Nir Eyal - How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life

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What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Float Shark podcast with your boys, Mount Wolf and Joe Fear. Yo.

Hi there.

Welcome back.

Hey, we're back. And we're not brain dead yet because we're doing this intro earlier in the day.

We're actually getting out of the way earlier.

Yeah, we've time boxed this time to make an intro right after.

I see what you did there.

You get it?

You get it.

What did I do there?

I'm gonna leave that loop open for our audience to figure out.

All right, well, you figure out what timeboxing is all about pretty dang soon with Nier Il.

I don't know what the title of this episode is yet, but I bet the title of this episode will give it away anyway.

Yeah, probably. All right, so today we are talking to Nier Il, and this dude is like the master, just indistractible machine man. That's not a machine, but he's a man. He's a mere mortal. But he. He's a mere mortal. He's like, whoa, this is good. Near and far immortal. Yeah, this guy, genuinely just a very nice guy.

Oh, he's super, super friendly and very eloquent. Like, he just has a way of. Of talking in ways that make sense and are easy to understand. And he's very clear and he pronunciates. Just very eloquent person.

Yeah, he's a good speaker. He's a very good speaker. He's like a professional or something. He like us, he done talk, talk good. And we are still learning to talk, even with this podcast going on for many years.

But yeah, with Nir. I think the first time I heard his name was I was actually watching a TED Talk on. On YouTube and it was with Joseph Gordon Levitt, you know, the actor from 30 Rock and Batman and a lot of Inception. A lot of things, right. He was giving a TED Talk about the sort of addictive nature of mobile apps and Facebook and things like that. And towards the end of his TED Talk as his reference, he said, if you want to dive deeper on this stuff, you need to go study this guy near.

Right?

And so that was the first time I heard his name. And then James Schramko connected us with Nir.

It was like a week later, and.

We'Re like, holy shit, I just saw that he just got mentioned on a TED Talk. And then I went on YouTube and I found out near himself actually has a TED Talk, not a TEDx talk, but a legit TED Talk.

He's a legit folks.

And I watched his TED Talk and I got hooked on that. And so I went and read the book Hooked. And Simon. Yeah. So right now his book is called Indistractable, his newest book. But his book prior to that was called Hooked, and I thought Hooked was his newest book. I didn't apparently do my research.

I said, matt, you're wrong. And it was right before the interview.

Yeah.

And so as it turns out, before getting on this interview, I read the book Hooked. Joe read the book Indistractable. So we kind of had this sort of wider range of knowledge around the topic because we've read both of his books separately.

Yeah.

Yeah. And you watched a TED Talk, which I have not done yet, but I want to. I will. But yeah. Nier seems to be everywhere. He's near and far in the podcast world. Everywhere. And this is a reference to website, by the way. So if you go to near and far.com, that's.

Yeah.

And sue, link to the TED Talk below on this episode. I want to make sure people can see the TED Talk.

Is this how we communicate to our team now?

Yes.

Yes. We don't do Slack. See, this is. This is smart because we're time boxing this time to communicate to our team so we don't have to bugger in Slack. It's great.

Well, the whole idea of these intros is to give people, like a little bit of insight into our world. If they don't want to hear what's going on in the EGP business, you just skip the first five minutes.

But why would you do that? There's so many good lessons that you can come from are relatability things.

Yeah.

So. All right, so I read. Yeah. Indistractable. I thought it was freaking amazing. And it actually. And I didn't mention this on the podcast, but there's. And I don't think he even went into it at all, actually. But email is being. That's kind of my. Has been a mental block in a weird way. Like I'll dwell over like a bunch of emails just because. I mean, I could say reasons out of my ass all day long, but reading his book, he had a whole section on emails and how to basically just use simple tags and then this time boxing concept and combining those two things, making it simple on yourself. But I've been blasting through emails and finally getting myself into a nice rhythm and I feel like there's a. I do a lot more of the communication between the two of us and I noticed I'm like, oh, crap. This is where I get distracted and I get in my head a lot. And that's what near I love about indistractable. And just this talk and the podcast is there's a lot of inner stuff that we gotta work through before we start shaming or blaming the externals, like email or bleep blops on our phones.

Yeah.

So that's what in a lot of this talk I feel like was in the internal dialogue talk and how to manage ourselves first.

I mean, for me, a big sort of roadblock that to this day trying to overcome is I tend to procrastinate, especially in the morning. I take a really, really, really long time to sort of get into the groove of getting work done in the day, you know, like, like, like what? So I'll. I'll come into my office maybe at like 9:00am to, to kind of start working. But the first, like, hour and a half of my day is often, you know, looking on social media or reading some blog posts or, you know, spending 10 minutes listen to a podcast or watching a couple videos on YouTube. There's almost like nothing productive that I do in the first, like, hour of my day. And then at some point, like a trigger shifts in my brain where I go, okay, I've been doing this for too long. Shit. I need to get down to business and actually start getting some stuff done. And because I feel like I sort of killed the first hour of my day, I feel like I'm operating with an extra sense of urgency throughout the day because I killed the time. And what I'm actually taking away from this interview is it's actually okay to do that in the morning if I'm putting planning on doing that in the morning, putting strains around it, right? Like, if I tell myself I'm giving myself an hour in the morning to just sort of warm up my brain, just watch the YouTube videos I want to watch, read blog posts if I want to, check some emails if I want to, you know, whatever, right? The stuff that's a distraction, quote, unquote. If I give myself the opportunity and the window to do that stuff in that window, it's no longer a distraction. It's actually the purpose that I set aside for that window. That was sort of my big takeaway about the whole procrastination thing.

