Episode 84: Becoming Indistractable — with Nir Eyal

Nir Eyal writes, consults and teaches about behavior design and habit formation — at the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. He has been dubbed “The Prophet of Habit-Forming Technology” by the MIT Technology Review, has founded two tech companies since 2003 and has taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford.

Nir is also the author of the bestselling book, “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products” and a brand new book called “Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.”

On this episode, you will hear Nir talk about:

• What really causes distraction (Hint: it’s not technology!)
• How we use distraction as a coping mechanism for escaping discomfort
• How planning and timeboxing can help you avoid distraction (and why to-do lists are a myth)
• How to become indistractable at work

For more information about Indistractable:

• Order the book and get bonus content at www.indistractable.com
• Download the free distraction guide and timeboxing schedule maker tool

You can also read more of Nir’s writing on his blog at www.nirandfar.com.

 

The full episode transcript is below.

Today on Beyond 6 Seconds,

The definition of becoming indistractable, is not that you never get distracted. That’s impossible. The idea is that now you know why you got distracted, and you can do something to prevent it in the future.

Welcome to Beyond 6 Seconds, the podcast but goes beyond the six seconds first impression to share the extraordinary stories and achievements of everyday people. I’m your host, Carolyn Kiel. On today’s episode, I’m speaking with Nir Eyal. Nir writes, consults and teaches about behavior design and habit formation, at the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. The MIT Technology Review dubbed Nir, the profit of habit forming technology. Nir has founded two tech companies since 2003, and has taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. He’s the author of the best selling book, “Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products,” and a brand new book called, “Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.” In addition to blogging at Nirandfar.com, Nir’s writing has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, TechCrunch and Psychology Today. Nir is also an active investor in habit forming technologies. Some of his past investments include EventBright, WorkLife, which has been acquired by Cisco, and Anchor.fm, acquired by Spotify. Nir, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks so much. Great to be here.

Yeah. So happy to have you here today. So the whole concept of habit forming technologies is so interesting, what got you interested in studying that?

My last company is at the intersection of gaming and advertising, and I kind of had this front row seat of these companies. Some of them got really big, some of them petered out. And there was this consistent narrative of the fact that the companies that succeeded were the ones that could build consumer habits. And so I wanted to figure out, you know, how do they do that? How do they change consumer behavior? So I began to study the gaming companies, the social media networks, and trying to figure out what it was about them that made them so good at changing people’s behaviors and forming new habits. And I looked for books on the topic, and I couldn’t find a book that taught me how to build habit forming products.

So I decided to write about it, and do my own research about it, and blogged about it for a while. Then got an email from an old professor of mine at Stanford who said, “Wow, I really liked your model, why don’t we teach a class together?” And then that turned into a class at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford, and then later, I moved over to the Design School and taught over there for many years. That’s kind of where this research area start, at least, I mean, the fascination around how products can change behavior has been in my life for quite a while. As a kid, I was clinically obese. And I remember my mom taking me to fat camp, and the doctor and, that whole nine yards and, you know, I remember the doctor saying, okay, here’s the chart and look, this is where normal weight is. This is overweight, and here’s your son. He’s obese. I remember that whole experience. I think that was a very, it was a difficult time , of course, as a kid, you know, now I’m no longer obese. But I think it was that experience of feeling like, food was controlling me. And then I lacked agency over it. It was a really defining experience. And I think it kind of fascinated me how products can influence our behaviors. I think that’s carried over into my life today, where what I study is really about the intersection of psychology, technology and business. It’s primarily focused on how technology can change our behavior, just as you know, food change my behavior. One point in my life.

Yeah, I mean, it’s so interesting to think about that in terms of products. And, I think certainly a lot of us had thought about advertising in the media, for example, as having an impact and that’s sort of the whole motivation behind advertising and commercials. They want you to get you to buy so they want to change that buying behavior of the consumer. But I feel like the thought around products changing our behavior is really, something relatively new. Maybe, now recently with the whole, rise of social media and people are starting to become aware of how some of the social media companies, for example, might be manipulating what we see and what we feel, by showing us with different algorithms, different types of information. But, I feel like until recently, maybe people weren’t thinking as much about the importance of building products that, essentially get us hooked, which was basically the subject of your first book. I understand. So right?

