Nir Eyal on Becoming Indistractable

free access to this helpful resource. Again, that's a free guide called the Top five reasons you can't seem to stick with a meditation practice at one you feed dot Net. Time management is pain management. Everything we do is about a desire to escape discomfort. Welcome to the one you feed throughout time. Great tinkers have recognized the importance of

the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true, And yet for many of us are thought don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life

worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Near a all author and previous lecture at Stanford Graduate School of Business and Hasso platin Or Institute of Design. His writing on technology, psychology and business appears in the Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, Psychology Today, and others. His new book is Indistractable, How to Control Your Attention

and Choose Your Life. I knear welcome to the show. Than its great to be here. I am excited to have you on. We're going to talk about your book Indistractable, How to Control your Attention and Choose your Life Here in a moment. But let's start the way we always do with a parable There is a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two

wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather's grandfather, which one wins, and the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work

that you do. I think the parable is really about the power of habits that we are some of our behaviors. I don't believe that people have fixed person renalities. I don't believe that there's an identity that we are stuck with from birth. That we are able to in fact change ourselves anyway we wish, and we are a some

product of our behaviors. We can we can change those behaviors if we are diligent about understanding why we do what we do and then take the steps to alter our path so that we can be the kind of people we want to be. And that's to me, what what feeding one wolf or the other is all about. It's about which behaviors do repeat versus which behaviors do you starve as a wonderful way to start off and a good summary for why we do what we do

here on the show. So your book is about being indistractable, how to control our attention and and choose our lives. And I love this idea that where our attention goes really controls, to a large extent, the quality of our life. What we pay attention to really directs our experience. And so I've got a spiritual habits course that I lead in. One of the key principles we talk about in the very beginning is the idea of what's my intention and

then what am I doing with my attention? And if you've got those two things sort of locked in, you can do so much. That's absolutely right. I mean, there's a reason we call it paying attention. There is a value there, there's a cost, and for most of us, we just give it away. Right, And how crazy is that? Right? If we think about our our stuff, our physical possessions. We put our uh you know, we put our money behind vaults inside banks, We put security systems in our homes,

alarms and our cars to protect our stuff. But when it comes to the one thing that everyone on earth has the same amount of our time, well, I don't care if you're Warren Buffet or Bill Gates or anyone. You have the same twenty four hours every day, and yet so many of us, unfortunately just give it away anybody who wants it. Whatever is in the news, whatever happened on Twitter, whatever our kids are, spouse, our boss, whoever wants to come on over, take as much as

you want. And I think what's going to happen, especially in this day and age where you know, distraction is so easy to find because it's so accessible in our pockets at all times with our our cell phones and other technologies, that if you are looking for a distraction, you will certainly find it. And so I think what's

going to happen. It's already happening. Is a real bifurcation between people who say to themselves, look, my time, my attention, my life is mine, and I will choose how I allocate my my time and attention, or the people who say, okay, you know whatever, I'll give it away to whoever wants it. And I think the people who can proudly proclaim that no, they are going to be in control of their time, intention in their life, those are the people who will

be able to say I am indistractable. And that's what this, this book, and hopefully this movement UH is really all about. It's about creating this identity of people who say, I am indistractable. I decide how I will spend my time and attention in my life, right, and that is the most important thing I often say with coaching clients. You know, the fundamental life skill is to be able to decide what's important and then give it your attention and your devotion.

So you start off by saying that one of the things that we really need to realize is that we tend to blame our distractability on the things that distract us. And and you know, we live in a world, as you said, it's very easy to be distracted. It's never been easier to be distracted. But you say that, you know where most people are blaming the devices, the technology, all of that, that the root cause that this is a lot deeper than that. Absolutely, yeah, that's absolutely right.

So you know, there's two types of approaches that I think most people take. We have what we call the blamers and the shamers. The blamers say, oh, you see, I got distracted because of my iPhone, because of the email, because of what's happening in the news, because oh I hear this all the time. This is my favorite the modern world these days, Well, here's the thing. Blaming those kind of things outside of your self is futile. You

you can't change that stuff. Right, These technologies aren't going away, and frankly we don't want them to. These are wonderful technologies, right, We use these companies make so much money because we like to use these products and services. So it's not going away. And frankly, there's this myth of you know, the good old days that somehow there were it was a day when the world was without trouble and wasn't

wasn't distracting and that and that's ridiculous. I mean, years before the iPhone complained about how distracting the world was, and the Greek he called it acrasia, the tendency that we have to do things against our better interest years ago. So this is clearly not a new problem. So being a blamer isn't very useful. It doesn't accomplish much. Being a shamer is the other extreme. A shamer they don't

