Nir Eyal - Habit & Procrastination Expert | How to Stay Focused and Become Indistractable

Stop blaming all these things outside of us and start claiming responsibility for what we can do that it turns out it ain't that hard. What makes us form habits? How do we take control of our attention in a world full of distractions? Near I.L. has spent his career answering these questions, becoming one of the most influential voices in behavioral psychology and design. I became increasingly distracted from the one thing that made me successful in the first place as an author, which was the research and the writing. Distraction is not a moral failing, it's not a character flaw, there's nothing wrong with you, it's simply that you haven't learned how to deal with these impulses. That's odd as it's an impulse control issue, but the antidote to impulsiveness is for thought that if you plan ahead there's no distraction you can't overcome. If you take steps today to prevent distraction there's no distraction you can't overcome tomorrow. He's the author of two groundbreaking books, hooked a guide to creating habit forming products and indestructible, a blueprint for mastering focus and reclaiming our lives. Time management is pain management, you can always make more money, you cannot make more time. Time is a limited resource. His ideas have not only shaped the way we use products, but also how we live our daily lives. Today, near reveals the patterns that drive human behavior and how we can use them to design a better future. Welcome to success story, I'm your host, Scott Clary. The success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network, they have great podcasts, but they also have great tools for entrepreneurs. That's why I've worked with them for over three years now. I want you to picture this for a second. You've got a party and someone asks you what you do as a marketer. And this is a lesson for marketers and even people that don't classify as marketers because at the end of the day everybody has to figure out how to talk about the product to grow their business. Whether or not you're formally trained or you're a solo printer, you have to market. Now marketers have a tough job because it's really hard to describe what a marketer is. Because if you think about what a day in the life of a marketer is, you have to generate leads, you have to score them, you have to contact them, you have to create content, you have to gather data and tomorrow, you have to do it all over again. And then you have to wonder if it's even working marketers are spread way too thin. Anybody that does marketing is spread way too thin. Now HubSpot has a collection of AI tools called breeze to help marketers. They have features like content remix, return one piece of content into all these different assets. You can also pinpoint the best products with predictive lead scoring so you can know who's actually going to buy your product or service. You can level up your campaigns with KPIs and analytics. So your day to day as a marketer becomes less busy work and more driving revenue through the roof. So remember, everybody at the end of the day has to be a marketer. And more importantly, you'll have a way easier time describing what you do at parties. If you want help marketing, your product or service, if you want to grow your business, is at HubSpot.com slash marketers to learn more. What does like a day in your life look like? Like walk me through a day in your life because you're living all the things that you teach about not being distracted and we're all human. So I know no one's perfect, but just like walk me through your ideal day. Sure, yes. So one of the principles that I talk about in indistractable is that you can't call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. You can't call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. So if you don't know what is traction for your day, what you have planned in advance to do with your time intention, everything is a distraction. So I use this technique called time boxing, which is one of the most well study techniques out there, one of the most well verified way more scientific backing and studies than, you know, techniques like to do lists. Actually, these time boxes eat to do lists for breakfast. It's such a better technique. And it essentially utilizes the psychological principle of setting what's called an implementation intention, which is just a fancy way of saying you're planning out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it. Because if you don't know what it is, you said you were going to do it in advance, then you can't say you got distracted again. You can't say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from. So my day is planned at the start of the week every Sunday. I have time in my calendar to sit down and look at the week ahead and make sure that I am going to live my life and plan my time according to my values, turning my values into time. You know, if you want to know what someone's values are, don't listen to the words that come out of their mouth, people will lie to you because they lie to themselves every day. Look at their calendar, look at how they spend their time and look at how they spend their money. That's how you really know what someone's values really are. So my typical day, I wake up at 7 a.m., typically without an alarm, I'm just kind of conditioned to wake up more or less around that time. I have breakfast with my family till 8 at 8 o'clock. I either have a call because I'm in Singapore. So it's 12 hour apart. So that's typically when I'll do a call with the United States. And then at 9 o'clock, I'm off to the gym and I'll either go to the boxing gym, I'll lift weights or I'll run. I'll do one of those activities. And then I'm back by 10 from 10 to noon. I'm doing my writing time. Then I have lunch, typically with my family or maybe a business meeting. And then from noon till around 5 6, I'm writing. I'm working on my next book. And then in the evening, I'll do dinner and then I'll have one of these calls like I'm doing right now. It's evening time here. And then if there's still time left over my calendar, that's typically when I'll check email and I also schedule time for social media. And so I've got that time all scheduled in in advance. Now, that's a weekday. On weekends, it's completely different. Actually, every day can be different. And what you actually do with your time, I don't want people to say, oh, I want the near AL calendar of how to be super productive. That's not the idea here. The idea is that no matter what it is that you want to do that you plan that time, you want to watch Netflix, watch Netflix, you want to play video games, play video games, but do it with intent. Don't feel guilty about it. There's nothing wrong with it. You're not wasting your time as long as you plan it in advance. So anything you want to do with your time, intention is fine as long as you're doing it with intent. And you speak out. And it's not just that you say that time boxing eats to do lists for breakfast. You speak out against to do lists. Like you don't, you're not a fan of to do lists. So what you just mentioned, you just mentioned that to be indistractable, you have to know what you're trying to do in the first place. Why don't to do lists accomplish that even till like a minor degree, I get the time bucks at the time boxing is superior, but people will say, well, if I have to do list, at least I know what I'm planning on doing in that day. Yeah, there's a little bit of nuance there and that it's not that using the to do list in that you're getting things out of your brain and putting them in a piece of paper on or on an app. That's great. That's wonderful. What I'm trying to rally against is this idea that your to do list should tell you what to do. Meaning if you wake up in the morning and you look at your to do list rather than your calendar, you've lost your day is already sunk. The war is over. Because what people do when they look at it to do list, do they do the important stuff? No, do they do this stuff that really matters to move their career forward? No, do they do the hard work they have to do? No, what do we do? We do the easy stuff. We do the urgent