Just to be clear, I never wrote “Hooked”, for the social media companies, the gaming companies that and the advertisers, they’ve known these techniques for years. They are the case studies that I show how all of us can do this for good, right? Why should they have a monopoly on using technology to change behavior? The reason I wrote “Hooked” was not to get people nefariously hooked, the idea was to get people hooked to healthy habits. I didn’t call the book how to build addictive products. The book is called “How To Build Habit Forming Products,” for a very specific reason. You know addictions are these persistent compulsive dependencies that harm the user? However, habits we have good habits, as well as bad habits. And I think that we can use technology to help us build these healthy habits. And the past five years since Hooked was published exactly what’s happened. So companies like Kahoot, kids hooked to learning in the classroom, Fit Body gets people hooked to exercising in the gym. Companies like Pantry labs, get people hooked to healthy food. So the idea behind my work is that we can use technology to help people build healthy habits in our lives as well as, I think I’m a pretty good person to provide an insider’s perspective because I built this type of technology for good. I can also tell you how it’s used for ill. And, through that knowledge, you know, I’m not one of these academics who doesn’t have a social media account. I use this stuff every single day, and I love it! And I’m here to tell people that as powerful as this stuff is, I think we are irrationally freaking out right now. I think there is a moral panic around technology that is helping no one What we hear the rhetoric these days is that technology is taking over our brains. And it’s manipulative, that’s hijacking us, that it’s addictive. And the fact is that there’s so much nuance here that is lost, and so much science that is thrown out the window. And it turns out, it’s actually hurting us by thinking this. What it leads to, it leads to what’s called learned helplessness, that when we tell people that it’s addictive, that it’s hijacking your brain, right hijacked? And that’s what they did to us on 911. This isn’t what happens on your phone, for God’s sakes, when we use Candy Crush or Facebook. So we have to start keeping this stuff in perspective, because what’s happening is, this narrative is so compelling. And the media loves it so much because they are Facebook’s competitor, let’s admit it, right. Yeah. When you click on a headline, whether it’s from the Atlantic or from the New York Times, and I published in these publications, they’re wonderful publications. They’re in the same business. And a headline that tells you technology is hijacking your brain and it’s addictiv, gets a lot more clicks. Then one that says actually, guess what, we can do something about this. And it’s not that hard. Okay? And so I don’t want the person who wants a 32nd sound bite of gloom and doom and moral hysteria. I want the person who’s willing to think this through, look at the science and realize that there is way more power in each and every one of us than we might otherwise know.

Right. And that’s an important point, I think. You know, I agree that there’s this general freakout about technology and how it’s ruining our lives, ruining our children’s development and all that. And certainly there’s a time and a place for our different gadgets and screen time and all different types of activities. But it’s true. It sounds like you’ve studied the science to really see what’s behind it and that we actually can have some control over it. And I understand that’s what you talk about in “Indistractable,” is sort of breaking down what’s really going on with when we use technology, and we sort of feel like we’re addicted to it, but we’re really not. You give a lot of great guidance in terms of how to take that control back.

Absolutely. Yeah, and sometimes saying that technology isn’t addictive. This is where the nuance is very, very important. Technology is addictive. And so it was alcohol. But not everyone who drinks is an alcoholic. Sex can be addictive, but not everyone who has sex is a sex addict. Gambling is very addictive, but not everyone who plays poker is a problem gambler. And so somehow we use the term so loosely and we have to remember that addiction is a pathology. It does not apply to everyone, as many headlines we’ve seen saying this, you know, and it sells a lot of books to generate this fear and loathing. It’s just not true. And so what we need to do is start being very careful about the words we use because when we call something an addiction, there an addiction implies a pusher a dealer, someone doing it to us, whereas when we call it what it really is, a distraction, or perhaps overuse. Wait a minute, now that’s something we can do something about, uh, and that’s a bitter pill for a lot of folks to swallow, but that is the truth. That’s what’s going on. I want that to be an empowering message. I want that to be something that people can look at and say, wait a minute, actually, this isn’t all that hard. And the reason I think this is so important to understand, is that, you know, as much as we think that we are saddled with all these modern problems, like distraction, distraction happens to be one of the oldest ailments that we have in recorded history. In fact, Plato talked about 2500 years ago, he talked about a cacio. This what he called this tendency for people to do things against their better interests. I mean, that really is distraction. And he talked about this 2500 years ago, right? 2500 years before the iPhone before Facebook, before Twitter, and all these things that we think are so distracting. People were saying how distracting the world is. And so if this is not a new problem, then I think that gives us a lot of hope. Because what we’re in right now is a transitory period that when humans adopt a new technology, that technology often comes when it’s on this scale and magnitude, it often comes with downsides, Paul Verello?, of the philosopher said, When you invent the ship, you invent the ship wreck. Yeah. So of course, there’s lots of bad things with technology and not and I’m not arguing with a lot of things. I think we need to held technology companies to task for, election meddling data, incursion, monopoly status. Yes, those are problems. What is not a problem, is that these companies are building products so good, we want to use them all the time. We need to stop complaining about that. That’s not a problem. That’s progress. And so what I want to help folks do is to get the best of these technologies without letting the technologies get the best of us, by realizing that distraction, is not about the pings and dings and rings. Distraction starts from within. That fundamentally the source of distraction is the source of all human behavior, which is to escape an uncomfortable sensation. Everything we do, is about escaping discomfort. Now, folk psychology will tell you different. Most people tell you that wait, isn’t it about carrots and sticks, right? That’s what we always heard, carrots and sticks, pain and pleasure. No, neurologically speaking, it’s pain all the way down. The way the brain gets us to act, this is called the homeostatic response, is by making us feel discomfort that prompts the body to take action. So when you think about it, physiologically, if you feel cold, you put on a coat. If you feel hot that’s not comfortable. You take it off, when you feel hunger pangs you eat. And when you’re stuck, though, that doesn’t feel good, you stop eating. And so those are physiological responses. And it turns out, that psychologically, the same thing is going on. When we feel bored. We check Reddit or YouTube, when we’re lonely, we check Facebook, and we’re uncertain we Google. And so we have to understand that are the sources of our distractions are never the proximal causes. It’s never the tool in our hand. It’s what’s going on inside of us. And the solution where we really need to start, is to understand how to master these internal triggers either, by fixing the source of discomfort, or by learning tactics to cope with it. And so that’s really the first step to becoming indistractable.