blame things outside of themselves. They shame themselves. So a lot of people do this, right, They have a self image that says, ah, you see, I'm so lazy. Uh, here I go again, getting distracted that's so like me, I can't I have a short attention span, and uh, they shame themselves. And ironically, what we find is that shame is a negative emotion. Shame feels bad. And it turns out that the root cause of distraction is in fact,

uncomfortable sensations. That when we really look at why people do things against their better interest, To answer Plato's year old question of why we do things we know we shouldn't do or don't do the things we know we should, it's not a character flaw. It's that we just don't know how to regulate our emotions. You see, time management is pain management. That everything we do is about a

desire to escape discomfort. That most people have this notion that motivations about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Freud called this the pleasure principle. But in fact it's not true. Like a lot of things with Freud, it's not true that, in fact everything we do is not about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Neurologically speaking, it's only about the desire to escape discomfort. Everything you do, whether it's physiologically, if you feel cold,

the brain says, oh, this is uncomfortable. Put on a coat. If you feel hunger, payings, the brain says, this doesn't feel good, you should eat something. So everything we do physiologically is about the desire to escape discomfort, and the same holds true for our psychological sensations. So if we are feeling lonely, we check Facebook. Were uncertain, we google, If we're board, we watch the news. We check stock prices, sports scores, uh Pinterest, Twitter, or read at. All of

these tools cater to these uncomfortable sensations. So we have to address this fact that everything we do is about the desire to escape discomfort. So it's about which wolf you feed? Right? Do you feed this wolf by escaping that discomfort? Do you look for psychological escape from reality so that you don't have to deal with whatever it is is around you with too much booze, too much news, too much Facebook, too much foot ball, too much whatever

to take your mind off of those uncomfortable sensations. Or do you build the habit of harnessing those internal triggers to lead you towards traction rather than distraction. And so this is why we don't want to be blamers. We don't want to be shamers. We want to be what's called claimers. Claimers acknowledge that you cannot control your emotions. Okay, your urges are not in your control. Many people don't understand this fact that controlling your emotion is like trying

to hold in a sneeze or a cough. You cannot stop that urge. You can only act in response to it. So when you feel the urge to sneeze, do you sneeze all over everyone and get them sick. No, you take out a handkerchief and you sneeze into a tissue, as opposed to getting everyone else sick. And so the same thing happens with our emotional sensations. How do we respond to those internal triggers is incredibly important, and so you know, the word responsibility is about how we respond

to these these uncomfortable sensations. And so that's the really the first step to becoming indistractable. I don't want to go down this rabbit hole too far, but I read the book and I've heard you talk a couple of times about this idea that everything is a response to pain, right, that it's not seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. It's just a response to pain. And I just wanted to understand a little bit more about where you're pulling that idea

and that that research from. It's an interesting idea. I'm not sure I agree with it, but before I go disagreeing with something, I'd want to know how to learn more about it. Buddhism has been a big part of my life, and right, we talked about greed and aversion. Right, it's it's wanting, and it's wanting good things and not wanting bad things. But so I'm kind of curious that the neurological piece of that that you talk about. Yeah, it comes down to the neural wiring of the brain that,

in fact, pleasure is an abstraction from what is happening. Neurologically, you said it yourself, it's wanting, craving, desire, lusting. There's a reason we say love hurts because even the desire for good things, wanting to do something, even if it's the pursuit of pleasure is what you want, the wanting itself is psychologically destabilizing. That the way the brain gets us to act and do anything, even to pursue pleasure, is not about what feels good. It's about what felt good.

That's a very important point. How does that work? The way the dope allergic system works in the brain, the way our reward system works is by having a memory of a past experience that felt good, and then what the brain does is cause us this itch, this desire, this craving to feel that again. And that that doesn't mean that the way we should incentivize and motivate people is punishing them and with you know, pain, That's not

what I'm saying at all. That absolutely that we we know that the best motivators are these intrinsic motivations, these intrinsic rewards for something that is pleasurable. But that doesn't mean that the desire to go pursue that pleasurable sensation is itself a desire to escape the discomfort of wanting. That makes sense to me. That piece totally makes sense. That that wanting is an unpleasant sensation that we then seek to relieve, totally makes sense. So I love this

idea of time management is pain management, right? And what you're talking about here, essentially there's lots of different words for it. A term we've used on the show a lot is its emotional regulation. Right, It's this ability, as you said, to be able to Okay, I feel an unpleasant emotion and instead of letting that spin me off in a variety of directions, I'm going to allow that to be there. I'm going to cope with it, and then I'm going to act according to what I value

or what's important to me. So let's break down from your perspective, how do we do that? Yeah, So becoming indistractable is really about these four key steps and the first we talked about, which is about mastering these internal triggers. And that's the most important step because you know, whether it's uh, some technology today. You know it's Facebook today or iPhone today. Tomorrow it's gonna be something else. Fifty years ago it was the radio or television or comic books.