stuff. We do the fun stuff as opposed to doing the hard and important work. We have to do to move our lives and careers forward. So getting things out of your brain and putting them on a piece of paper. Wonderful. But that's step one. What people forget is that the next step is that you have to find time to do those things because a to do list has no constraints. The problem with the do list is you can always add more and more and more and more. So it to do list becomes a register of output. But you can't have output without input. If you were to go to a baker and say, hey, my kid's got a birthday party and I'm going to need a dozen cupcakes. Well, the baker's going to think for a minute is, okay, well, I need flour, I need sugar, I need butter, I need these inputs to make the output. But what's our input as knowledge workers, what's our input? Our input is only two things. It's not flour and butter and sugar. Our input is time and attention. So how the hell do we think we're going to get the output of all the things we have to do if we don't account for the ingredients for our work, if we don't plan the time and the attention. And so what people do when it comes to a to do list, they'll start one task, they'll work on it for five minutes, then they'll get distracted with email to work on that and then they'll go get a cup of coffee. Oh, Janet's at the water, go, hey, Janet, how you doing? Wait a minute, what am I working on again? And they totally forget about what it was that they plan to do with their time and attention because what they do is they measure themselves by this stupid technique, this very outdated technique of a to do list. And they measure their personal productivity based on these cute little boxes they check off. I do this too, by the way, I'm guilty of this. What I would do, this is embarrassing to admit. I would finish a task. And then because I hadn't put it on my to do list, I would go back and write it into my to do list just for that satisfaction of checking it off, right? How stupid is that? That's bad. That's the tyranny of the to do list. And so what that's a ridiculous thing that I would do because that's kind of how I measured myself. Well, if I checked off lots of boxes that I'm being productive, that's dumb. Rather a much better way is to not measure yourself by cute little boxes, the right measurement and the only measurement that matters is did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction. And doing it doesn't mean finishing. You could be with your kids. You could be watching TV. You could be doing a big presentation. You could be making sales calls. It doesn't matter. The only metric is did I do it without distraction. And it's not about finishing. This is going to blow your mind. It's not about finishing with people are saying, wait, then when do I finish isn't the whole goal to finish stuff? No, here's why. Because when you measure yourself by doing that, you can do that. Measure yourself by simply that one metric of did I do what I said is going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction. Now you have a feedback loop. And that is something that it to do list can never give you. Right. You people have no idea how long things take and we know from surveys that on average, this is called the planning fallacy. People take three times longer to finish a task than they estimate why because there's no feedback loop to know how long things take. Whereas when you say to yourself, hey, I'm just going to work on this one task for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes doesn't matter. I'm just going to work on this one task for 30 minutes without distraction. Now you start creating a feedback loop. Now you can say to yourself, hey, I worked on this thing for 30 minutes and let's say I've got to do a 30 slide slide presentation. Okay, well, I worked on it for 30 minutes and I got three slides done. That means in order to finish the entire presentation, I need nine more time boxes to get the entire task done. And now you have this feedback loop where you can learn for the first time how long things take to do list can never give you that. I would also I would also assume if you put time constraints, then then you will actually finish that thing, even though you'll get a feedback loop is how long that time that that particular segment will take that things going to be done much quicker than just an open ended to do list because then again, the the work will fill the time that it's allocated regardless. Bingo, bingo. So this is the big irony is that actually the people who don't run their life on a to do list and rather run their life on a calendar based on a to do on a time box counter. They actually finish more it's not just your intuition studies have found this that people who keep a time box calendar, they finish more they get more done at the end of the day, they are more productive than that to do list devotees and they do it without guilt. Here's the problem. So many people think that this to do list methodology is the way to go that even when they have some free time, even when they want to enjoy a leisure activity, like I used to do, I would get home from work and I would look at this to do list and I've got a million things that I still didn't do right because again to do us have no constraints. So here's all these things I wish I would have done and they're all staring me at the face right all these things I didn't do. And so what does that do to your psyche if day after day week after week month after month year after year, you didn't do what you say you're going to do. Loser and that's when people start concocting all these silly reasons I'm no good at time management. I'm a satirious. I have some undiagnosed whatever whatever and really is this nothing broken about you is like wrong with you. It's a stupid time management technique we keep using. Whereas when you use a time box calendar now when you come home from work and you just want to watch Netflix or play a video game or hang out with your kids. That's exactly what you're meant to do. Now that's traction that because that's what I said I was going to do. Everything else becomes distraction near tell me tell me your story. Where when did this concept or the passion for this particular topic and to your life because I know this wasn't just you throwing a dart at a board of different topics to write a book about. So this was something that obviously had a major impact on you. So obviously your regular professional. You're you probably like you mentioned subscribe to this sort of the old to do list that everyone else does walk me through sort of that inflection point origin story of this topic in your life. Yeah, so you know I'm a little different from I think most authors in that I don't write books about things I know about I write books about things I want to know about. And so I only write books when I have a problem in my own life. And I think about it and I talk to my wife about it and I talked to my friends about it and I read tons of books about it. And only when I still haven't figured out the answer. Do I write a book and so this is why it takes me about five years to write a book because I really want to tackle these problems that haven't been solved before. And so when I read every book on his problem that I personally had right when I became you know somewhat successful with my first book and I started getting speaking engagements and I started getting consulting opportunities and investment opportunities and all these great opportunities. I became increasingly distracted from the one thing that made me successful in the first place as an author, which was the research and the writing. And so I needed to kind of reset my own my own relationship with distraction and all the books on the topic kind of said the same thing right stop using technology so much stop using email stop checking social media. Well, thanks, but that's not really practical right like for most of us if we stop using email we stop checking social media, you know, we're going to get fire. We're going to lose our jobs and these tools are wonderful. And so I didn't want this anti tech chicken little attitude of oh, technology's melted our brain and it's all