uncertainty around what's going to happen next. It's what makes books entertaining.

It's what makes television shows fun. And it's what makes scrolling your Facebook feed entertaining as well. It's all about this uncertainty, this very. variable reward. So one way to look at it is that this is nefarious, that they're doing this to hook us, to get us addicted to their products. I don't necessarily buy into that viewpoint anymore. I think I started from that perspective. I think what I now realize is that, look, you know, that's not necessarily a problem. It's progress, right? We want products to be engaging. We want this interview to not be boring by telling you something you don't already know. It has to be

uncertainty. It has to be something that's unexpected. So anything that, that is meant to attract people's attention has to have some elements of novelty. You know, the upside, of course, that we have all these interesting products and services that we use every day. The downside is that in a world of such abundance of so many entertainment options, sometimes it can be hard to focus. And that's becoming a very scarce commodity, the ability to concentrate on one thing at a time so that we can apply our human creativity and ingenuity. it requires our full attention. And so that's really what I wanted to study next. So do we do we have to then avoid things that give us variable rewards? Because that seems kind of impossible. Well, to some degree, it comes down to putting them in their place. I would not be on the side of people who

say, well, we just need to abstain or let's do, you know, a digital Sabbath and go away to the woods and just don't touch your iPhone for a week. And, you know, the fact is these products are not going away for all the critique of these technologies and these companies. And I'm not saying that there aren't things that are wrong about these products. There's a lot of stuff these companies are not doing right. But the fact is they're not going away, right? Right. So if you find...

Especially if it works. Yeah, exactly. They're doing their jobs. They're giving people things that they want. There's all kinds of problems with these products as well that I think, you know, the vast majority of them I'm pretty optimistic that will work out. But the fact is that there's some amount of personal responsibility as well, that we have to figure out how to put these technologies in their place.

And that's something that if you hold your breath and wait for the companies, to do this for you. If you hold your breath and wait for them to change, you're going to suffocate, right? So it's much better to figure out how we ourselves can manage these distractions. Are there companies that go, look, we realize people are going to use our stuff less if we're bad for them? That's right. I think that's exactly what we see some companies doing. So there's there's some companies that I won't work for. And those are the kind of companies that depend upon addicts, meaning people who want to stop but can't. So I won't work for the game. I won't work for any kind of alcohol manufacturers. I won't work for any tobacco companies.

I won't work for the porn industry. Not that I want to live in a world where these things are illegal. It's just that these industries focus on people who are what they call in the industry whales, the 1% of users who make up 90% of the revenue and some online games are the same way, right, where they focus on the very few who account for most of the revenue. And those type of businesses tend to be unethical, in my opinion, because they depend upon people who even when they want to quit, they don't let them quit. Right. Whereas the vast majority of our distractions and the vast majority of people actually are not

really addicted, right? The level of addiction in society, you know, we're talking at any one time, you know, something in the single digits percentages of people who are actually addicted to gambling, to pornography, to the internet. There are people who are unhealthful. addicted, but it's almost become this tagline that we said, oh, it's, you know, I can't stop, I'm addicted. Yeah.

Well, not really. There's actually a medical definition for addiction. Right. And just saying, oh, I'm addicted or these products are made to addict me kind of left us off the hook. Yeah, that's true. I don't think, because you ask any sort of teenage boy, they're not addicted to porn. They just, they like it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's actually, there was interesting. There was a study done by a friend of mine, Gabe Zickerman, who has this company onward, which tries to help people who suffer from. porn addiction, weaned back their habits. And it was interesting, they did a study of, you know, how much time people who think they

are addicted to porn actually spend on porn. And the average is something like six minutes. Well, yeah, that actually checks out just fine. You know, even though they would call themselves as people who are dating, you think an addiction, you know, you think about a heroin addiction or any kind of addiction, you know, the definition is a persistent, compulsive, harmful dependency on a behavior or substance. An addiction is not, oh, I like it a lot. Addiction is not, you know, I wish I would use it a little bit less.

An addiction is when you can't think of anything else. It becomes an overpowering thought in your day and day life that's hard to resist. It's not six minutes a day. It might be, it might. And that's on a slow internet connection, right? It's like, I've waited four minutes for the thing to load. Yeah. So a lot of it has to do with our perception of our problems.