Every generation has these successive technologies that everybody has a moral panic around and says, it's melting our brain, it's super distracting. It's the same story every single generation. But the real cause is always what is going on inside of us. It's always about the desire to escape discomfort. And so there's some tactics. I talked about three big tactics in the book about what you can do to reimagine the trigger, reimagine the task, and reimagine your temperament.

So that's the first most important step. The next step involves differentiating between traction and distraction. So this is a really important point to to talk about just a bit, because in order to understand what is distraction, we have to understand what is the opposite of distraction. And so most people will say it's focused. The opposite of distraction is focused, but that's not exactly right. The opposite of distraction is not focused. The opposite of distraction is traction.

That in fact, both words come from the same Latin root, which means to pull, and they both end in the same six letters A C, T, I, O N that spells action. So traction is any action that pulls you towards what you want to do, things that you do with intent. The opposite of traction is distraction, anything that pulls you away from what you plan to do, any actions that you are doing without intent. So this is really important for two reasons. Number one, anything can become

a distraction. Okay, so this used to happen to me all the time before I wrote this book. You know, I would sit down at my desk and I'd say, Okay, now I'm gonna focus. I'm gonna finally get to work. I'm gonna stop procrastinating. I'm gonna do what I said I'm gonna do. Here I go, I'm gonna work on this big project. I'm gonna get so much done today. But first, let me check some email, right, let me

do that one thing I might to do list. That's kind of an easy thing to do to get some momentum, right. And what I didn't understand is that I was allowing distraction to trick me, to full fool me, to pull the wool over my eyes, and that I didn't realize that when I did that other thing, I was getting distracted. And so that's a much more pernicious form of distraction.

Because look, if you're playing candy Crush or watching YouTube video or you know, putsing around at your desk playing candy Crush at work, you know that that's not what you're supposed to be doing. You know that's a distraction. But if you check email, oh that feels productive, right, that's kind of worky. But we don't realize that when that happens distraction has tricked you into prioritizing the urgent at the expense of the important, and that is toxic

for your productivity and where you're well being. So anything can become a distraction, and conversely, anything can be traction. So I am not one of these chicken little anti tech people that say the sky is falling and this tech is so horrible and smelting our brain. I know too much history to believe that stuff, and too much research that says that is not true. It's not hijacking

your brain, it's not addicting everyone. That's an excuse, that's what the blamers say, because look, the fact of the matter is there is nothing wrong with using Facebook or YouTube, or watching the news or playing a video game, as long as you do it on your schedule, not on some media company's schedule. That's right. It's that idea of time that you enjoy rating is not wasted time. Time you played to waste is not wasted time. It's exactly right if you plan that time. It's traction. That's such

an important point. It's why when I'm doing coaching work with people like we don't start with emotional regulation. We start with a plan, because until you have the plan, you don't know, as you say so eloquently, you don't know are you being distracted or not. If you don't know what you plan to be doing, what you want to be doing in this moment, then you don't know if you're procrastinating or not. It's it's when you go, all right, I should be doing this, and then you

don't do it. Now we know, we've got a very clear example. Okay, distraction, right exactly. And so this is this is one of the key mantras of the book is that you can't call something a distraction unless you know what you are distracted from. You can't call something a distraction unless you know what you are distracted from.

Meaning if you don't plan out your day, you have no right to complain about getting distracted, because what did you get distracted from your You know, if you have a bunch of white space in your day, everything is a distraction. So what are you complaining about? And it's amazing to me. You know, two thirds of Americans don't keep any sort of a calendar, and I've always kept a calendar, but I was actually the one third of

people who do keep a calendar. But I didn't realize until I wrote this book that I was doing it wrong because I would interview people. I interviewed hundreds of people for this book over the past five years. And the people who were most distracted, you know, I've talked to them and they say, oh, you know that I'm so distracted these days. I can't seem to get what

I want to do done. And you know, did you hear what's happening in the news and Donald Trump said this, and Kim Kardashian that and all this stuff that they get distracted with. Uh. And then I would say, well, what did you plan to do with your time today? And they say, oh, let me show you. Look at my to do list, look at all this stuff I didn't get done today that I planned to do. And I said, no, no no, you didn't hear the question. I said, what did you plan to do with your time today?