technologies fault and all the problems of the world are because of technology. It's silly. It's ridiculous. I love technology. I mean, look, here we are. You're in Miami. I'm in Singapore. We're talking through these magical screens right now basically for free. I mean, this is science fiction when I was a kid. And so here we are leading this amazing future. But the price of all that progress, the price of information at your fingertips, the price of instant communication, the price of all this entertainment that we have is that you know what we need to grow up a little bit. We need to stop blaming and shaming everything around us and learn these new techniques because it's not your fault, right. You didn't invent social media. You didn't invent YouTube. You didn't invent all these distractions. They're not your fault, but they are your responsibility. And so I think the world is really by for creating into two types of people. People who will allow their time and attention to be manipulated and controlled by media companies and people who stand up and say, no, no, no, no, I'm going to decide how I control my attention and how I choose my life because I am indestractable. And so that I think is the superpower of the century. Like, you know, we think about all these skills. We want to learn and these practices and all these things. But if you can't pay attention long enough to turn that information into wisdom. It's as if that information didn't even exist in the first place. And so that's really the gift I want to give people is the is the gift of clarity is the gift of a focus is the gift of being able to control their attention and choose their life because this is what I needed most in my life. And I can tell you today, you know, I'm 46 years old. I'm in the best physical shape of my life. I've never I was never able to see my abs. I used to be clinically obese. Now I can actually see my abs for the first time. Not because I'm particularly athletic or have good genes, but I exercise when I say I will and I eat right because I say I will I spend quality time with my family because I say I will I more productive at work because I do what I say I'm going to do. And it turns out that when you have that critical keystone habit, all kinds of other good things happen, right. People want to be friends with people who are reliable and have integrity. People want to do business with people who do what they say they're going to do. People want to fall in love with partners. They can depend upon. And so this skill has really enhanced my life so much. I really wrote the book for me and I've been thrilled of course that others benefit from it as well. Yeah, so I think that I think that without these tools that you've researched and now you sort of put into words we can understand technology blindsided because it moved so quickly and it tapped into so many different parts of our brain that we weren't really pretty pretty all these social media tools and outlets. We weren't really trained or or we didn't really understand the impact that it had on us so that if we apply these old systems to new technology, the obviously we're going to fail. But so the technology is not the issue. It's just our our education, our skill sets, they they were no match for for this kind of in flux and just information and constant access. You mentioned when we look at time boxing and we look at being indistractable, it's not about focus. It's about traction. So talk to me about the difference between focus versus distraction. And then why we're not that's not what we should be focused on. Yeah, let's look at it as more traction versus let me just what you just said earlier about how we weren't prepared for these these tools and it's a new thing. I would I would probably challenge you on that a little bit. It turns out that we know that for the at least the past 2500 years, people have been struggling with distraction. How do we know this because we know Plato, the Greek philosopher, bemoaned what he called a Krasia in the Greek, the tendency to do things against our better interest. Like literally for 2500 years, people have been complaining about how distracted the world is today. Right. And then how the new technology is not new. It's not new. Socrates was talking about this terrible technology that he said was going to infeal men's minds that new technology was the written word. So people have always been freaking out about the latest technology. And so, you know, as Paul Verilio says, when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck that if we are going to have the benefits of a new technology. Of course, you're going to get the goods and you're going to get the bats. But what did we do? Did we stop sailing ships? No, we made ships better. Right. We learned how to sail them more effectively. And so that's what we as a species have to do. These technologies are not going away. It's futile to say, oh my gosh, the new technology. It's rotting my brain. And then what? Right. There's a wonderful quote. Poilo Coilo said, a mistake repeated more than once is a decision. Such a good quote. A mistake repeated more than once is a decision. So yes, OK, that darn Mark Zuckerberg with his Instagram and the darn tiktok and the whatever that all these distractions, which by the way, for the ages before this, it was television before this, it was comic books before that it was the radio every new technology distracts people. And then what are we just going to sit here and take it? Are we going to say, OK, hey, you geniuses in Washington, can you legislators, can you make them stop? No, it's not going to happen. Right. And do we really wanted to. Hey, Netflix, your shows are too good. Please stop making interesting entertainment. Oh, my favorite basketball team, please stop being interesting. I'm tired of wasting so much time, you know, on these things, they're never there's never going to be a world without distractions. So stop blaming all these things outside of us and start claiming responsibility for what we can do about it. Turns out, it ain't that hard. Like it's really not that true, but like humans don't like to claim responsibility for the shortcoming. That is like a whole other. That's for sure. So I'm not talking to those people. I'm not talking to the masses of people who complain about, oh, I'm fat because the food industry, you know what, if you want to believe that, believe that I'm not talking to the people who say I'm not successful because systemic this and that and the other. And that's why I can't achieve my dreams. I'm not talking to those people. I'm talking to the people who know their capable of more that they know they can do better if they can just do the things that they themselves want to do. I'm not going to tell you what to do. Do whatever you want. But if you know, you're not doing something, whether it's exercise, whether it's being fully present with your family, whether it's writing that novel, whether it's making those sales calls, whatever it is, you know, you could be doing, but aren't because you're Dicking around online or doing some stupid thing you later regret, that's who I'm talking to. So this great. So I completely aligned. That makes a lot of sense. I didn't realize that I was under the assumption that new technology had almost like 100x negative effect on on the brain compared to previous technologies. But you're saying this has always been an issue. So it doesn't really matter. It's just we have to have the tools to deal with it. And we have to have We have to have sort of the ownership over our own issues in our life to go and learn those tools so we can deal with whatever technology or whatever new thing is available to us. It doesn't matter whether or not it's this technology or the printing press or the television or the radio. It's something we got to deal with because if not we're not going to be successful. It's you're sure more it's more accessible than ever before. And if you are looking for distraction, you'll find it. But I think, you know, like you'll think, oh, I'm going to solve my problems by quitting social media, but actually to quit social media, you have to solve your problems. And so that really gets into a heart of my research