Lessons - The Four-Step System for Taking Back Your Attention | Nir Eyal - NYT Bestselling Author of Hooked & Indistractable

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In this lessons episode, discover why productivity depends on planning ahead rather than relying on willpower.

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Understand how time boxing and schedule syncs create accountability.

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Explore how asking when instead of saying no helps manage competing priorities and uncover why forethought is essential to overcoming distractions and building lasting habits.

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Obviously, not just having a person appear, but your partner plays a big role in this as well.

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So for everybody who is listening to this, who has a partner at home that when they first started dating and got married, they didn't have your book and they weren't time blocking their life.

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I mean, this could be something that could not be like a tumultuous negative impact on the relationship, but it could be a little bit of a shift from what people are used to.

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I think getting a partner on board is probably one of the most important things because they're living in your space every single day.

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So how do you manage that?

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I mean, you have a wife, she deals with all this.

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What was the process even for yourself to get somebody so close to you to understand this system?

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That's a great point.

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And I hear this all the time of, look, I'm trying to become indistractable, but can you fix her or can you fix him?

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I get that all the time.

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And you really can't.

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You can't make someone change.

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In fact, the best way to get someone not to change is to tell them you want them to change.

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But there is something you can do.

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And this is a lesson I had to learn for myself.

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When I looked at my values, we talked about values earlier, and I thought to myself, what are some of my values?

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One of my values was to be a good husband, to be in an equitable marriage.

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And I remember for years, so I've been married now for 23 years, and I remember a few years ago, my wife and I had tons of fights over kind of the same thing, right?

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And she felt that I wasn't pulling my weight, and she would complain to me, right?

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She would say, you know, can't you see the garbage is sitting there?

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Why don't you take it out?

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Can't you see our daughter needs to be fed?

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Why aren't you feeding her?

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Like, why aren't you making lunch?

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And my response to her was, honey, honey, honey.

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If you want me to do something, don't yell at me.

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Don't get upset.

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Don't nag.

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Just tell me what you need me to do and I'll do it.

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Right?

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And I thought, well, there, that's the solution.

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So simple.

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What I didn't realize is that I was asking her to do yet another job, which was to be my camp counselor.

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Right?

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I was adding even additional information, additional responsibility to the relationship on her side.

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And that really wasn't fair.

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And it wasn't until I started doing this research for Indistractable that I found the solution, that I found the answer to our prayers.

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And now we – I cannot remember the last time we fought.

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It's been years since we had an argument.

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And I'll tell you why.

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Because when I started timeboxing –

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Now my calendar became an artifact, right?

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It became a physical thing that I could print out and I could show her.

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And so every Sunday night after I make my calendar for the week, we sit down together maybe for 10, 15 minutes.

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It takes us never more than that.

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She has her calendar.

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I have my calendar.

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And we do what's called a schedule sync, okay?

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A schedule synchronization, schedule sync.

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We sit down together and we just look at each other's calendars.

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And we say, okay, here's all the stuff that needs to happen.

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My daughter needs to be taken here on this day.

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And who's going to cook lunch on that day?

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And who's responsible for dinner?

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And who needs this?

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We just sit down and we look at all these responsibilities.

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And we make sure that they're taken care of so that she knows where I'm going to be.

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And I know approximately where she's going to be.

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We look at each other's calendar.

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And through this schedule sync, I realized I wasn't pulling my weight.

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And now, instead of having this to-do list of things that sometimes I would do, sometimes I would forget, sometimes, you know, now it's on my calendar.

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I know exactly when it's my day to make sure that the laundry is done or whatever the case might be.

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It's in my schedule.

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This has been amazing.

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life-changing.

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By the way, you can also adapt this technique for the workplace.

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So a lot of times I work with people who say, hey, I read your book.

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I love it.

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I'm indistractable, but my boss keeps distracting me.

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What do I do about them?

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Right?

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It's great that I'm indistractable, but if my boss keeps bugging me every 30 seconds, how am I going to get any work done?

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This is where the schedule sync comes in handy.

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So when you sit down with your boss, what this is preventing, by the way,

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is the number one absolute worst piece of personal productivity out there.

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Let me go ahead and kill this golden calf right now.

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The worst piece of personal productivity advice is, if you want to be more productive, you have to learn how to say no.

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Yes, that is the worst personal productivity advice.

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You're going to tell your boss, you're going to tell your wife, no.

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I can't tell my wife no.

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I don't know about you.

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I've heard that advice so much.

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I've heard that advice.

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I'm pretty sure I've tweeted about that advice too because in theory, it makes so much sense.

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In theory, it makes so much sense.

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It's like, well, if I just said no more.

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And and there's a there's a subset of the population where that actually like resonates, like it resonates with me when I'm building my own thing and people are hitting me up for meetings and people are trying to shiny object syndrome me and saying no repeatedly actually does help me focus.

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So that that it but but I get that not everybody's.

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And by the way, if I had investors or a board or a C-suite, I can't say no to them because then I'm in a very particular situation at this point in my life where I'm running my own business.