Show me your calendar? Because what most people don't realize that that to do list is evil, right, that to do list keeps most people as slaves and and it's and people don't realize this. This This is a really important point. I call this the tyranny of the to do list. Because here's how most people use the to do list. They use it as a device to reinforce their identity of not being able to do what they say. They are using a method that reinforces their inability to do

what they say. And here's how it works. If you're anything like I was, I would keep it to do list, because you know, that's what the productivity gurus tells you. To get things done right, you have to keep it to do list. And day after day, about half of my to do list I wouldn't get done. I would just recycle that stuff from one day to the next the next, and it just wouldn't get done. And so what I was doing to myself is reinforcing a self image.

You know, when you see day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, Yep, another day went by and you didn't do what you said you were going to do. Loser. You start to believe that over time, you don't even realize the subconscious effects that it has

on you. And so instead of keeping it to do list, which is fine if it is a temporary repository of tasks, what most people do is they have a big, long to do list and then they do whatever they want, whenever they want, and they get very little done as opposed to the right way is to keep a time box calendar where immediately, if something is important enough to make it into your to do list, you put it on your schedule, because that is the only way we can live out our values. If you want to see

my values, look at my calendar. Why because I consciously sit down for fifteen minutes a week. It's all. It takes fifteen minutes. And I asked myself, how will I turn my values into time this week? The values that I have around taking care of myself, which include physical exercise, rest, education, meditation, prayer, whatever it is that are your values. I'm not telling you what to do, by the way, I'm telling you that whatever it is you want to do, you have

to make time for it, even if it's video games. Right. Here's the thing, here's an amazing thing. This is why the tierny of that to do list is so evil, because even when a productive person wants time to relax, Okay, I used to get home from work and so I just want to watch some Netflix, right, even when I was watching Netflix, or worse, even worse, playing with my daughter in the back of my mind. Oh, there's all those things that my to do list I didn't get

done yet. And let me tell you, a tiny percentage of people in the world have ever experienced the bliss that is watching a movie, playing with your kid, going out to dinner with your your spouse, or whatever it is, without the guilt of thinking in the back of your head, oh, I should be doing something else. That's such a beautiful feeling. It's so ironic that by keeping it to do list and not finishing what you said you would do, you're actually not even enjoying the leisure time you do give

to yourself. And so that's why that technique really does backfire. I would say it slightly differently, but I agree. I mean, for me, the to do list stands like you said, is it's a place to hold things until I can marry them to my calendar as quickly as possible. Yeah, this spot almost didn't get recorded. Well, it's not entirely true,

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money back guarantee. That's simply saved dot com slash Wolf to make sure they know that the one new feed Podcasts sent you. I start each day by sort of just writing out thirty minute intervals all day long, and then I look at, like, what's actually already on the calendar, So okay, that covers the things that I've already prioritized enough to put on. And then I look at the to do list and I go, okay, what's getting plugged

into those rest of those? And like you say, now I kind of know all day long, at any given moment what I'm doing and prioritized in there are all the things that are also important, like exercise and meditation and spending time with friends and and all of that.

And so I agree, and I think that like Friday nights for me is I know, Friday nights with unless something else comes up, Friday nights are like pizza and Netflix night, and I do it and I love it because I know it's exactly what I'm supposed to be doing. It's so freeing, right, in my calendar. I have time for social media. Every night, I have time on my calendar two puts around on Facebook and YouTube. And it's great, don't I love it? And there's nothing wrong with it.

And I took something that used to distract me all the time and I turned it into traction simply by deciding with intent when I will do it. This process is really life changing. In large part, I think a second order benefit is that when you have a physical manifestation, I don't tell people to do this every day. I advise most people can do it once a week and it literally takes a team minutes. In fact, I'll give you a link for the show notes where I built

this online tool to make it super easy. You don't have to buy anything or even give me your email. It's totally, you know, totally free. Anybody can use it. It's just basically a calendar template for the week. And what it does is when you do this, you have a physical manifestation of what your week will look like. And this is really powerful for a few reasons. One, you can know, for every minute of your day, what is traction, what is on your counter distraction? Anything else

is a distraction, So that's really important. Now you can at least identify the enemy. Right. Coil has this great quote where he says a mistake repeated more than once is a decision. And in many people, including myself, before I wrote this book, I made the decision essentially effectively, to be distracted all the time. Well, we can make the decision to be indistractable. But that starts by identifying.