is that what we find and this goes back to your earlier question. We had this perception that these distractions are something that happens outside of us. It's my phone. It's my kids. It's my boss. It's the news. It's whatever. It's this stuff that's happening outside of me. We call these external triggers. And researchers found that they account for about 10% 10% of our distractions are external triggers, the pings, the dings, the rings, all this stuff outside of us. That is a source of distraction. But only 10% so what's the other 90% it turns out that 90% of the time that we get distracted 90% it's not because of what's happening outside of us. It's because of what's happening inside of us. These are called internal triggers that studies have found that 90% of time that you check your phone. It's not because of a pinging a ring. It's because of a feeling. It's an internal trigger loneliness, boredom, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety. That is the source of 90% of our distractions. What we're doing, whatever that technology might be, maybe for our parents, it was the television or the newspaper, the radio, whatever, is that when we're using these distractions as pacification devices, because we don't want to feel our feelings. That's the source of 90% of our distraction, because distraction is not a character flaw. There's probably nothing broken about your brain. It's simply that we haven't learned how to deal with discomfort in a healthy way that leads us towards traction rather than trying to escape it with distraction. So what my research shows is that high performers high performance in every industry sports, the arts, business, whatever the field, high performers, they feel the same exact internal triggers that we do. They also feel bored. They also feel anxious. They also feel uncertain. The difference with these high performers is they have learned to use those internal triggers as rocket fuel to propel them towards traction, rather than what distractable people do is they try and escape these uncomfortable feelings with distraction. I just want to take a second to thank the Housebot podcast network for supporting today's episode. Now, if you like success story, you're going to love other shows in the network. One of my favorites is the hustle daily show hosted by Juliet Bennett Rylah, Rob Literist, Ben Berkeley and Mark Dent. It's brought to you by the Housebot podcast network, which is really the audio destination for business professionals. Now, the hustle daily show brings you a healthy dose of this irreverent offbeaten formative takes on business and tech. I was just listening to an episode to give you an example of what they talk about. So they broke down how this 100 year old organization has created one of the most successful business models in the world, not only does this organization teach young entrepreneurship, they generate over a billion dollars in annual cookie sales. And what I really love about the show is they take these stories and these businesses that we think we know and they reveal the surprising angles that we never considered. So I really think that you should go listen to the hustle daily show wherever you get your podcasts. It's one of my favorites. You're not going to regret it. Just a quick question on time blocking because I don't I want to I want to sort of move on from that. But just as I'm thinking through how to implement this and people that are listening are probably I'm assuming thinking the same thing. When you time block your day out because you before time blocking you had this list of things you had to get done. How do you decide? How do you decide the allocation of time for certain tasks? I mean, is it an urgent important matrix eyes and hour matrix? Ask thing that you apply or is there some other framework? Because again, I still have to get through these things. It's important. There's there's there's a time stamp that an update that has to be done by. So how do I sort of break up my day? So what's the big goal here? Like what what's the purpose of figuring out productivity and how we spend our time and time management? What's the big picture here? Why are we doing this? Big picture for me at least and what's worked for me is I really was inspired by Jeff Bezos has this regret minimization framework. The whole idea is that when we make these decisions with how we spend our time, how we spend our money, we want to spend it in ways we don't later regret. And so when we think about our money, right, people are very stingy with their money. They put their money in banks. They keep it in vaults. They split checks. They clip coupons. We do everything we can to save a buck. But when it comes to our time, we give it away to whoever wants it. Right. You need me to do this. This stupid thing in the news that doesn't involve me. This wore thousands of miles away. Oh, yeah, sure. I'll give that my attention. Whatever, whatever stupid thing. Take my attention. Right. But it should be exactly the opposite because while you can always make more money, you cannot make more time. Right. Time is a limited resource. I don't care if you're Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, you have the same 24 hours in the day. Right. And a limited time on earth. So we should be very stingy with our time, but generous with our money. And so the way we do that is by turning our values into time. It has to start with your values in order to minimize regret in order to look back at your day, your week, your month, your year, your lifetime. My goal and the reason I did this research and wrote this book was so that I can look back on every day, week, month, your lifetime and say, you know what? I spent that the way I wanted to not the way a media company wanted me to not the way someone else wanted me to, but the way I wanted to. And so to do that, I start with my values. And so here's what you do. You look at these three life domains, these three life domains start with you. You're at the center of these three life domains. If you can't take care of yourself, you can't take care of other people. You can't make the world a better place. So it starts with asking yourself, how would the person I want to become, spend time taking care of themselves. And you look at your calendar the week ahead, you take a blank calendar, whether you do it on paper or Google calendar, it doesn't matter, just any tool where you can see your week ahead, and you ask yourself, how would the person I want to become, spend their time taking care of themselves. So for me, it's time for proper rest, right? I used to tell my daughter, oh, it's past your bedtime. And then one day she looked at me, she said, daddy, do you have a bedtime? And she was absolutely right. I was being a hypocrite. Now I have a bedtime time, time to take care of myself by going to the gym. People's, oh, health, health is very, very important. That's super important. They'll spend too much money on vitamins and pills and potions and powders. But when it comes to spending time in the gym, do you have that time scheduled? Have you made that commitment to yourself to do that thing that you said you want to do for your personal health. So it comes down to first scheduling the time to take care of yourself. By the way, it can include time for fun. It should include time for fun. You love playing video games. Awesome. Put in your calendar. You like social media. Put it in your calendar. That's the most important thing. Then the next life domain is your relationships. And I think part of the reason that we have a low minus epidemic in the United States is because we have lost these institutions that used to hold time for relationships on our calendars. You know, we used to have the church group and the Kiwanis Club and the local events that now as society became more and more secular. People don't have those institutions that brought them in. And I'm not saying you have to be religious per se. But we need to bring back those regular places in our calendar to interact with our relationships, especially men, men in particular. We let our best buddies kind of go. You know, they move away. They drift away and our relationships kind of starve to death. So put that time in your