And so what I wanted to do with this next book is to give people these very practical tools that they can use to live the kind of of life they want. And so if you're doing something that you would prefer not do or not do as much, the solution isn't, oh, Facebook, you should make your product less engaging or, oh, you know, Snapchat bad on you for using these psychological tricks to make your products so good I want to use them all the time. Like, you know, that's pointless. It behooves us to instead use these techniques to do the behaviors we want. So this isn't for breaking an addiction. This is for using something less. So these aren't, this isn't like how to wean off your. actual addiction to gambling. This is more like, look, if you find you're wasting a lot of time on

social media or doing some other sort of activity that you think is a, that you know is a waste of your time, here's how we can cut down on those things without just using sheer willpower. Right, right. So, you know, you will find that there are a lot of traits that are similar for weaning off of an addiction that are similar for weaning off of a distraction. But I really focus on the vast majority of people who, from time to time, maybe every day, find themselves doing something that they didn't intend to do. And, you know, whether it's using too much Facebook, whether it's watching too much YouTube, whether it's reading too much news, whether it's, you know, you're at the dinner table with your family

and you can't help but check email. You know, what is it that's driving these distractions? And so the first thing that I had to do was to define what I mean by distraction. So I kind of came up with this mental model of how I think about distraction. So I think about, you know, your actions are at the center. and your actions can go down two paths. You can either do things you want to do, things that are moving you towards the life you want,

and I call those things acts of traction. And then the opposite of traction in the other direction is distraction. I see what you did there. You see what I did there? But the important thing here to know is that both words, traction and distraction and in the word action, reminding us that these aren't things that happen to us. These are things that we ourselves do,

either these acts of traction or distraction. Now, that's not how most people think about distraction. Most people think about distraction. They think, oh, my God, the phone rang and I got distracted. But what we're doing is conflating the trigger, the ring, the ding, the ping, the thing that we heard that caused us to then become distracted. So it's not the phone call itself that got you distract. It's not the email or the notification that distracted you. That was the external trigger, the thing in your environment that then led you to either traction or

distraction. So for example, if an alarm rings and it's your, you know, it's your wake up call, and then you get up and that's what you intended to do, well, then that was traction. That's what you wanted to do. If, you know, but if you hear that phone call and you intended to do some writing or, you know, work on something important to you, but then you take the phone call instead, that would be a distraction. So, so to flush out this model, you've got one side is traction, one side is distraction. What affects our actions is external triggers. The one other thing that affects our action and actually impacts our actions more than external triggers is what I call internal triggers.

And so this is one of the big takeaways for me from writing this book that I discovered is that actually most distractions start from within. And they start from within because of these internal triggers. Internal triggers are these uncomfortable feelings, these uncomfortable sensations that we look to satiate in some way. They can be physical sensations or psychological sensations. So for example, when you're feeling too hot, you take off a coat. When you're cold, you put a coat back on.

If you're hungry, you eat. If you're stuffed, you stop eating. So it's this process called homeostasis that causes us to do basically everything we do is done to satiate some kind of discomfort. Now, those are all physical discomfort. The same goes for emotional discomfort. If I'm feeling lonely, maybe I check Facebook to reconnect with my friend. If I'm feeling uncertain, I Google something. If I'm feeling lost, I check Google Maps.

If I'm feeling bored, I might check YouTube or the news or whatever. So the very first step to conquering distraction is identifying what is that internal trigger that prompts you towards that distraction. I got a letter from a fan the other week and said, oh, my daughter's addicted to YouTube. And I asked some, because I'd never heard of that. I mean, it makes total sense. I used to probably be addicted to TV if you're going by that definition of watching way too much as a kid. And I said, oh, well, what else is going on?

First, she was really gung-ho on going to college. And then she went through summer and she applied and she got into the schools that she wanted to go to. And then a couple of days before school started, she decided she didn't want to go. She backed out. Now she spent the whole time while all of her friends are gone for a semester in her room, locked in there, sleeping and watching YouTube. And I said, your daughter's not addicted to YouTube.

Your daughter has depression. Yeah. And I would investigate thoroughly what might have happened over the summer. Because a kid who's excited to go to college doesn't one day a week before school decide that they can't do it and they don't want to go and they're never going in and then lock themselves in the room. And I said, you know, this sounds pretty serious. You need to probably go to a therapist with your daughter because I am a little nervous that something really bad happened over the summer. Right. But the trigger for her watching YouTube isn't some kind of boredom.

In her case, most likely, she's trying to avoid some sort of pain, which is that her life isn't going the way it was supposed to go and that she has major letdown from being excited to go to school to some traumatic event that she's now trying to not maybe relive every five minutes. And so this is what differentiates a real addiction from just a bad habit. That addiction, you know, there are no addicts without a story. It doesn't exist. Every addict has some kind of pain that they are looking to escape from. All addictions are disassociated devices. They take us out of an uncomfortable reality. And you're exactly right.

Whether it's your cell phone or YouTube or gambling or booze, it's not just the substance. It's the person and the problem that they're trying to escape. So those are for these more intense problems. But for the vast majority of people, it's also these low-grade emotions. It is things like, you know, I'm feeling bored. or this thing I'm doing at work is hard and I'm looking for an escape so that I don't have to feel that immediate discomfort. So the first step is to recognize these internal triggers, to name them so that we can begin to do something about it. How do we start this inventory of internal triggers?