Wait a minute, where did I get distracted? People feel distracted, but they don't actually actually identify what do they get distracted from in order to understand the distraction. So that's a really important point. The second point is that when you have this artifact of yep, this is my schedule for every minute of the day for the entire week, it sounds like a lot of work. Believe me, it's not. It's actually and it sounds like it's stifling people. Oh,

I want to have spontaneity. You can plan spontaneity as as as oxymoronic as that sounds. You can plan time and for that as well. You can reserve that time too. You know, go hang out with your kid. You know, every Saturday, I hang out with my kid for three hours. We don't know what we're gonna do. We might go to the park, we might go get some ice cream, we might go to the the museum. We don't know. But what I do know is what that I will not be on email, I will not be checking social media.

I will not be doing something. That's the distraction. That time is reserved for her. But the spontane is still there because the time is reserved. But the other point I want to make here is that when you have that artifact, you can take it to the important stakeholders in your life, like your boss. So when you go to your boss, you know, we've heard this, this ridiculous trope that gets repeated in every single productivity article I read. If you want to be more productive, you have to

learn how to say no, give me a break. You're gonna go to your boss, the person who cuts your checks, and you're gonna say no, you're not gonna be in business for very long. You're gonna fire right. You can't do that to your boss. That's stupid advice. Instead of saying no, what you want to do is to your boss to say no, how do you do that? You show them your schedule, You say, hey, look, boss, I made my schedule for the week. Here's how I will do all the all the things you asked me to

do this week. Now you see this other piece of paper, You see this other thing over here. I wrote down all the things you asked me to do that I don't seem to find time for because look at the week ahead, I don't you know there's no extra time left over. Can you help me reprioritize what's more important? Okay? Is it the task here that's on my calendar or should I rearrange the calendar in some way to make

time for another task you think is more important. First of all, your boss will worship the ground you walk on because most employers have no idea how you spend your time, and most of them assume you're slacking off in one way or the other. So when you show them here is how I plan to spend my time, they crave that visibility. Let me tell you, as a boss, a founder of two companies, I'm telling you from personal experience.

They want to know, but they don't want to ask you to do this because they don't want you to feel like you're being micromanaged. But when you voluntarily show them, hey, here's how I plan to spend my time. Help me reprioritize that visibility is a game changer. The same tool of that time box calendar can help you in your home life as well. You know, I used to fight with my wife all the time about domestic responsibilities that

you know. She would say, why why aren't you know, Look, the laundry needs to be done, or our daughter needs to be fed, or the house needs to be cleaned up, why aren't you doing it? And my response was always honey, if you want me to do something, why don't you just ask? Right? What I didn't realize is that when I sent crap like that, I was giving her yet another job to do, which is to be my babysitter essentially.

And so now we never have those fights anymore. By the way, this is this is a statistic that across the board, in dual income heterosexual relationships, women still take on an outside share of household responsibilities even when they have a job outside the home as well. So we are really slacking here, guys. Uh And and let me tell you a lot of it is not maliciousness. It's just ignorance. Right. I didn't know what I was supposed

to be doing. So what do we do? We sat down, we said, Okay, here's all the stuff that needs to get done, and now that stuff has time in my calendar. It's not just part of my to do list. I know every Saturday, these are my responsibilities to do today and when they get done because many household responsibilities have contingencies. Right, Uh, you know she can't cook lunch if I haven't cut the vegetables, things like that, and so I know when

I will do those things. And so by having this weekly scheduled sink, Okay, where are you going to be this day? Do you need the car? Who's taking our daughter? Things like that. It takes ten minutes, ten fifteen minutes a week. We do it every Sunday night, life changing.

We never have those fights anymore because of this simple practice. Yeah, it is a really powerful way to live, to be that intentional about your time and like you said, to make it visible, because I love that idea too, of taking it to your boss, because you're right, you can't be like, no, I'm not going to do that. The question, the great question is always like, help me understand how to prioritize all this? If I can't fit it all in, you know, instead of just not fitting it in or

that's a distraction. Boss, no thanks, I'm learning how to say no right break. So an important point here is, like you said, this sounds like it's overwhelming to do, like the amount of effort, and it sounds like it's control freaky. But I found that it's really not that much time and effort, and that you know, there's a lot of productivity systems out there that become way too much, and there's all this endless categorization and and all this stuff.