calendar for your most important friends, your family, your kids, your wife, your spouse, right, whoever it is. If there's someone important in your life, then fill up your calendar with the time that you ask yourself, how would the person I want to become spend time with their most important relationships. That's the second life domain. The third life domain is work. Okay, most people start with work. And I actually think we should end with work. And then work subdivides into two kinds of work. Okay, this is where we spend most of our waking hours. Work can need to be divided into what's called reactive work. Reactive work is reacting to emails, reacting to notifications, reacting to taps on the shoulders from colleagues. That's reactive work. And then we have what's called reflective work. Reflective work is the kind of work that can only be done without distraction, planning, strategizing, thinking for God's sakes requires us to work without distraction. Most people spend their entire day doing reactive work, right. They look to their email inbox to tell them what they do. They look at their to do list to tell them what they do. They ask their boss what they should be doing. As opposed to planning at least some time in your day for that reflective work, right, that can only be done without distraction. And if you're not planning that time for reflective work, I promise you, you're running real fast in the wrong direction. So that's how we build that calendar. So when you look at you, your relationships, then your work, now you filled out what your ideal week would look like. Is it going to be perfect? Are you going to follow to the tea? Of course not. You're always going to fall off track from time to time. But now as soon as you fall off track and you're doing something else, even if it sounds important in the minute, you can always look back on that calendar and say, wait a minute, wait a minute, is this traction? Is this what I said I was going to do? Or is it distraction? Is it anything else? It's so funny how you know, when you when you lay it out like that, it's so simple, but I would assume that most people in their entire life, like you mentioned before, they're only ever to even a small degree planning. The reactive work and everything else is just ad hoc. Right. Right. Planning the relationship, the person like I feel like most people go through life without ever purposefully putting any kind of energy into planning those things. And I think that's why you want to you want to have extraordinary things, you want to be an extraordinary person, you have to do extraordinary things, right? You want to be average, do whatever else does. Yeah, but it's not even it's it's so sad how the bar for extraordinary seems to be so low. It's true. These are not complicated concepts. It's very, very true. But you know, the thing is, it's so much easier to have an easy excuse. Right. It's the news. It's Mark Zuckerberg. It's this. It's that it must it's my ADHD. There's so many ways to get out of taking personal responsibility. Just taking a few steps. Right. Just doing a few couple of things here. There's four steps. Right. Master internal triggers that we didn't really talk about it just a little bit around understand this by the way, this is the most important step if you don't do this first, nothing else, you can talk about that a little bit more to understand that remember those internal triggers we talked about earlier boredom anxiety uncertainty. If you don't understand the root cause of the problem, you will always get distracted by one thing or another, whether it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, you're always going to get distracted by something unless you understand what you are trying to escape, what's that uncomfortable icky sticky feeling that some distraction is solving for you. Okay. That's the first and most important step if you don't solve that, nothing else matters that you have to figure out how to master those internal triggers and you don't have to go to therapy for this. You just have to have a tool in your toolkit ready to go so that when you feel bored when you feel anxious when you feel lonely when you feel uncertain, you know what to do with that sensation as opposed to trying to escape it. I don't want to feel it. Let me click it away. Let me scroll it away. Let me drink it away. No, you're going to deal with it in a healthy way that leads it towards traction. Okay, so that's step number one master internal triggers step number two, which we've been talking about the most make time for traction right planning out what it is you're going to do and when you're going to do it sounds so simple. Most people don't take that step because they realize if they did they would actually have to do the hard work. That's the truth. I've heard every. Oh, I work in the services business. I can't plan my time. I have international clients. I have distributed teams. I have kids. I have this. I have all these excuses when we're not willing to face the fact that if we actually said, you know what 11 o'clock I'm going to go to the gym. And then I'm going to go to the gym. That's something people don't want to do. I don't do the behavior. So I'm not going to I'm not going to plan the time because they haven't done step one. They haven't dealt with the uncomfortable sensation in the first place. Okay, so that's why step one is so so so important. So step everyone master internal triggers step number two, make time for traction step number three. Hack back the external triggers. So this is where we talk about the pings, the dings, the rings, even though the only account for about 10% of your distractions. We go through systematically. How do you work through each and every one of those not only the usual suspects, you know, the things on your phone and computer that's kindergarten. That's very, very easy to deal with. I can show you in about five minutes how to make your phone indestractable. The harder stuff that people don't really want to deal with are the stupid meetings that are nothing but distractions that we didn't need to be in the emails that didn't need to be sent or received that are nothing but distractions. Our kids, we love the death, but they can be a huge source of distraction. So we go step by step through each and one of these external triggers. And then the last step is to prevent distraction with packs. A pack is a pre commitment devices when we decide in advance what will be the consequence of getting distracted and we make a pack with ourselves or others to make sure that that doesn't happen. It's the last line of defense. And I promise you if you use these four steps in concert, just do one small thing in each of these four steps. Anyone can become indestractable. I'd like to unpack the first step, those internal triggers. I don't even know if people understand because I just I actually just heard this on another podcast the other day ironically enough. It's funny how it just came up on it was a Chris Williams in podcast speaking about every time you're depressed. You go on Instagram and you look for something funny and then it distracts you from that depression or that anxiety and then a week later, you're still not going to understand why you feel like shit because you felt like in the moment you got over that feeling but it's still like buried down deep inside you. And I don't think that many people before before that, you know, five minute talking point that I heard, I don't think many people truly think, oh, I'm purposefully going on social media because works not going well or relationships not going. I don't know if everybody connects those dots so easily. So is there some science or some research or some just things that you've experienced as to how to understand how these triggers impact you your brain, your mind, how social media maybe alleviate some short term anxiety and some stress. Why do we fall into this loop totally totally and I was on Chris's show my first one when I booked first came out in 2019. So maybe he remembers it from from that episode, but this is what I've been trying to shout from the rooftops is that we keep blaming the thing in front of us when really it's what's going on inside of us