What we want to start doing is to start logging these sensations, right, so that when we experience one of these internal triggers, we want to identify what that internal trigger is. So first noted, even just writing down, I'm feeling bored and really want to go to. check YouTube right now can help us can help empower us by simply naming what that sensation is naming that internal trigger then what we can do is to start use these these techniques uh to help do what's called surfing the urge actually let me pause you right here so let's instead of youtube let's go with um someone who maybe eats junk food and is trying to break that habit because i might think well i'm hungry so i want to eat ice cream but i'm not really hungry so i want to eat ice cream. I'm actually just bored, so I want to eat ice cream. That's a fantastic example. I mean,

very rarely. And I've struggled with my weight on my whole life. I used to be actually clinically obese. I cannot even imagine that ever. No, as long as I don't even like thin and in shape. This is a terrific example because I, I mean, this is something that I struggle with literally every day and I probably will for the rest of my life. And so what I used to do was to either, you know, ignore the sensation entirely or to stuff it down. Right. Just don't feel what you feel, right? But instead I got curious about it.

And so this is what psychologists recommend is instead of trying not to feel what you're feeling, whether it is actual hunger or much more likely, it's the fear of being hungry. It's amazing how much we eat, not because we're hungry, but because we might be hungry in the future, right? Yeah, guilty of that. Guilty that. But I didn't discover that until I got curious about that sensation when I told myself, well, I want to eat because I'm hungry. And then I started surfing the urge, which is a really interesting technique. There's this technique called the 10-minute rule where I allow myself to indulge in anything that's tempting me, but in 10 minutes. I have to spend those 10 minutes getting curious about the sensation, not stuffing it down, not trying to ignore what I'm feeling, but to get curious around it.

So what I discover when I say, oh, I'm just hungry, I want that, is that, wait, am I really hungry? Or am I, as you said before? Is it boredom? Is it fear that I might be hungry? Hungry? Is it that I'm avoiding the fact that I need to do something else right now? I'm just trying to procrastinate by giving myself something to do. Right.

So getting to that deeper internal trigger of what's really driving my behavior and then using that 10-minute rule of, let me have just 10 minutes of curiosity. I'm just going to sit here and think for a few minutes about what's really going on. what we find is that that allows us the time to then let that urge satiate. Right. So we're not just thinking, what kind of ice cream am I going to eat? Right. I'm going to put chocolate sauce on it. It's going to be more like, well, wait a minute.

All right. If I'm really hungry, would I eat broccoli? Well, hell no. I don't want to eat broccoli. So I guess I'm not really hungry. Right. Am I bored? I don't know.

I'm watching a movie. How bored could I possibly be? I'm not afraid of being hungry. I just ate dinner. What actually is going on here? Never mind. I don't need this ice cream. That's right.

That's right. And you can use that same technique. whether it's trying to go on the web less while you're doing your work or whether it's, you know, checking your cell phone email while you're at dinner with friends, whatever it might be, you can use that same technique. The point is to come to grips with the fact that distraction starts from within. And that's really where we need to start. Because look, if there is that internal trigger that's unaddressed, if it's in there and you

haven't figured out how to cope with it in a healthy manner, it's going to manifest in a way you don't like, whether it's, you know, it's going to find a medium to distract you if you don't deal with it. So the internal triggers, unless we figure out what they are and deal with them, they're just going to camouflage themselves in different types of external triggers instead. You're going to say, that's it. I'm not checking my cell phone anymore. Well, then you're going to start watching TV or then you're going to start listening to

too many podcasts. Or then you're going to start reading, you know, too many newspapers. Easy. Podcasts. You've never listened to too many podcasts, as long as you're listening to this one. That's right. So that makes sense, right? because you're going, oh, well, all right, it's my phone that's the problem.

There's always these things coming up and notifications and all that. And that may be true because that is designed to suck you into the device. And we'll get to that. There's lots of stuff you can do there too. Well, okay, good. But you're right. Yeah, I'm going to then start. And I've seen this in myself too.

If I don't want to do something, like I've got to draft a legal document, which is funny because I'm an attorney, but I hate doing it. And you've got to do the research and stuff. And if it's for myself, it's not interesting. If it's for someone else, I'll research it all day. But I associate it with stress. I don't want to deal with it. So I might go, yeah, but first, I have this other thing on my to-do list.

And then it's actually been kind of good for me because I've been going to the gym. I'm outside. I'm caught up with my parents. I've studied tons of vocabulary for my Chinese. My flashcards are up to date. So this actually brings up a really great point of how do you know the difference between what is traction and distraction? Yeah. Because at the moment when you are doing this other thing, you think to yourself, oh, no, that's good.