But but but this time boxing method is actually pretty straightforward and simple. It is it is, and most importantly, it's backed by really good research. I didn't invent time boxing. It's been around for a very long time, and in fact, thousands of studies, no joke, thousands of peer reviewed studies have found this is one of the most effective techniques

for doing what you said you're gonna do. The psychologist we call it making an implementation intention, which is just a fancy a way of saying doing planning, doing what you plan to do when you plan to do it. And that's really what what living with personal integrity is all about. And so that's a very simple thing. Anyone can do it to some degree. And if you say, oh my gosh, every minute of every day that sounds like too much, no problem. You know, becoming indistractable doesn't

mean you never get distracted. Becoming indistractable means you strive to do what you say you're going to do. And so the beauty of this methodology is that anyone, whenever they want, can implement these four tactics in small degrees. So we talked about the first one, mastering the internal triggers.

There's very simple techniques like the ten minute rule I talk about in the book is a wonderful way to disarm these internal triggers in order to help us stand track and not not lead towards distraction when we feel these uncomfortable emotional states. Anyone can learn that technique in just a few minutes. Making time for traction. Maybe you're not ready to book, you know, every minute of every day, seven days a week. How about you start with one weekend? Right?

And the question to ask yourself is how can I turn my values into time? Values are attributes of the person you want to become, So how could you maybe plan out one weekend and then maybe two weekend days, and then maybe one week day. And so what we're doing is progressively learning to use this muscle of getting

better at time blocking. Because remember, unlike the to do list method, which tends to reinforce a self image of someone who is not capable of doing what they said we're going to do, by time boxing, you're a winner at the end of every block of time. Because remember, the goal of time boxing is not to finish anything. Let me say that again. I know people are scratching their heads. What do you mean, not finish anything? How am I gonna get anything done? Here's the goal when

you use a time boxing technique. The only goal is to work on what you said you will work on for as long as you said you will work on it without distraction. That's it. Whether it's ten minutes, thirty minutes, an hour, two hours, doesn't matter, irrelevant. The point of this methodology is that when you finish that time block, you are reinforcing your identity as someone who follows through you do what you say you're going to do. That is what becoming indistractable is all about. You strove to

do what you said you were going to do. And you did it. That's why it's such a powerful technique. So that's what making time for traction is all about. The third technique is about hacking back the external triggers. And so the external triggers, and this is what most people tend to blame. It's the pings, the dings, the rings, all of these things in our outside environment. And it turns out this is actually the easiest and most tactical

section of the book. People complain about these technologies being so distracting. I can teach you in just a few minutes how to make your phone indistractable, how to make your computer indistractable. That's kindergarten stuff. What's a bigger source of distraction are things like the open floor plant office? Right, Eight of survey respondents in the modern American workplace said the number one source of distraction wasn't their phones, their computers,

their apps, It was other people. So I teach you how to hack back distraction in the workplace. How to hack back meetings, Holly, Molly, how much time do we spend in meetings that are just a pointless to distraction. I teach you how to hack back all of these external triggers in all these various contexts. And then finally, the last step, the line of last defense, is what we call preventing distraction with pacts, and this is something we do after we've implemented the other three tactics. So

a pack is what's called a pre commitment device. We in advance decide what we will or won't do with some kind of backstop, right, some kind of firewall that prevents us from getting distracted. So there's three types of packed. We have what's called an effort packed, where we put some kind of friction in between us and the distraction. Then you have a price packed where there's some kind of monetary disincentive, and then finally there's an identity pact

where who we are helps us stay on track. And so that's the that's the essence of these four strategies. Master internal triggers, make time for traction, hack back external triggers, and prevent distraction with packs. And when you know those

four strategies, the strategy is more important than tactics. Tactics are what we do, strategies why we do it, And so understanding those four strategies is really all you need because you can come up with your own tactics to best suit you, and and over time, implement more and more of these small tactics so you know first you you find ways to master internal triggers in a few small ways. You make time for traction, You hack back

a few of those external triggers. You create a few pre commitments to make sure that you prevent distraction with packs, and you add more and more and more of these over your lifetime. This isn't something you're ever done doing. It's about constantly reassessing and saying, wait a minute, now that I know why I got distracted, will I do

something about it? Or will I keep being a dummy and get distracted again and again and again, making the decision to become distracted righte a mistake repeated more than once the decision, or will I decide I am indistractable if I get distracted next time, I will make sure I won't get distracted by the same thing, because I will know what to do about it when the time comes.