Yeah, that’s interesting, and that really does put the onus and the responsibility back on people. And you know, just because we have the ability to be distracted relatively easily, it seems like it’s built into our wiring, but we also have the ability to focus. And it’s within our power to do that.

Righ,t as long as we acknowledge that if we don’t have mechanisms to deal with discomfort, right, if we keep using our devices and distractions as emotional pacifiers, then we will habituate to always turning to these distractions to satiate our pain. That’s the cause and effect relationship that our brain learns. That’s how it forms habits, habits are nothing more than learned behaviors. And so when we reinforce those learned behaviors by constantly reaching for you know our pacifier, whether it’s email or work, or the bottle, or whatever it is that we’re using to escape discomfort. Those habits become ingrained and can sometimes lead towards distraction, or the opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction is traction. And this is a really important point because both traction and distraction come from the same Latin root tahara, which means to pull. And they both end in the same six letter word. ACTION, it spells action. So traction is any action that pulls you towards what you want to do in life, anything that you plan to do with intent. The opposite of traction is dis traction, any action that pulls you away from what you want to do things that you don’t plan to do with intent. So the idea here, when you understand the difference between traction distraction, this makes a lot of things fall into place in our lives and helps us gain control over our attention and what we do every day. By understanding that look, if you plan to do something, whatever it is, and you do that with intent, its traction. So for example, in my life, instead of checking social media all day long or checking email because I was stressed, anxious, fatigued, whatever it might be, I was using this as an emotional pacification device. Now I have it scheduled in my day, right? I turned a distraction into traction by making it something that I do with intent. And so the second step to becoming an distractible is about simply planning your day. Turns out the two thirds of people in America don’t keep any sort of calendar. Well, that’s like leaving $100 bill in the middle of Manhattan street corner, and then expecting it to stay there. If you don’t plan your day. Somebody’s gonna plan it for you. Somebody’s going to take away that hundred dollar bill if you just left it on the street. So many of us, we just leave our calendars wide open. If we leave, our calendars are wide open, somebody is going to eat up that time, right? It’s going to be something that happened in the news or Facebook or email or your boss or your kids. Something is going to eat up that time if you don’t decide in advance what you want to do with it. So the lesson I want folks to remember, is that you cannot call something a distraction, unless you know what it distracted you from. You can’t call them a distraction unless you know what it is distracting you from, which means we have to plan out our days. And when we do this, this is life changing. I know, very few things in my life have had such a positive impact on my work life and my home life as this practice of timeboxing, where basically what you’re doing is you’re making an ideal schedule for your week. And the reason you do this is because, finally, when you do this, you can look at that calendar and understand what is traction, what is distraction, traction is anything you plan to do, whether that’s I plan, time to meditate, watch TV, watch Netflix, pray, you know, take a walk, doesn’t matter. Those are acts of traction, anything that is not that is a distraction. What this also allows you to do is to sync your schedule. So my wife and I would constantly have fights because of household responsibilities that we’re not done. And it turns out this is a very common problem and dual income heterosexual households, women statistically take on a disproportionate share of household admin. And I didn’t understand that I was like, you know, honey, you just tell me what to do if I’m not doing something, just tell me what to do. What I didn’t realize is that by me asking her, to tell me what to do, that was itself work, right?

Yeah, it’s I didn’t realize that. It’s funny when I give this talk, and I relay that story in front of a crowd. I see lots of women’s heads nodding, no men understand what I’m talking. And so we totally solve this problem. We don’t have these fights anymore. Because now we keep a timebox calendar that has all of my household responsibilities, all the admin duties I have to do. And we review that just takes 15 minutes a week. And it absolutely revolutionized my home life, my work life. It’s a very, very important tactic that I show you how to do step by step.