It's productive, right? I should be doing this other thing. What if you say, like, you do? Study in Chinese. Yeah, sure. Studying Chinese. That sounds semi-productive, right? That's a good thing to do.

Yeah, no one's going to punish you. And I'm not going to punish myself because if I'm, if I spent the whole morning working out, calling my parents, studying Chinese and reading, it's not, it's hard to go. You lazy sack. But I would argue that it's still distraction. Of course it is. Because here's how you know the difference. The only way to know the difference. is because, you know, distraction is very tricky like that.

Distraction tricks you into thinking that in the moment it's what you should be doing. And it's not the action that's good or bad. Of course, studying Chinese, there's nothing wrong with studying Chinese. It's fantastic. There's nothing wrong with checking Facebook. There's nothing wrong with going on YouTube. The differentiating factor between what is traction and distraction is what did you intend to do with that period of time? The fact is, if we don't plan our day, someone else will.

and if we don't decide what is traction, distraction, then we spend our entire day distracted. That you can't call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. So, you know, when I help folks deal with distraction, a lot of times I hear this complaints about, like, how does anybody get anything done? You know, the world is so distracting today. Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and Twitter. I just can't concentrate on anything. And then I say, you know what?

Let me see what you plan to do today. Can I see your calendar app? And it's blank. And it's completely pristine. Blank. So you cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. And that means, and that leads us to the next step here, how do you do more acts of traction after you've dealt with the internal triggers? The answer to that is that you have to plan your day.

That's so interesting. I discovered this by accident completely a long time ago. I started working from home, which as you know is people go, that must be great. I'm thinking, oh, slow your roll. It is if you know what you're doing. But for the first few years, it was get up whenever. Oh, I should go to the gym. Yeah, I guess I'll go to the gym.

Cool. Come back. Eat. It's 2 p.m. Guess I'll do a little bit of work. Oh, man, it's already 430. I'm kind of tired. And I'm getting hungry again.

All right. Oh, well, I've friends stopped by. So, yeah, let's get a bite to eat. Wow, I only did two hours of work today. If you do that for a six months, you're out of business. Right. Right. And what happened, what I learned from a successful salesman was that he,

He planned his day the, I think it was the night before. So I went, oh, this works. And then I started planning my week the week before. And now I'm actually literally weeks or even months ahead. Yeah. Which is great. And people go, how do you live your life like that? You're so inflexible.

No, no, no. There's flex time built in there. Right. You can plan to veg out. You can plan a vacation. You can plan time to do social media. I mean, every day on my calendar, it says social media time. And it's no longer distraction because that's what I wanted to do.

that is an act of traction going on YouTube and Facebook and whatever, because that's exactly what I plan to do in that time. So the guilt goes away because it's in the calendar. And if you need to deprioritize something because, yeah, you did have an important conference call. It's got to get scheduled. Well, you can move the YouTube stuff and put it over that. And then you don't feel guilty because you didn't move your gym time.

Right. Or your family time. And look, the goal isn't to, you know, you're not a failure if you fall off track. If something takes you a little longer or, if you, you know, you did something that you didn't intend to do. But the point is to give yourself a template that if you walk into every week with a white calendar that's got nothing on it, you are bound to be distracted all day long, right? And the tricky part is it'll feel like you're doing productive stuff. Like, you'll check email way too much. Sure. Because, well, email is

work and it needs to get done at some point. Right. But it doesn't need to get done right now. What needs to get done right now is that focused work time, that hard stuff that you know you need to do right now, But you didn't feel like doing so you checked email instead because you felt that internal trigger of boredom and discomfort and whatever else you were feeling. Yeah, the planning of the day is it's the elusive obvious because people go, well, look, I only have two things to do tomorrow. They're both phone calls and they're both flexible. Why would I put that on my calendar? Right. And the reason is because if you don't, what you'll end up doing is waking up whenever, going to the gym, which is great.

And then spending a ton of time on social media or reading something. And it looks, like you said, it looks. feels like work and then you try to make the call and then the other person's out available and then suddenly it's 5 p.m. and you go, how in the hell did I screw up this day? So, so we can actually look at this in these three domains, like these three concentric circles that I like to think about where we spend our time. So in the center is you, right? And you've got to first figure out how how you want to spend time on yourself. So sleep, meditation, reading books, educating yourself, anything that working out, anything that it benefits you that you need to invest time into. So when you look at that calendar,

first put in the time for the things that are investments that you want to make in yourself. Now, I'm not telling you how much time to spend in yourself. I'm not even telling you what to do with that time. I don't care. That's up to you and your values. What I'm advising you to do is to schedule that time. If you want to get five hours of sleep out night and that's good for you, fine. That's okay. If that's what you want to be doing with your time. If that's all you need, I hate you. So, exactly. Yes, but the point is here, there's no values judgment here.