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deeper that would be really helpful. And I do think that's the biggest challenge of the work that you're talking about. The rest of the stuff, I agree. I think a lot of it is is pretty straightforward. But I think it's learning to work with our uncomfortable emotions that is the work of a lifetime in a lot of cases. So maybe let's let's dive a little deeper into that particular space. Sure, So there's three big pillars on how to master these internal triggers. It's about reimagining the trigger,

reimagining the task, and reimagining our temperament. And it would take me a while to describe all three, but let me give you just one very tactical, practical technique that you can use that I mentioned earlier, called a ten minute rule. And this falls under the category of reimagining the internal trigger. And so this is really about finding new ways to deal with that discomfort in a way that leads us towards traction rather than distraction, by disarming

and understanding the source of that distraction. Because again, you know, procrastination distraction, it's not a character flaw, it's it's an emotional regulation problem. But once you learn these techniques, once you have the arrows in your quiver ready, these tools, uh, then you can apply them. So there's only three reasons we ever get distracted. Only three. Either it's an internal trigger,

an external trigger, or planning problem. That's it. So all we want to do is to make sure when that that distraction arises, do we know how to fix it for next time. And so let's say it's one of these internal triggers, which turned out. The reason it's the first step is because it's the vast majority of distractions. The vast majority of distractions come about when people feel bored or lonelier and decisive or fatigued, and so they use something to try and escape that discomfort. That's what

procrastination distraction always is about. So this ten minute rule is fantastic. The ten minute rule says, and this this is not something that that I made up. This comes from acceptance of commitment therapy. The ten minute rule says that you can give in to any distraction, any distraction, in just ten minutes. Now why is this so effective Because what we want to do for those ten minutes

is one of two things. You want to either surf the urge, meaning to be with that sensation, contemplate what is it that you are feeling for just ten minutes to write out that sensation, because remember, these emotions, they feel like they're gonna last forever in the moment, But it turns out that emotions are like waves. They crest and then they subside. So if you can ride that sensation for just a few minutes, most of the time, it will subside by the time that ten minutes are up.

So your choice that you have to make for those ten minutes, so you can give into that distraction, you can eat that piece of chocolate cake. You can go check email when you know you should be writing on that blog post or whatever it might be in just ten minutes of surfing the urge. So your choice is either surf the urge, sit with that sensation without judgment, right with curiosity, not with contempt. Don't be one of

those blamers and shamers. Instead, what you can do is either surf the urge or get back to the task at hand. And what you will find if you set that timer ten minutes actually is a long time. If you set that time, or you know, many times I'll take out my iPhone, I'll say send a time for ten minutes, I'll put down my phone and I'll just

sit with that sensation. And what we find is that nine times out of ten before that alarm rings, you will be back at that task at hand by just giving that sensation a little bit of time, a little bit of space before you react to escape that discomfort. And that of course, you know, you get better at this technique over time, so it becomes just as effective when you know you shouldn't eat something or drink something

or say something. You can use this technique with all kinds of impulses that you might have a tremendously useful one. It's it's sort of the twelve step program, you know, one day at a time, but shrunk way down, you know, because because that's the origin really of that, you know what like just not today, just not today, delay till tomorrow. You know. But it's but it's shrunk down and it's a it's a remarkably effective technique. Yeah, you know, not

just delay right exactly. And you know, I like to say the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. The antidote impulsiveness is for that. I think this is a really important concept because you know, If there's one thing that our species does better than any other animal in the face of the earth, it's that we can plan ahead. We can see into the future with greater fidelity than any

other creature that has ever roamed the earth. And we can use that ability right because we know that if you wait till the moment, right, if the chocolate cake is on its fork, you're gonna eat it. If the cigarette is lit in your hand, you're gonna smoke it. If you sleep next to your cell phone every night, you're gonna pick it up first thing in the morning. It's too late. They've won. They got you. So the antidote to that impulsive reaction is not willpower, it's not

self control. The people who I interviewed from a book, these masters of doing what they said they're going to do, the most indistractable people on earth. They don't have tremendous amounts of willpower. What they have is a system so that when the time arises, they don't need willpower and self control. Willpower and self control don't work, they collapse over time. Instead, it's about thinking in advance, what am I going to do? Okay, when I feel that internal trigger,

what is what becomes my habitual response. Is it to escape this discomfort, right, to look for a pacifier like a baby looks for their pacifier, to just take my mind off of that sensation. Or do I have a mature response to this that leads me towards traction rather than distraction? Yep? Okay, So the ten minute rule, that's a great one. What else and so there's other tactics as well in the book about reimagining the task itself?