And to be clear, this is not the same as making a to do checklist like so many of us do.

No, I want people to know what I call the myth of the to do list. The myth the to do list, and this is kind of kind of what we’ve heard promoted, productivities miracles, that if you just put stuff on a to do list, it’ll magically get done. And we know this is not true. I used to have a to do list. And about half of that to do list got recycled from the next day, to the next day, to the next day. Why does that happen? It happens because we don’t plan the input. The problem is we’re planning the output. And so we need to stop doing that. What we need to plan is the input first and foremost. It’s like if you went to a baker, and you said, Hey, I need 100 loaves of bread. Well, the baker would say, Okay, well, where’s the yeast? Where’s the flour? Where’s the sugar, where’s the salt? I need all these ingredients to make the output. But when it comes to knowledge workers, so many of us we just put what we want to get done on a to do list without figuring out the input. The one input that goes into doing knowledge work is our time. And so that’s why we have to plan the input, not the output, because there are too many exogenous factors to the output. If you say today I’m going to finish my presentation. Well, you got to get the numbers from Jimmy in accounting, and you got to get the graphics from Joanne, and you got to do…, there’s all these exogenous factors. So don’t plan the output. Don’t say every day. I’m going to finish that presentation. I’m going to finish that big job. I’m going to do that thing I said, I’m going to do, No, just plan the time. I am going to spend one hour being indistractable working on this task. That’s all you can do. You know, I had this experience in terms of falling asleep. For a while, I had some pretty bad insomnia, and I said, I’m planning the time right? Didn’t I? I said, I’m going to get eight hours of sleep. So here I go, I’m in bed. And every night at 3am I would wake up, and I wouldn’t be asleep, but didn’t I plan the time, right? It was on my to do list, to do it? And so what I was doing was playing the output, get eight hours of sleep but here’s the thing my body wasn’t cooperating. And the same thing by the way can happen at your desk. You know, I I can’t sit down and say today, I’m going to write a chapter in a New York Times bestselling book. I can’t do that. I don’t know if the if a good it is going to come to Me too. You know, I wrote probably five times as many words as were actually published, were words I threw out, I didn’t put in the book. So you can’t necessarily plan the output, today I’m going to get that great idea, of what you can plan is that my butt will be in this chair, and I will give myself the opportunity to do an hour and a half of writing, in an indistractable manner. So what did I do with my sleep? So every night I wake up at 3 am, and I would start getting stressed about this, right? I need to get my eight hours of sleep. And if I don’t get sleep, I’m not going to be at my best tomorrow. And if I’m not at my best tomorrow, then I’m not gonna, it’s gonna be a wasted day. And if I have to give a talk I might embarrass… And it turns out the number one source of insomnia is rumination about insomnia.

Yeah, now you’re wide awake.

So what do you do? Well, if you realize that your only job is to give yourself the opportunity to do the output, meaning you’re you just plan the input. And you don’t worry so much about the output. Just plan the input, not the output. You’d be begin to relax. And so here’s what I would say to myself, at 3 am, when I found myself awake, I would tell myself this simple mantra, the body gets what the body needs. And when I started repeating that, the body gets what the body needs. And I stopped stressing out about the fact that I was awake. I started to relax, and you know, where the story is headed. Right? That once I started to relax, I fell back asleep. And the same goes when it comes to creative tasks, right? When I have to do that work, and I have to sit down at my desk and focus, instead of stressing about, Oh, is this going to be any good? And is it gonna make into the book? And is a book going to do well, and, am I going to do a good job at that presentation? Whatever it might be? No, you just plan the time because what most people do, they get paralyzed by the fear, or the perfectionism, or some kind of other internal trigger, some kind of uncomfortable emotional state, that they don’t give themselves, the time at their desk to do the focused work and so they self sabotage. So the one thing you can control is your time, and that is an absolute critical ingredient to doing your best work and living your best life.

That’s such a great point. Yeah, it resonates with me, especially because I have to do some writing this weekend. And I’m already starting to stress about like, you know, when I sit down to write and 10 minutes later, it’s like, oh, I want to check my phone. I gotta get back, gotta focus. So, yeah, I think time boxing and just trying to, set that time aside and not stress about am I going to write an awesome piece of work? And you know, it’s literally just trying to get that traction, as you said.