and it always has been right I used to be clinically obese. Was I overweight because food tasted good? No, was I overweight because I was hungry? Not really. You know, I was overweight because I was eating my feelings. I ate when I was bored. I ate when I was lonely. I ate when I felt ashamed about how much I had just eaten. That's how I became clinically obese. And if they're honest with you, that's how everyone becomes clinically obese. We're always eating our feelings and in whether and just replace whatever that distraction of choice might be, whether it's too much social media, whether it's too much news, whether it's too much television, too much sports, too much booze, just name, you know, pick your poison. These distractions, there's nothing necessarily wrong with the thing you're using. It's about why you're using it, right? It's it's to what you are escaping when you are using these distractions. And if you can't deal with that deeper reason for why you are escaping, then you're always going to find something to take your mind off that uncomfortable sensation. And so the that realization, I think, should be incredibly empowering because in fact, the reason we do anything and everything, right? The reason you use any product or service is only for one reason only for one reason. Everything you do, everything you buy, everything you click, you always do to modulate your mood. It's to alleviate discomfort. We used to think about carrots and sticks, you know that metaphor of carrots and sticks turns out that's not true, right? That neurologically speaking in the brain, the brain only does what it does for one reason. It gets us to act to escape discomfort because the carrot is the stick. The carrot is the stick. What do I mean by that? Even wanting to feel good craving desire, lusting hunger, wanting pleasure is itself psychologically destabilizing. Does that make sense? Wanting something to feel good is itself uncomfortable. So everything you do is about the desire to escape discomfort, which means therefore that time management is pain management. Money management is pain management, weight management is pain management. It's all pain management. And so in one respect, that's kind of depressing. Wait a minute, I got to deal with these uncomfortable feelings. On the other hand, it's unbelievably empowering because there's really only one source for all of these problems, right? It's that we need to learn how to deal with discomfort in a healthier manner that serves us rather than hurts us. It's so interesting that the carrot, that phrase of carrot is a stick. So when you think about, when you think about improving your life, that actually triggers some, I'm assuming some sort of hormonal response that is stress or anxiety because your brain is understanding the journey that it's going to take. So it doesn't so you have to remove, it's almost like you're removing, you're removing the feeling and the emotion out of it. And you're just looking at it very pragmatically. There's a difference between an emotion and a feeling. So in a moment, we use these words interchangeably in the vernacular, but there's actually a big. I have not done research. I have not done research. Nor have I until I started researching this stuff and wrote two books about it, but it's a very important distinction that an emotion is a physiological response. Okay, it's what happens to your body, right? When you feel thirst, when you feel hunger, when you feel heart palpitations, that is an uncontrolled physiological response. That's an emotion. The feeling is an interpretation is a psychological sensation. It's an interpretation of an emotion. So one of the reasons that one of the ways the methodologies that we get over these internal triggers and use them to lead us towards traction, rather than distraction, is that we have to reframe them. So for example, you know, I've been a professional speaker now for about a little over a decade and one thing you do not want as a professional speaker is to get stage fright. And I used to have terrible stage fright. I used to before I went on stage, I would get the sweaty armpits and I would get the heart palpitations and I would get the dry throat and I would get all these things right before I was about to step on stage. And I started having this dialogue that really made it worse and worse. I started ruminating on this dialogue with myself. You know, maybe I didn't prepare enough. Maybe I'm not cut out for this work. I'm going to mess it up. If I was really good, I wouldn't feel this way. I started this awful dialogue with myself about why I wasn't good enough. And then I came across this research about how you can reframe. And then I completely disconnected. The story I had between the emotion and the feeling, right? The emotion was was these physiological sensations, which I still get. I'll be honest with you. Right now, as I'm talking to you, I still have the heart palpitations and the sweaty armpits and the dry mouth. I still have that. That hasn't gone away. But I interpret it completely different. So now right before I'm about to go on stage, I interpret the sweaty pits and the palpitations and the and the source and the dry throat. As, okay, my heart is beating faster so that I can get more oxygen to my brain so that I can deliver my best talk. Right. So it's not it's not anxiety. It's it's preparedness. Right. I'm rising to the occasion. And that's actually a tool we can use for all of these different sensations. And we want to check Facebook when we're uncertain and we want to Google something when we're lonely and we want to check Tinder, we can reassess that emotion that physiological response with a feeling that serves us. I want to take a second and thank Range Rover Sport for supporting today's episode. Now let's talk about tools that match your ambition. The match, the ambition of everybody who's listening today, who has taken risks, who has upleveled their personal professional development, who has tried to build their own thing. Everybody listening gets it. There is a moment when the thing you're trying to build the challenge that you're taking on, it finally starts to take off. There is like this rush of excitement and possibility and that feeling, that feeling that you get when you get behind of the wheel of a Range Rover Sport because we've all had that perfect drive when the road, the car and you, you're all in perfect harmony. But that's not just by chance. 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But when you understand that physiological response or that emotion, there's a physiological response and then there's the mental interpretation like the feeling of that particular physiological response. Does do not start to train your brain to react like you imagine you do train your brain to react differently because now you understand it differently. But would that reaction not have like a net positive on the original physiological response like if you understand that heart palpitations and sweaty armpits and dry throat is your body preparing and then delivering more oxygen to your brain. Does that not have some sort of feedback loop or eventually that feeling becomes lesser and lesser because you now understand what it actually is versus this scary ambiguous thing that you don't really know how to control. Maybe yeah maybe but the nice thing is even if it doesn't right when you release that expectation so the problem is so I that's what I originally wanted I wanted to see okay if I use reframing because that's what these studies say to do so let me try the reframing. But it's not happening right I still feel them why isn't this going away it's not happening fast enough it's not going to work I'm going to dump it. Okay as opposed to I release that expectation I don't care right I can have the worst panic attack and I'm not scared of it anymore because I know that my reinterpretation tells me that this isn't anxiety it's excitement I'm passionate you can see right now right I'm passionate about this dog and and so you know it's it's all about reframing it so I don't care if I have a crazy hard palpitation or whatever the case might be because I'm telling myself to choose this story that serves me. I love it I think