All I'm saying is that whatever it is that you want to spend time doing, first plan the you. Then the next concentric circle around the time that's spent for you is what I call the IOUs, is the important others that you owe. Right. So the time with family, friends, community groups, anything that other people expect you to spend time with them, that you owe them time, make time for that as well. So it's not, hey, you know, to your significant other, you know, we'll get dinner when we get it. No, no, no, no, we're going to have our dinners on Tuesday and Thursdays, and you're, you can expect me home to have dinner with, with my family on those nights, right? So you can coordinate with those stakeholders. And then the last concentric circle, and the reason I put on the outside is because you can't do this well unless you've done the other two well is your work life.

And so the work life also needs to be scheduled out so that you have the time to do the things that are most important to you. So today, many workers. find their entire day is spent reacting. And it's come at the expense of reflecting. And the fact is, it is very difficult to do the core job of a knowledge worker. A knowledge worker's job is defined as providing novel solutions to problems. That's what we do as knowledge workers. Oh, yeah. There's not a whole lot of that going on.

Because it's impossible to do that if all you're doing is answering emails and phone calls and your boss comes by your desk and now you've got this meeting you're pulled into. There's no time to reflect. And so the most important time in your professional career, the most important time in your day needs to be that reflective work time, that whatever amount of time it is that you're giving yourself, that focus work time to think, to strategize, to be with yourself to progress your career. Do you tend to do that in the morning? Personally, I like it in the morning. So I do it, you know, I have my two hours of writing time right after I come back from the gym. That's when I like to do this focus, reflective time.

But, you know, whatever suits your schedule, just put it on your calendar somewhere. Yeah, that makes sense. I feel like the morning's easiest place to do that because no one's calling you at 630 a. generally or 7.30. Yeah, whatever works for your particular schedule. Now, what are you doing during this time? What is reflecting really mean? Anything that requires concentration as opposed to collaboration.

Oh, okay. Good. Yeah. Now, you also need to plan time for collaboration, right? You need time to meet with your colleagues. I mean, you know, most of people's days is spent, you know, doing meetings. The problem is that we take meetings whenever we find time in our calendar. So we book time to collaborate, but we book no time to concentrate.

And I think that's a big detriment to your career, that you need time at your desk just to think, right, to produce that output. Now, what a lot of people do, which is really unfortunate, is that they do the thinking part of their job. They do the concentration part after work. Oh, right. So they bring it home. They bring it home. Yeah. Which, you know, if you live the kind of lifestyle and your values are recording, are, are,

allow you to do that, that's fine. What I found, I used to be a consultant, and what I found was that I was giving up something that was very important to me, and that was time with my family. You were the dad who was in front of the TV with the kids with the laptop out, like, oh, I'm spending time with my kids.

Yeah, I didn't have kids back then, but the same idea. I would come home, and it would come at the expense of people who I really owe time to. So the big lesson there, if you want more traction in your life, you have got to plan your day or somebody else will. We talked about messaging earlier and how what a huge part of the day, you know, this communication, all the communication we do today.

And part of why that's such a big time sync is that we get all these external triggers. So this kind of leads me to the third part of the model. Those external triggers we talked about earlier, that these messages that we're getting throughout the day, you know, the pings, the dings, the notifications, the emails, they tend to lead to distraction. And so we've got to find ways to control those. And there's a lot of things we can do around that as well. We know that about two-thirds of smartphone owners never adjust their notification settings. That's ridiculous. Well, to be fair, when we met, I was seated next to you at Mastermind Talks.

And I went, oh, yeah, great talk on all these notifications. Then it was like, Instagram, Instagram. On my phone? You were like, oh, yeah, those are on right now for some other reason. I've since changed that. Maybe I just installed Instagram at the time. That was a long time ago. Sure you did.

No, I did. I did. I swear to God, I did. I, you know, I go through, every time I install a new app, I go through the notification settings to make sure that I only get the notifications that are worthy of interrupting me during my focus work time. Is it really two-thirds of smartphone owners? Just might be bug you whenever that, because whenever an app's like, hey, we need to make sure that you know when you're able to log in and play this trivia game. I'm like, no, I will decide when I'm going to play this stupid freaking game. And this is, by the way, something I think that the Apple and Google can definitely make easier.

It is too hard to turn off notifications. That is something that I think these companies should help us do. But that's still no excuse, right? Take 10 minutes, go through your notification settings, and turn off everything that doesn't deserve the right to interrupt you throughout your day. Which is like, in my opinion, frankly, not much of anything. Right. I've got my, mine is default.