Right, right. I feel this every day when I sit down to write, writing is hard. And it’s full of these internal triggers, right? Is this going to be good enough? It’s, you know, you’re stressed, you’re anxious, maybe you’re fatigued, all kinds of uncomfortable emotional states. And so the first step has to be, how do you cope with that discomfort? Do you have a habit of, Oh, let me just google this one thing, or let me just check that quick email. Or let me just, you know, I want to see what’s going on in the news real quick. I just checked Twitter for five seconds, whatever it might be. Is that your habit? Or do you have a better habit to cope with that discomfort in a healthier manner? And so I tell folks step by step, I use all kinds of techniques, from acceptance of Commitment Therapy, to reimagine the task, reimagining your temperament, all of these techniques that we can use to make sure that we are dealing with those internal triggers in a healthier manner that leads us towards traction as opposed to distraction. Then of course, we have to plan the time. And then the third step, is that we have to make sure we hack back the external triggers. So this is more the common sense stuff around the pings, the dings, the rings, all of these things, that can prompt you towards distraction as opposed to traction. So we want to get rid of that stuff, right? Some of this is kind of common sense. I devote a little bit of time to this, but not very much, you know, the conventional advice is, you know, turn off your notifications, delete your these apps that don’t serve you. Yes, you should do that. But this is common sense. Of course, you should that’s kindergarten. But what what folks don’t realize is that these external triggers are all around us in ways that they don’t appreciate. For example, the open floorplan office, huge source of distraction. So what do you do about that? So in every Copy of “Indistractable,” there is a cardstock screen sign, that you pull out of the book, you fold it into thirds, and you put it on your computer monitor. And this screen sign in bright red says, I’m indistractable, please come back later. And so what you’re doing is you’re hacking back the external trigger of other people potentially distracting you. So I tell you how to hack back the open floor plan office, how to hack back meetings, oh, my God, what a tremendous waste of time meetings can be that don’t need to be called. And it turns out that many times, the reason they are called is because, not because it’s to get anything done. Because somebody wants to hear themselves think out loud. Huge waste of time. Emails, oh my god. You know, there’s studies that found that between email and meetings, the average knowledge worker only has about an hour and a half to do everything else they have to do. An hour and a half. It’s all we get. And so where do we do focus work? You know, where we do it. We do it at home. We do it on nights and weekends. And our health pays the price our relationships pay the price, our families pay the price.

So for knowledge workers and people who are working, you know, doing the corporate job or whatever, I could imagine some people saying like, you know, this concept of time boxing is all you know, that’s all well and good. But you know, I don’t have control over all of my time, my boss could just come in and ask me to do something or some emergency could come up in the morning, and I have to deal with that. So what’s, what’s the point of trying to schedule out my time? What would you say to that?

Yeah, so here’s the thing. There’s a central trust compact, that is made between employers and employees. And that trust compact is, I will give you my time, and you will give me money.