This is where I I I look at this this freaky science around how we can learn to do what's called play anything. Uh and And basically what we can do is we can learn to make any task something that is play without necessary looking for enjoyment. It's interesting that play doesn't necessarily have to be fun, believe it or not. It just has to focus our attention. And so we look at this weird science around how people learn to love all kinds of mundane tasks. Right, we

all know that car buff that works on their car. Now, of course, you know you have to pay me to to be a mechanic, and yet these people love it. Why the barista who's obsessed with getting just the right brew, you know, you don't have to pay me a lot of money to work in the Starbucks. I wouldn't do that for free, and yet they're obsessed with it. I have another friend who's really into quilting. Oh my god, I can't even imagine how boring that is, and yet she loves it. Why how do you how do you

make a task something that that is playful? And I teach you exactly how to do that. There's some very simple tactics that we can use to learn how to play anything. And then, finally, the last of these three pillars is about reimagining our temperament. And there's a lot of junk science out there, or overturned science. I should say that people still believe. One of the most prevalent myths is this idea of what we call ego depletion.

Ego depletion says that we run out of willpower. And many, many people believe this, that they run out of willpower. And even if they don't know the term ego depletion, uh, they experienced something like this. So I used to come home from work and I would say, boy, I've had such a tough day. I feel quote unquote spent. Give me that pine a Ben Jerry's I have no willpower left. I'm gonna watch some Netflix and just veg out right.

I'm I'm spent. I got nothing left. And many people have this notion, consciously or subconsciously, that willpower is something you run out of. And there's actually some research that showed this was true about a decade ago. And uh, it turns out that the research that that, you know, the press loved it. There was a best selling book about this. But when other you know, in the social sciences, when a study sounds too good to be true, we

replicate the study, We try and run it again. And it turns out when other researchers tried to replicate this study, it turns out that ego depletion didn't exist. That the studies can't replicate except except with one group of people. There is one group of people who really do experience ego depletion. They really do run out of willpower like gas and a gas tank. Who is this group? It's people and only people who believe that willpower is a

limited resource. So if you believe that you are running out of will power, you were running out of self control, it becomes true. And so much of our beliefs these days are self limiting. Principally, this idea that technology is addicting you, it's hijacking your brains. Your kids won't stop playing video games because of these algorithms. If you believe it's true, it leads to what's called learned helplessness. And

that's exactly what the ego depletion study shows. So what we want to do is to reimagine our temperament, to realize that we are not a fixed self, that we can reimagine our capabilities and only keep the identities that serve us versus the identity that we are serving. Yep, such a such an important piece. This this idea of I'm the kind of person who and we were. We are attached to these ideas that that simply aren't true. They're just their their patterns of behavior that we have

over identified with. I often say, you know, it's not you, it's your approach. You know, it's this idea that we can be different with the proper tools and techniques and skill sets. Absolutely, that's exactly right. And I'm not saying that, you know, having an identity is a bad thing. In fact, one of the last chapters in the book is about how you can reshape your identity to make what's called an identity pact. So I want people to go from

these self limiting beliefs to self enhancing beliefs. Right. So, we know, for example, in the psychology of religion, that when someone calls themselves a devout, you know, observer of a particular faith, they become much more likely to stay in line. So when someone, for you know, when a devout Muslim says uh, you know, they don't ask themselves, oh, I wonder if I should have that gin and tonic. No,

that's forbidden. Devout Muslims do not drink alcohol. Even a vegetarian, you know, if you call yourself a vegetarian, you don't wake up in the morning and say, hmm, I wonder if I should have some bacon for breakfast. No, vegetarians don't eat meat. So we can use an identity to help us become indistractable. And that's exactly why I named the book what I did. Indistractable sounds like indestructible, and

we can use that oker. We can use that identity and teach others about this practice to help us stay in line. To help us do what we know we are capable of, to live the kind of life we know we deserve. That's a that's a great way to say it. And that idea of letting identity be something that serves you because they're not as fixed as we think we are. So if we're putting one on, if in essence, in some ways it's like a costume. We got to choose to put on the costumes that lead

us in the direction of what matters. If we're making it up, we gotta make up stories that are useful and life supporting. And and you know, being indistractable is a is a good one to to carry. Absolutely, yeah, I couldn't agree more. All right, Well, you and I are at the end of our time here, so thank you so much for taking the time to come on.

You and I are going to talk for just a couple of minutes in the post show conversation about some way, some simple techniques to hack back distractions from our phones and computers. So we'll do that in the post show conversation listeners. If you'd like access to that, as well as a mini episode each week and supporting the show, you can go to one you feed dot net slash join, Neior, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. I've really enjoyed this conversation. Oh my pleasure. Thank you

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