Do not disturb. But it allows favorites to call through. And I think there's a setting where it's like if someone calls three times in a row right in the phone. Right. I'll do that. And that was originally just because I was on air all the time. And then I just never turned it off.

Yeah. No, it's fantastic. And in the last 11 years or 10 years, however long smartphones have been around, because of course, naturally is a nerd, I got the first iPhone immediately. I've had zero emergencies that I haven't been able to get, that I've been unreachable before. Yeah. I've had zero.

The house is on fire type situations that I've had to worry about that I didn't know about in time. I've missed absolutely nothing that I can remember due to having notifications. and my phone on do not disturb. Yeah. And now there's a new feature in the new iOS that is do not disturb while driving. And so you can change that feature, though, so the way it works, you push one button. And with somebody emails you, I'm sorry, if somebody texts you or calls you, it instantly

sends them back a reply that says, hey, I'm driving right now. I can't reply. But if you text me or call me again, then your message will come through. Yeah, I think you can also write urgent in the text and it will then go ding, dang, and be like, hey, exactly. But you can also customize it. So mine doesn't say I'm driving. mind says, I'm indistractable right now. Oh, that's cool. So, you know, and people respect it.

People love it. Oh, that's a great idea. I'm going to do that too. It's got a little preloader now. Exactly. The one thing I do hear, though, from a lot of folks is that they tell me that, you know, that's all well and good. Yeah, I'm going to turn off my notification settings, but here's the problem. My job demands it of me. Yeah, I've got some crazy privilege being like, when I work at home in my underwear doing this podcast that you're listening to, I don't have emergencies. And people are like, Great, cool. Tell me who's going to fire you if you do miss one because I'll tell you who's going to fire me, which is like these seven guys that are the partners in my law firm. Exactly. So there's some solutions to this. This was an objection I heard about quite a bit. So there's a few things. And when I was doing the research for my book around how different industries manage distraction, I came across this group of nurses that really did this really inspirational study.

It turns out that you know what the third leading cause of death in the United States is? I'll give you the first. do. Number one is heart disease. Number two is cancer. What's number three? Car accidents? You'd think it'd be accidents or Alzheimer's or strokes. You know what beats all that? Oh no. It's going to be like medical malpractice. It's it's medication errors. Oh, that sucks. Prescription mistakes. People receiving the wrong pills or the wrong dosage of pills accounts for 400,000 injuries a year. That's that's horrible. horrible right so this group of nurses at UCSF wanted to discover what was going on and what they could do about it and the solution they came up with just floored me they reduced medication errors prescription errors by 88% and the solution was plastic vests plastic vests that these nurses wear when they are dosing out medication reduced it by 88%

how did the plastic vests work now right so the way the plastic vests work basically what they found was that these nurses were when they were dosing out medication they were constantly interrupted when they weren't wearing the vests right that doctor would say oh I need you to do this or another nurse would say oh we have to do this or a patient would say excuse me I need help with this and this task that required focused work that required concentration was being messed up right they weren't doing the job that they needed to do of dosing out these medications correctly so wearing a vest that says do not disturb me right now almost eliminated this problem completely in this study

that's I'm it's so it's so sad that millions of people have died and the solution was low tech right and we can learn from this in our own settings right so even if you're not a nurse practitioner what we need to learn from this is that we can use physical signs to stop these external triggers so the probably the number one external trigger for someone who works in an open office plan is other employees yeah right hey what's going on do what are you doing what you want to get a coffee or something and that stops you from doing this focus work time right or you see somebody you say hi So what we can start doing is taking lessons from these nurses and using little physical signs. Like literally putting a little sign on our computer that's, you know, you can go to my website and print it out for free that says I'm indistractable right now. I can't be bothered because I'm doing concentrated work. Some people put headphones on. I'm not crazy about headphones because a lot of people think, well, if you're wearing headphones, you're just listening to music. So they don't take the cue enough to know that that means don't bother me. So I think we need to use four open offices in particular.

If we can't shut our door, we've got to use these big fat physical signs that say, I cannot be bothered right now. Like I'm coding or whatever. Because I really thought you were going to say, the solution was a medical dispensing robot that measures things and can't be distracted because all it does is measure medication. It was a two-penny disposable plastic vest. 400,000 deaths a year. That's terrible.

And those deaths are caused by injuries, not just deaths. Injuries, okay. So those injuries are caused by people. prescribing and filling the wrong kinds of medication. This doesn't even count people who take two heart pills. This is in the hospital. Oh, wow. That's terrible.

Yeah. Because you hear it all the time, yeah, I took a heart pill or my dad took a heart pill and then he took another one because he forgot and then had it. No, no, this is not mistakes that people make to themselves. This is mistakes that doctors and nurse practitioners make because they're distracted. That's really disheartening. Yeah. So distraction in some industries really is a matter of life and death.