Now, if you want to work 60/80 hours a week, go for it, you should know what kind of profession you’re getting into. So if you want to work on Wall Street, you just need to be prepared for that. If you want to start a tech startup, that’s the name of the game. Okay. So if you have allergies, you may not want to be a forest ranger. That’s kind of the environment. So you need to know what you’re getting into. I have no problem with that. What I have a problem with, is the bait and switch. Is when we take a job with an employer. We think we’re working 40 hours a week, except for the fact that we need to do another 20/30 hours on nights and weekends. That’s a lie, okay, we’re not getting paid more. So what are we doing all this extra work for? Now, if you know that going in, well, you knew the condition, and that’s fair. But this bait and switch happens all the time. And it leads to stress anxiety, it actually causes depression disorder, right? If there’s a certain work environment where you have high expectations and low control over your time, studies have found that this is the toxic environment that literally create, drives us crazy, creates anxiety and depression disorder. This is the studies of Stanchfield and Candy. And so that work condition leads to higher churn, you know, and these health problems, these mental health issues as well. So what we have to do, by timeboxing, by having a calendar that we can then create for ourselves, and share with our bosses. Here’s the magic that this practice this works. We don’t keep this secret, we have to do what’s called a schedule sync. A schedule sync looks like this. You sit down for 15 minutes with your boss. And you say, Hey, here’s all the things you asked me to do this week, here are all my priorities, right? Here’s all the things that are on my to do list for you. I put them in my calendar, you can see where everything goes for the week. Here’s what I don’t have time for. Help me figure out what not to do. If these things are still important that you want me to do this week? Where does that go in my schedule? And you would be amazed how just doing that, you know, what tends to happen in the research that I did over the past five years. Almost every time you do this, there will be a realignment of priorities where people, say actually, you know what, what you put there, is actually not that important. Can you move that to next week? Let’s do this. This is more important this week. So that’s a huge win right there. And then the second thing is that you’re not spending time outside of work, because you have your time planned with your colleagues or with your boss, to know how you will be spending your time. And so this works wonders, and now, of course, if there is, you know, an emergency, a real emergency, of course, you can pause that plan. But here’s the thing. This isn’t about never getting distracted, becoming indistracted. It’s a made up word, I made up the word indistractable. It’s not in the dictionary, the definition of becoming indistractable, is not you never get distracted. That’s impossible. The idea is that now you know why you got distracted. You can do something to prevent it in the future. So you know, that old quote around, you know, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again, and again, expecting different results, right? So many of us, we are distracted by the same crap every day. And we just live with it. We don’t do anything about it. So the idea here, is that we can use these tactics to identify why we got distracted. There is only three reasons for every distraction, an internal trigger, an external trigger, or a planning problem. So over time, we’re iterating, we’re improving our calendar from week to week to make it easier to follow, and therefore, to become more productive. So that schedule sync is critical. Now I will say there are some bosses and some work environments that you can’t do this in. Those are the places that people quit. Right? Those are the toxic work environments that people leave. Now half of the book is about things that you can do yourself. And the other half of the book is about environments that we live in. Right? So it’s about how do you raise indistractable kids? How do you create an indistractable workplace? How do you have indistractable relationships? So context. We’re, we’re around other people, because look, the fact is, if your boss calls you on a Friday night at 8pm, and says, I need you to work on this project right now. Whose fault, is it that the phone that the boss used to call you? Or is it the fact that you have a crappy boss who doesn’t respect your time? It’s clearly the boss. It’s not the telephone that the boss used to call you. And nor is it emails fault or slacks fault or any of these technology tools. These are the proximal causes, not the root causes. But what I do, is I show you how to create this culture, where people respect each other’s time. And so that’s really important because you’re absolutely right. If you know I can tell you exactly how to be indistractable, you can use every single one of these techniques on yourself. But if you work in an environment where the boss doesn’t respect your time, well, that’s going to be a big problem. What I want to disavow people have this notion, is that the technology is the cause of the problem. Because, when I did the five years of research around the book, the number one most distracting technology was email. Number two, what people told me was Slack or you know, some kind of group chat, app, and Slack came up. The largest group chat app is Slack. And people complained about it all the time and is saying, you know, that’s what tethers me to work, I can’t get it done. I’m constantly on Slack, a lot of hate towards Slack. So I actually went to paste like a visit. And you would expect if, it’s the technology that’s distracting people, well, then nobody uses Slack more than people who work at Slack. So you would expect people at Slack to be the most destructive people on earth. But that’s not at all what I found. Because Slack doesn’t have a problem with distraction. That in fact, if you use Slack on nights and weekends, and you work at Slack, you’re reprimanded, that is not what they do there. Well, at six o’clock at the San Francisco company headquarters, it’s empty, everybody’s gone home. And they have in big pink letters on the wall. It is written, it says for everyone to see. It says, Work Hard and Go Home. It’s part of the company ethos. So it turns out that really the real problem in organizations that struggle with distraction, the real problem is not the technology. The real problem is that they can’t talk about their problems. That’s the root cause. So the three qualities of a company that has the kind of culture where people can deal with distraction, don’t suffer from distraction, but in the workplace, are companies that A, give him employees what’s called psychological safety, the ability to raise their hand and say, Hey, something’s not right here. That’s a very important trait. Second, they give employees a forum to talk about their problems. And third, management exemplifies what it means to be in distractible, culture flows downhill. So if your boss is always on, then you’re going to have to be always on because that’s what it takes to climb the ladder. So this really does have to be something that management embraces, this idea that, people can talk about their problems, place to talk about their problems, and that were management exemplifies what it means to be indistractable. It’s not correlate with technology use, it’s correlated with company culture, but company culture can change thankfully,

Yep. And it’s amazing how many things and issues and problems and challenges really do come down to company culture, outside of you know, technology and all the new things that new technologies that may come and go, it’s all very human.It’s all about how we interact with each other, and the role models that our leaders are providing for us, your words have to match your actions. So again, it doesn’t matter what they write on the wall about working hard and going home, if your manager is always on email all the time always writing you.

That’s right.

So much of what you’ve written and what you’ve studied is, at least somewhat influenced by your career that you built as an entrepreneur and as a founder of startups, and then also, now as an investor in startups. I’m always interested in how people start their entrepreneurial journey. So what inspired you to first start to become an entrepreneur.

Let’s see how far back do we want to go? Yeah, I would say that I have the quintessential story of the car wash business when I was a kid, and all that, and lemonade stand, but I think what really did it for me is working at a big company. My first job out of college was at the Boston Consulting Group. And it was hell. It was a very difficult work environment. My first week on the job was the week of 911. And we were working for an airline, after 911. And it was incredibly stressful. But that wasn’t the worst part actually loved that case. My big problem was the next case, when I got shuffled to a new boss, and the new boss was horrible. Back then BCG was kind of known for having a very hard charging, always on company culture. Which is funny, because this whole story comes back full circle, in fact, that Indistractable, in my new book, I actually profile the Boston Consulting Group, as this case study in a company that was able to change its culture. Because, when I remember being there, it was a very, very hard charging place where you would just expect it to always be on, that was just the way things work. Until a researcher from Harvard Business School came, by the name of Leslie Pirlo, and Leslie Pirlo, she wrote this book called “Sleeping With Your Smartphone.” She had this challenge for the people at BCG. She said, what would happen if everyone, in one case team of just eight people, was allowed to have one predictable night, off per week?