it's very powerful it's very it's very very empowering another thing that could or could not and I'm curious about your opinion on it that can affect that can affect your ability to do this successfully would it be environment does that have a huge impact I mean even before we press record. I was talking about okay just move down to Miami it's it's great for work there's lots of distractions in Miami you can basically go out 24 7 365 if you want to. You're in Singapore and I was I was thinking is there like a reason why he's in Singapore maybe not I have no idea but is there reason why you choose to move to the other side of the world to be in a certain community or or take part in a certain culture and is that help your performance how you work how you optimize yourself so talk to me about that yeah so there's nothing special particularly in terms of Singapore when it comes to distraction per se I mean there is you you're right that our environment. Can shape our behavior or at least make certain behaviors easier so for example in Singapore. This is the first time in my life I don't have a car when I live in the states I always own a car in Singapore you don't need a car everything is so convenient downtown and you know I can get to my coffee shop and the ice bath club and the the gym all this stuff is within walking distance so result of that is that I get probably 25,000 steps per day just by like living my life I don't have to plan to go to the gym to get my step. And so in that respect sure I think your environment can can greatly affect your behavior at least make it a lot easier but there's nothing particularly when it comes to distraction about living in Singapore. What I do think is an under utilized tool is finding like minded people so one of the things that I recommend as the fourth step in in this indestructible model of preventing distraction with packs is finding a focus friend. So if you can find I especially when people are working from home if you can find one other person maybe read the book together you know convince each other this is an important thing to do and just sitting down together at a coffee shop or you know wherever you can get together co working space maybe and just saying okay we're both going to work on whatever it is that we need to do without distraction for this period of time. And just that that social pack you make with another person who has a similar goal that's how you can design your environment by making that social pack to say okay we're going to sit here 45 minutes and we're going to we're going to get to do what we said we're going to do obviously not just having a not just having a person appear but your partner plays a big role in this as well. So for everybody who is listening to this who has a partner at home that when I first started dating and got married they didn't have your book and they weren't time blocking their life. I mean this 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. So I think getting a partner on board is probably one of the most important things because they're they're living in your space every single day so how do you manage that I mean you have a wife she she deals with all this like what was the process even for yourself to get somebody so close to to understand the system. That's a great plan I hear this all the time of look I'm trying to become indestructible but can you fix her can you fix him I get that all the time. And you really can't you can't make someone change in fact the best way to get someone not to change is to tell him you want to change we want them to change but there is something you can do it and this is a lesson I had to learn for myself so when I looked at my values and we talked about values earlier and I talked and I thought to myself what are some of my values. One of my values was to be a good husband right to be in an equitable marriage 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 had tons of fights over kind of the same thing right that. She felt that I wasn't pulling my weight and she would complain to me right she would say you know can't you see the garbage is sitting there why don't you take it out can't you see our daughter needs to be fed why aren't you feeding her like why aren't you making lunch and my response to her was honey honey honey. If you want me to do something don't yell at me don't get upset don't nag just tell me what you need me to do and I'll do it right and I thought well there that's a solution so simple but I didn't realize is that I was asking her to do yet another job which was to be my camp counselor right I was adding even additional information additional responsibility to the relationship on her side and that really wasn't fair. 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 and now we I cannot remember the last time we fought it's been years since we had an argument and I'll tell you why because when I started time boxing now my calendar became an artifact right to became a physical thing that I could print out and I could show her. And so every Sunday night after I make my calendar for the week we sit down together maybe for 10 15 minutes it takes us never more than that she has her calendar I have my calendar and we do it's called a schedule sink schedule synchronization schedule sink we sit down together and we just look each other's calendars and we say okay here's all the stuff that needs to happen my daughter needs to be taken here on this day and who's going to cook lunch on that day and who's responsible for dinner and who needs this we just sit down and we look at all these responsibilities and we make sure. That they're taking care of so that she knows where I'm going to be and I know approximately where she's going to be we look each other's calendar and through this schedule sink I realized I wasn't playing my weight 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 I know exactly when it's my day to make sure that the laundry is done or whatever the case might be it's in my schedule this has been life changing by the way you can also adapt this technique for the world. Workplace so a lot of times I work with people who say hey I read your book I love it I'm indistractable but my boss keeps distracting me what do I do about them right I 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 this is where the schedule sink comes in handy so when you sit down with your boss what this is preventing by the way is the number one absolute worst piece of personal productivity out there let me go ahead and kill this golden calf right now the worst piece of personal productivity advice is if you want to be more productive you have to learn how to say no yes that is the worst personal productivity advice you're going to tell your boss you're going to tell your wife no I can't tell my wife no I've heard that advice so much I've heard that advice I'm pretty sure I've tweeted about that advice too because it in theory it makes so much sense in theory it makes so much sense it's like well if I just said no more 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 people are trying to shiny objects and grow me and saying no repeatedly actually does help me focus so that that but but I get that not everybody's situation and by the way if I had a if I had investors or a board or a C suite like I can't say no to them because then it like I'm in a very particular situation at this point in my life where I'm running my own business the smaller business don't have investors but this is not universal like universally applicable advice by any means so 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 not to say no you're going to piss them off you're going to get fired instead what you want to ask is when you're not saying no you're saying when so when you do this schedule sync with your boss and you say hey boss here's my schedule for the week okay you see here's what I'm playing to do for my nine to five or whatever you're working hours are okay here's this meeting here's when I plan to check email here's when I'm I'm doing whatever project you asked me to do okay here's this here's my schedule for the week now you see this list over here I'm on this other piece of paper on this other piece of paper hear