What's interesting is when I talked to the folks who did this study, they actually got the idea from pilots. So in the 1980s, there were all these accidents that the airlines were getting into because pilots were distracted during takeoff and landing, which is the most dangerous part of a flight. Who's distracting the pilot during takeoff and landing? You know, it would be, Captain, would you like your gin and tonic now or something? I don't know.

It's a great time for a drink. I'm about to land a plane. So the FAA instituted was called the Clean Cockpit Rule, which means that you cannot distract the pilots for any reason below 10,000. feet. And this is saved, right? And it saved countless lives. So we need to adapt some of these lessons in this age of distraction where we're constantly, you know, have all these external triggers that get us to do things we don't want to do. We should take some of these lessons to heart. So distraction existed before the internet just for the record, right? If that was happening in the 80s,

then in fact, okay, so that's a good lead into the last step, the fourth step about, you know, so we talked about this model one side is traction, one side is distraction. We've got internal triggers. we've got external triggers. The last thing that we can do is enter into pacts. That's how we stop distraction. So that, you know, we've taken care of the internal triggers. We've made traction more likely. We've blocked the external triggers.

The last thing we can do is to make distraction less likely. So when we're about to do the distraction, how can we block it before it happens? And one of the best things we can do is to enter into a commitment pack. And the idea of a commitment pack, you talk about how distraction is a very old problem. If you think about the story of Ulysses and the Odyssey, right, Ulysses is a, is sailing home and he's sailing his ship past the island of the sirens. And the sirens sing this beautiful song that anyone who hears crashes their ship onto the shore and they die. Well, Ulysses knows this.

And so he comes up with a plan. He makes everybody on his ship, all the sailors put beeswax in their ears so they can't hear the siren song. But he wants to hear the song. So he doesn't put beeswax in his ear. Why does he want to hear the song? Because it's supposed to be amazingly beautiful, right? He's tempted. Just wants to check it out.

He just wants to check it out. But he knows what's going to happen if he hears the song. He's going to tell his crew to sail towards the island. So he tells his crew to bind him to the mast of the ship. And he tells them no matter what I do, no matter what I say, don't let me go. And that's what they do. And he safely passes the ship through the island of the sirens. He doesn't get distracted.

He doesn't crash his ship. So what's the lesson here? The lesson here is that we can use these commitment pacts in our own life. There are all sorts of technologies today, most of them free, which help us enter into these Ulysses-style packs. So let me give you a few. I use this app called Forest every day. When I start writing, it's this silly little app that basically when I start my writing session, I tell it how much time I want to focus on what I'm doing without distraction. And if I pick up my phone during that period of time, this little virtual tree dies.

It's a stupid little virtual tree. It means nothing. which means you failed. Exactly. But it's enough of a little bit of a reminder there that, hey, that's not really what you wanted to do right now. You made this little commitment. Another thing that I do is that I'll have a buddy come over and we'll work together. But sometimes if that buddy isn't available, then I use a website called FocusMate, which I'm also an investor in.

I like the idea so much. FocusMade. Who needs friends? I've got to get a nap for this. It kind of. Remember chat roulette? Yeah, of course. Okay.

So this is just like ChatRollette? Yeah. Yeah. So this is just like ChatRelet. but for work and without all the nasty without a bunch of random dudes exactly yeah basically the way it works you sign up for a time and you say okay 830 in the morning i'm going to be at my desk i need to work for this time and you're matched with another person who has the same desire to get work done you very quickly in 30 seconds say hey how you doing my name's near here's what i'm working on they say

they tell you what they're working on and you get to work and for those 50 minutes you see them working on your screen and they see you they don't see what you're working on but just having that bit of a commitment with another person that says, okay, you're working and I'm working, we're both working at the same time, is enough to enter into that pact. That's so interesting. Is there sound? So if they're, I get a phone call or something? You can, but you can also mute it. So I tend to mute it. Yeah. But it's amazing how much that helps. And if you think about it, you know, today when so many people work from home or even in open offices, right, if you're working on your laptop, nobody knows whether you're checking ESPN or if you're actually, you know,

doing real work. Right? Yeah. But nobody cares. Nobody's looking. But the fact that like another human being said, okay, we're both going to work together during this period of time is incredibly effective. Because you just feel like such a schlep if you are screwing around. And more than anything, what I think it's really great at is that it guarantees that you're going to be in that chair at that time. Right. Because if you don't show up, they're going to give you a bad review that you're a no show. Oh. So it helps you actually, you know, enter into that commitment because you said you would be there.