Okay, PTO, predictable time off. One night to go out with your spouse, or go to the gym or go to your kids basketball game, whatever it is that you wanted to do, what would that look like? And people said, No, no, we can’t do that here. We’re in the client services business, we have to be always on. You know, we have a distributed workforce, all the excuses. So she said, Look, what if a client came to you, right, you’re a strategy consulting firm. What if IBM or you know, Delta Airlines or somebody came to you and said, Hey, this is the challenge, give everyone one night off per week. So there’s Okay. That’s a friend that we can work with. They started talking about the problem. And they actually figured out the problem of distraction, and they figured out how to give people predictable time off very quickly. It wasn’t that big of a deal, because, they gave people psychological safety, and a forum to talk about their problems. What was fascinating. A couple of things happened, after, Leslie Pirlo worked with BCG. One, is when they discovered that when they started talking about this problem of distraction, and people felt psychological safety, to talk about their problems in the workplace, without fear of getting fired, they opened up about all kinds of other stuff. All the unmentionable things, no one’s allowed to talk about in the workplace. Suddenly, they could talk about, how they weren’t serving their customers as well as they could, how the product could be improved. How, you know, all of these things that weren’t discussed, because people were scared. And so when people felt, you know, safe to talk about the problem of distraction, they now felt safe to talk about all kinds of other things. So that’s the one that huge insight. The other one was, that from one case team, one group of eight people, this case team, the performance not only improved, the employee retention was so much better than the average, that today the entire company practices this. They all have these these meetings to talk about predictable time off, and it’s just a great, great case study and how a change in culture can start small, you know, when you don’t have to be the boss, to implement this kind of change, you can start very small, and how it can permeate throughout an organization and hopefully it permeates throughout the world.

That’s fascinating. And of course, it’s not just about, to the point of your story, it’s not just about giving that one night off, it’s also, at the same time building that forum to share your your issues and the challenges that are coming up, as well as that psychological safety. And I feel like that’s just so much easier said than done. So I’m curious about how they did that. Because usually, you can’t just flip a switch and say, okay, it’s safe to talk about stuff. So how do they do that?

Right. So it starts by becoming indistractable yourself, right. First, set the example. Use the screen sign that I talked about earlier, use these tactics, show people how much better your performance is. Then you become indistractable. That’s the best thing right? The proof is in the pudding. If you can show people how much more productive you are, by making sure that you have time to do your best work, by focusing on one task at a time. That’s the first step. That’s what the first half of the book is. Then, the next thing is, to start small. It can be one colleague at a time. In the book, there’s a discussion guide in the back. You don’t have to be the one who convinces people to change their ways. That’s what I spent five years researching. Sometimes, telling someone, oh, wow, this is a great book, check it out, or having a company book club or, you know, making this part of the discussion. That’s what I’m hoping to facilitate is, just starting the process of having a discussion around this. Because, the fact is, nobody likes the status quo. Nobody likes being interrupted at their kids basketball game, and always feeling like they’re tethered to their device. That’s not something even the boss really enjoys.

So it turns out, we don’t have to live this way. That when we talk about this problem, it benefits us in so many ways. And so the idea is to make change within yourself, then make change within your teams, then make change within the broader organization. It does take time.

Yeah, that’s great. And it sounds like anybody really can help to affect this change, but especially if you’re a leader of teams, or a leader of people, because people are always watching their leaders in organizations. So if you role model that behavior and your words match your actions, then you can have an even larger effect on the people who work for you.

Absolutely. Oh, if you if you’re a manager, then there’s there’s no excuse. You can affect change much more than someone who isn’t in a management position. Absolutely.

Fantastic. So you have that experience, being an entrepreneu,r that I guess grew out of actually working, at a traditional corporate consulting job, many, many hours. Obviously, now you are very focused and studied on habit forming technology. And additionally, you are also an investor in other businesses. So I’m just curious, what kind of things do you look for probably besides, do they use some sort of habit forming technology? What do you look for when you want to invest in a business?