all the things you asked me to do that I'm having trouble fitting into my schedule and now you're going to ask your boss to do their most important job your bosses most important maybe they're only job the only job of a manager manager has one job that job is to prioritize that everything else is details a boss's job is to prioritize so you're asking your boss to do their most important job help you prioritize here's this list of things that I'm having trouble fitting in my schedule how would you like me to prioritize and what they're going to do invariably is to say hey you know that meeting that you said you were going to be that's actually nothing important but this project over here that's way more important can you swap those out 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 so don't let them micromanage you manage up 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 very very smart it's so smart and I would I would assume that yeah like you mentioned like the the reaction from the manager or reaction from the spouse is just always been positive because now they understand exactly what you're doing it's almost like it so it's it's an exercise what this also forces you to do is have a massive amount of self awareness all the strategies that you're talking about are forcing self awareness what I think is a positive thing anyways it's a very positive thing absolutely unexamined life is not worth living right I have a question for you because obviously you've written the book on habits as well and if somebody's trying to incorporate this they want to be successful at it the successful at it they want to they want to maintain it they want to include this in their life they're bought into the concept so out of everything that you know with habits or they're 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 yeah so if you were going to boil down 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 the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought meaning that distraction is not a moral failing it's not a character flaw there's nothing wrong with you you're not broken in any way it's simply that you haven't learned how to deal with these impulses that's all it is it's an impulse control issue but the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought that if you plan ahead there's no distraction you can't overcome but if you wait the last minute right if the chocolate cake is on the fork on the way to your mouth you're going to eat it if the cigarette is in it in your hand even though you're trying to quit smoking if it's in your hand you're gonna smoke it if you sleep next to your phone every night it's gonna be the first thing you reach for before you even say hello to your loved one so if you wait the last minute it's too late they're gonna get you right they've won but if you plan ahead if you take steps today to prevent distraction there's no distraction you can't overcome tomorrow so when you take these steps you feel like long term that's that's the answer to actually incorporating the successfully it's you're taking the steps rampively right you can't you can't it's the last minute right the the reason time boxing works is not because you quickly quickly make a plan for the day as you're as you're going through the day you made it ahead of time so that it's accordance with you or that and you did it right it's not imposed upon you you know but he's being your mommy and daddy and telling you what to do this is what you want to do to live without regret and so and so that's that's really really what it's what it's all about is 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 gonna do and and one one more thing one one more quick thing there's a great Henry Ford quote at least he's attributed to saying whether you believe you can or you can't you're right so I know that many people listening if you've listened this long in the episode are thinking that's not gonna work for me I've got this reason I've got this excuse I've got this condition I've got this trauma I've got this thing that happened to me and therefore my life is different it won't work and you know what if you think that you're right because you haven't even tried and so that's actually if I 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 of making a difference near what's one thing that you've learned since you published this book that you wish you had included in the book one thing I wish I would have learned before I would have known before I published the book you know it was pretty lucky actually so the book came out in 2019 and then COVID happened in 2020 and I remember telling my wife in the middle of COVID when there were all these internal triggers right the fear the uncertainty the all the internal triggers were happening at the same time and I remember literally opening my book back up and reading to myself what I had written to remind myself okay this is how the process works follow the process and it got me through I have to say really got me through I think one thing that's different that I would include in the updated edition is how prevalent work from home is today that it wasn't back then it doesn't change the fundamental model I just think the problems are different right the problems when I wrote the book were or more around what do I do because my boss keeps tapping me on the shoulders and asking for TPS reports every you know half an hour you know those kind of in office type type environments versus now people have a lot more questions about well what do I do when it's not my boss that's distracting me it's my kids if my dog it's the phone it's the UPS guy those are the kind of things that I didn't put in the first edition of the book which will probably come in the next edition but I do think that the framework is even more applicable not even not more applicable but there's more distraction than ever because now you can do whatever you want there's no VPN that's stopping you from going on Instagram or or Facebook or YouTube so the world is open to you if you if you if you're working from home so I think this is even more important it's a great no he's looking over your shoulder and saying oh what are you doing no not at all no you could do whatever the hell you want it may not work out for work but listen if you want to keep the job if you want to if you want to progress professionally if you want to do all the other things are important doing life I think that's why it's so important because you can just be literally on YouTube all day and that's not beneficial to anybody um where do you want to send people I know the book uh it came out in 2019 obviously you can get it on amazon or wherever you get your books will drop it in the show notes as well um other websites social that you just want to leave people with so they can go check out your work yeah my website is near and far that's my blog near and far.com and uh I I tend to kind of blog my books as I'm thinking through different ideas so I'm working on a new book now so you can kind of follow that journey if that's interesting uh and uh that's spelt n-i-r like my first name n-i-r and far.com and the book is titled indistractable at a control your attention and choose your life all right and then uh I will definitely bring you back on when when your new book's coming up and then you're doing the PR tour for that we'll have to bring you back on for that but outside of that uh the last question ask everyone and I'll probably ask it again if we ever do some more content together because I think it's fun to listen how the answers change but if you go back and tell your 20 year old self one lesson after your incredible career what would that lesson be? oh that's a good one um probably I would tell my younger self that things are gonna work out things are gonna be okay uh I think uh uh I tend to uh or at least I used to I'm not this way anymore but I think I used to make things a big deal right that like that things mattered and I think the older I got the more I realized this too shall pass right the good stuff the bad stuff we're just a tiny blue dot in a gigantic vast black vacuum of a universe and none of this stuff at the end of the day matters so enjoy the ride while you can