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The smaller business don't have investors.

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But this is not universally applicable advice by any means.

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So the best thing to do is to not say no, especially when it comes to someone who has power over you, like your boss, like your investors, like your spouse, right?

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Not to say no, you're going to piss them off, you're going to get fired.

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Instead, what you want to ask is when.

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You're not saying no, you're saying when.

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So when you do this schedule sync with your boss and you say, hey, boss, here's my schedule for the week, okay?

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You see, here's what I'm planning to do for my nine to five or whatever your working hours are.

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Okay, here's this meeting.

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Here's when I plan to check email.

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Here's when I'm doing whatever project you asked me to do.

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Okay, here's my schedule for the week.

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Now, you see this list over here on this other piece of paper?

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On this other piece of paper, here are all the things you asked me to do that I'm having trouble fitting into my schedule.

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And now you're going to ask your boss to do their most important job.

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Your boss's most important, maybe their only job, the only job of a manager.

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Manager has one job.

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That job is to prioritize.

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Everything else is details.

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A boss's job is to prioritize.

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So you're asking your boss to do their most important job, help you prioritize.

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Here's this list of things.

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that I'm having trouble fitting in my schedule, how would you like me to prioritize?

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And what they're going to do invariably is to say, hey, you know that meeting that you said you were going to be in?

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That's actually not that important.

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But this project over here, that's way more important.

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Can you swap those out?

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Your boss will worship the ground you walk on because bosses are constantly wondering what the heck their employees are doing all day, but they don't want to micromanage them.

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So don't let them micromanage you.

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Manage up.

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Manage your manager by showing them this time box calendar, showing them how you plan to spend your time and getting their input to help you prioritize what's on your plate.

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Very, very smart.

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It's so smart.

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And I would assume that

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Yeah, like you mentioned, like the reaction from the manager or reaction from the spouse has just always been positive because now they understand exactly what you're doing.

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It's almost like it.

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So it's an exercise.

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What this also forces you to do is have a massive amount of self-awareness.

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All the strategies that you're talking about are forcing self-awareness, which I think is a positive thing anyways.

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It's a very positive thing.

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Absolutely.

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Unexamined life is not worth living, right?

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I have a question for you because obviously you've written a book on habits as well.

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And if somebody is trying to incorporate this, they want to be successful at it.

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They want to maintain it.

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They want to include this in their life.

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They're bought into the concept.

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So out of everything that you know with habits, without doing a whole other podcast on habits, if somebody wants to start to incorporate this technique, this four-step process of time boxing into their life, what is sort of the first step they should take so that it does stick?

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Yeah.

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So if you were going to boil down...

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my research over the past more than a decade now, when it comes to personal productivity, when it comes to getting the most out of life, I think it would be this, that the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought.

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The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought, meaning that distraction is not a moral failing.

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It's not a character flaw.

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There's nothing wrong with you.

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You're not broken in any way.

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It's simply that you haven't learned how to deal with these impulses.

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That's all it is.

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It's an impulse control issue.

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But the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought, that if you plan ahead, there's no distraction you can't overcome.

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But if you wait to the last minute, right, if the chocolate cake is on the fork on the way to your mouth, you're going to eat it.

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If the cigarette is in your hand, even though you're trying to quit smoking, if it's in your hand, you're going to smoke it.

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If you sleep next to your phone every night, it's going to be the first thing you reach for before you even say hello to your loved one.

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So if you wait to the last minute, it's too late.

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They're going to get you, right?

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They've won.

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But if you plan ahead, if you take steps today to prevent distraction, there's no distraction you can't overcome tomorrow.

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So when you take these steps, you feel like long-term, that's the answer to actually incorporating this successfully.

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It's you're taking the steps preemptively.

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Right.

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You can't move it to the last minute.

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The reason timeboxing works is not because you quickly, quickly make a plan for the day as you're going through the day.

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You made it ahead of time so that it's accordance with your – and you did it, right?

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It's not imposed upon you.

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Nobody's being your mommy and daddy and telling you what to do.

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This is what you want to do to live without regret.

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And so that's really, really what it's all about is, again, back to where we started around minimizing regret, living the kind of life that you're proud of because you did what you said you're going to do.

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And one more thing, one more quick thing.

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There's a great Henry Ford quote, or at least he's attributed to saying, whether you believe you can or you can't, you're right.

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So I know that many people listening, if you've listened this long in the episode, are thinking, that's not going to work for me.

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I've got this reason.

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I've got this excuse.

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I've got this condition.

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I've got this trauma.

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I've got this thing that happened to me.

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Therefore, my life is different.

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It won't work.

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And you know what?

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If you think that, you're right.

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Right.

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Because you haven't even tried.

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And so that's actually, if I really had to boil it down, the precondition for anything working to change your life is a belief that you can change, that you're capable of making a difference.

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Thanks for tuning in.

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If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode.

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And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode.

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See you in the next one.