Yeah, so I use what’s called the GEM framework. I’m an active angel investor. So when I see a company startup that I’m interested in investing in, I’ve done probably two dozen investments so far, including event, Right and Anchor, which is sold at Spotify, a few other companies that they’ve done really well. I think every single one of the companies I’ve invested in has gone on to raise institutional capital. And what I look for in that very early stage, when I find a company, is I look for three things. This is called the GEM framework. It I think it was Reid Hoffman, who first developed it. The GEM framework stands for growth, engagement and monetization. That every product needs to have these three things, growth, engagement, monetization. So growth is how do you acquire customers profitably in a way that the customer lifetime value is greater than the cost of acquisition? So that’s, you know, strategy around growth. Then you have engagement, meaning how do you bring people back to use the product and keep them, whether it’s in a SaaS business, if they have to use the product in order to continue to pay for it every month, whether it’s engaging with a particular app or website or service, whatever it might be. And then monetization, right? How do you support business with some kind of monetization plan. So I typically look for two of the three, with a plan for the third. And that third is typically the monetization components. So if they can tell me how they can acquire customers, that’s the growth. Engagement is my specialty. So I only look for companies to invest in that are using my methodology are using the Hook Model, because that’s where I can offer the most value. So I don’t invest in you know, pharma or biotech or crypto, I just don’t have a special insight into those spaces. My insight is really around how do you get users to reengage to use a product. For many businesses, that is their competitive advantage? If you think about Google, Google actually doesn’t have many competitive advantages. There is no real moat around Google, other than habit, other than the fact that every day when you Google something you don’t ask yourself, Hmm, I wonder if Google is the best search engine?

No, you just Google it with little or no conscious thought,out of habit. That’s the tremendous power of habit forming products is, that we don’t even consider the competition. That’s the competitive mode of building a habit. So if you’re able to do that, that’s a very enviable place to be from a business perspective. I look for those companies that need a habit, whose business model need a habit, in order to serve their stakeholders, their shareholders, and of course, their customers.

And do you usually come in as an investor like in the very early stages, or more sort of mid-stage or sort o,f how do you find those diamonds in the rough? I guess the GEM framework is sort of a really strong way to do that.

Yeah, I’ll usually come in when there’s a very, very early stage product. So you know, maybe the beta. Now I don’t usually come in on the the paper sketch stage, once in a while I have, but most of the time, it’s, customers are using some sort of product very early, early stage. And I see the potential for how it can be a habit forming product.

That’s really, really cool.

And of course, it has to do good, right? Yeah. But there’s many businesses I will not invest in. So I don’t work with alcohol, tobacco. I don’t work with any business that exploits people who are addicted. You know, the so I won’t work with gaming companies or machine gambling, not that I’m ethically opposed to these businesses. I just don’t want to work with them because many of these businesses exploit people who have pathology of addiction. And so I don’t think that’s ethical.

No, definitely not. Nir, I really enjoyed talking with you today about your entrepreneurial journeys and your new book and just all the study and expertise that you’re bringing now to the business world and to the rest of us around the roots of distraction, and what really builds those habits. And the control that we can have over them. So I understand “Indistractable,” I think that just came out. I mean, we’re recording in end of September, but it just came out a couple weeks ago. Is that right?

Brand new. And yeah, it’s doing great. It’s available wherever books are sold. And if you go to my website, there’s a free video course as well as an 80 page workbook, that we ended up cutting out of the book because it just got too long. That’s available. It’s all complimentary there at indistractable.com, so it’s i n, the word distract, able. Indistractable.com is where you can get all that bonus content.

Perfect and so is that the best way for people if they want to get in touch with you, want obviously to learn more about your new book, but to, maybe learn more about your writing and some of the other work that you do?

Yeah, either Indistractable.com or my blog is Nirandfar, and Nir is spelled like my first name, Nir and Nirandfar.com.

Awesome. So I’ll put those links in the show notes as well so people can have easy reference to them there too.

Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you.

And you know, as we close out, is there anything else that you’d like our listeners to know or anything else that they can help or support you with?

I appreciate it. I mean, I think really the message I want to impart to folks out there when it comes to struggling with distraction, is that this is something that everyone deals with. But I think mastering distraction becoming indistractable is really the skill of the century. Right? It’s a macro skill, if you can be the kind of person who does what they say they’re going to do. That is such a competitive advantage in the marketplace in terms of other people. You’re an individual performer, if you you know, work for someone, you want to be the kind of person that people can depend upon, and you want to be the kind of person that can depend upon themselves, right? We, we would never want to lie to our family or friends. And we don’t want to lie to ourselves either. If we say we’re going to work out, we need to go work out and we say, we’re going to work on a big project, we’ll do it. And being able to be that kind of person to live with personal integrity is really the skill of a century. And what I want folks to know is that we can do this, that we need to stop believing these myths that we’re somehow being controlled. It doesn’t help us, that in fact, we can get the best out of these tools without letting them get the best of us.

Absolutely. It’s definitely within our reach and buy the book, and you’ll find out how to do that. Great, thank you so much here was great to talk to you.

My pleasure. Thanks so much.

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