What is it called again? It's called Focusmate. Focusmate. Okay. Focusmate.com. It's free. Another tool I use, I use this app called self. control on my on my Mac ironically titled self-control right yeah right which basically you hit one

button you tell how long you want to work for and it will not let you access any websites that you deem distracting right so it doesn't let you for me it doesn't let me get to email it doesn't let me get to to to facebook or youtube on any of the sites i don't need to get to when i just need to have focus writing time so these tools are out there to help us make these commitment packs i love the the focus made thing and people might go oh that's kind of dumb i can promise myself but you You can't. That's the point, right? Well, the idea is that you can use these tools in concert, right?

Focus on the internal triggers. What is it that's prompting the distraction in the first place? Schedule your day or somebody else will. Remove the external triggers. And as a last resort, make these packs. What common problems do you see with implementing these types of solutions? So, for example, with the earlier example that I gave was, well, I'm not really hungry, but I'm still want to eat ice cream. It's actually that I'm bored.

I'm mislabeling the internal trigger. Do we ever get the right answer? Are there sometimes where we just, we're so good at lying to ourselves that maybe I, maybe I never really find the internal trigger. Maybe I really convinced myself that I'm hungry. Well, two things, actually. Lack of self-compassion and a lack of belief in your own power. So let me talk about that self-compassion first, that studies have found that the more self-compassionate you are, the more likely you are to achieve your long-term goals.

And this is antithetical to, I think, how we are raised, that, you know, we think, No pain, no gain. Right. And that, you know, if you don't suffer, then you didn't work hard enough. And I don't think that's true, actually, for these type of things. That we need to be compassionate with ourselves. You know, Socrates and Plato, 2,500 years ago talked about Acresia, this nature of human beings to do things against their better interests. So, as you said, distraction is not new.

It is part of the human condition. I mean, the brain is built to be distracting. Right. Think about it. I mean, if you've ever tried to meditate, just. Thinking about nothing is really hard to do. It's like impossible. It's very difficult.

So the brain is constantly getting us off track. It's natural. You're born like that. There's nothing wrong with it. But we expect ourselves to, you know, have these willpower that would let us accomplish what we want to accomplish. Then we beat ourselves up when we don't or when we feel something we don't want to feel. And so the answer instead is self-compassion and is curiosity rather than beating ourselves up. And the second big mistake I see is that we think we're powerless.

There was a really good study done a few years ago that found that the number one determinant of whether an alcoholic would relapse was not the amount of physical dependency. It wasn't the amount of actual alcohol that they consumed. It wasn't the level of physical dependency. That didn't determine whether they would relapse after treatment. It was the belief in their own powerlessness. And I see this all the time. And this is what kind of scares me about this recent, all these recent stories about, you know, with headlines like technology is hijacking your brain and how, you know, technology is making you do things and how technology is so addictive. We got to put this stuff in perspective, right?

The fact is we're only powerless if we think we are. So the biggest mistake you can make is to think, well, there's nothing I can do. Right. This is going to suck me in one way or the other. So forget about it. Might as well play Warcraft all day. Yeah, there's this psychological phenomenon called the what the hell effect. Yes.

Where, you know, you start doing, well, you know, you break the seal and, oh, I ate one cookie. Well, might as well eat the whole bag. Right. And we see this with distraction as well, well, you know, I've only got, you know, 45 minutes until my next meeting. Might as well not start anything important. I'll, you know, puts around on YouTube. And then, you know, you just use up the entire time and you could have been doing something else. So it's important to realize we are not powerless.

That's the most important thing that we can do. I love this. This is super effective. And your first book was called. hooked. Wait, was that your first book or just the first one I read? Okay, it's called Hooked. The next book is called Indistractable. And that comes out when? Who knows? All right. Sounds good. I'm still writing. You're getting a sneak peek of the concepts in the book. I'll plan for that then. Yeah. It'll be out within the next year or so. Great. Thanks, Neer.

Thank you very much. Great big thank you to Neer. The book title will be Indistractable. It's not out yet, so don't worry about it. We'll have him back on the show closer to that date as well because there's a lot more where that came from. If you enjoyed this one, don't forget to thank NIR on Twitter. That'll all be linked up in the show notes for this episode, which can be found at jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. Also, tweet at me your number one takeaway from NIR. I'm also at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. And don't forget, if you want to learn how to apply everything you heard today from NIR, make sure you go grab the worksheets also in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com

slash podcast. We've got our Alexa skill if you want to hear a little bit of outtakes and or tidbits, juicy tidbits, in the daily briefing. You can go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash Alexa to install that. It'll install on your Amazon Echo, that thing that monitors everything you say, whether you like it or not. But I think it's a great way to get reminders of what's coming up and shows you haven't heard and maybe a little refresher from episodes that you've recently listened to already. This episode was produced and edited by Jason DeFilippo. Show notes are by Robert Fogarty. Booking Back Office and Last Minute Miracles by Jen Harbinger, and I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger.

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