I like it, man. And it's. It's. That's what I think everyone will get from this episode is that you can be in control of your actions and it. And those actions could be you just like you said, dicking around on YouTube or something like that or listening to podcasts and you know, non business y. Or maybe it doesn't seem productive. But that's what I got from this talk with Nir especially is that we can give ourself the freedom to do anything we want as long as we're putting little constraints on our time and then following our constraints because that's where and that's what's helping with my emails is I've literally been putting. And this I think is in from his book. He doesn't talk about it in this podcast but the way that he looks at email is he'll he'll time block or he calls them time boxing certain times every single day. I think he said, I don't know but something he's a daily time box and then one day a week he'll have a three hour time box to answer any emails that are non urgent. So his daily. And this is how I've been talking.

We didn't talk about that.

No. So in his book and there's so many practical things like this, but this is my biggest. Get the damn book people. Get the damn book. Indistractible by the way is what it's called. We'll link it. It's all linked up. But yeah, the email process for me that I use now from him is basically two tags. It's do I need to respond this today like the today tag in Gmail or is this a this week tag? And then with the time boxing I now can basically answer those things accordingly and it's working. So it's really cool.

Cool.

And we're also gonna have a link in the show notes to where you can actually go and download a document that lays out a lot of this process for free. He's given that to you guys. So very, very cool. And speaking of notes.

Well, templates as well.

Yes, templates.

It's like a scheduling template I think and some other stuff he gives a lot of free.

Have you seen it yet? I haven't actually looked at it yet.

I have. It's actually there's a copy of it in the book too.

Oh cool.

But yeah, there's like a. I think there's literally like an app online you can get for free. So check it out in the show notes. Actually we don't have the link in front of us right now. We'll just tell you we'll put it.

In the show notes. But yeah, speaking of notes, we are taking notes on this episode we are always. Yes.

Why wouldn't we?

What's the phone number? Joe said he finally has it memorized.

Well, if you get out your phone, we are now doing this new thing called text messaging. SMS it's called. Okay, so get at your phone. Step one, get the little dialer thing out because you don't have those rotary phones anymore. 38470 is the number you want to text.

What are we texting to that number?

We are texting the word comp.

C O M P 38470 comp. 38470 comp.

Alright, so 38470 text comp. And you will then get the notes for this episode.

That's literally how we memorized it was by making a jingle out of it.

We have to. And that's why you'll know it forever.

And you're going to hate us because now you're just going to walk up to to us at conferences and be like you're the 38470 comp guys.

We should get a T shirt made. Just hand them all out stickers. T shirts.

Yeah, because everybody's gonna wanna wear a T shirt with a phone number on it.

Hey, I mean if we make it cool enough looking people wear anything. Yeah.

But anyway, 38470. If you text the word comp to that number, we will send you the notes to this episode. And this isn't like the typical show notes. This is detailed step by step process notes of everything. We talked about resources. All of that stuff is all gonna be in these notes. Or you can also go to hustle flowchart.com comp if you're at a desktop computer, that's a better way to get it. If you're at your computer. If you're at your phone, text comp to 38470 and we'll shoot you those notes. Assuming you got them in time. There's about a two week window to grab these notes from this episode from the date it goes live. After that two week episode those notes get locked into our vaults. And then if you're an EPIC member, you still have access. But if you get them in time, they're free right now.

Yeah, we got to put these constraints because as near as you'll learn with nearby things don't get done. Yeah, you won't be happy unless you're got some constraints around this. So speedy, get that phone out and go opt in at to get those notes. We told 38470 Comp.

Yeah, I was going to challenge You. I'm like, did he already forget the number?

I was thinking about it. It was the first time I memorized it.

Alrighty, this is one of our longer intros. So let's go over and talk to Nir because he's a really, really smart dude and I love this conversation.

Let's do it. Hey, Nir, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Great to be here.

Of course. Yeah. We were saying it's been a little while since we were going back and forth for a long time since James Schramko introduced us to all of us together. And like I was telling you, anybody that James sends over is an automatic amazing guest.

Yeah, he's great. Yeah. Yeah. Really good to be here. I'm so glad we could finally make it work out here.

Yeah. And Matt and I, we just. When it's topics like what you talk about, I think we just both have an urge to just lear. Learn as much as we can and improve. Obviously, you have our distraction. It's just the focus that we put into life and business. And so that's why we both nerded out on. I took one of your books and then he took the other.

It was pretty funny.

So you're the author of Indistractable and Hooked is the one that Matt read.

And it seems like it's hitting a vein right now in just business and life. And I think it's. I don't know, I feel like it's kind of catching wind. I'm seeing you everywhere, actually, which is really cool. So it must be working.

It's been really great. I have to say that I think.

The book is really meant to empower people to control their attention and choose their life. And I think we've kind of hit peak pessimism in a way. We've been told so much now that it's technology doing it to us and the algorithms and Facebook this and iPhone that and technology is this. And it's all. It's addicting. Everybody, everyone is hijacking our brains. And I think people are a little bit starting to think, okay, well, what do I do about it? Right? Like, you can only shake your fist at these companies so long before you say to yourself, okay, but what do I do? And that was kind of my struggle. You know, the past five years writing this book is I first. Before I set out to write the book, I actually read everybody else's book on the topic. And I did the digital detox and I did the 30 day plan and I even got rid of my iPhone and I got a smartphone instead. And I even went on ebay, and I bought myself a word processor from the 1990s with no Internet connection. They don't even make these anymore. And I thought to myself, okay, great. Well, I got rid of the technology. That's what all the books tell me is the problem. So, you know, now I'm not gonna get distracted. And then I would look at my bookcase and I'd say, oh, you know what? I've been meaning to do some research in that book, or let me just clean up my desk real quick. Or, you know what? My trash can is kind of overflowing. Let me take that out. And I kept getting distracted even when I wanted to do something, I kept getting distracted even when I stopped using all this technology that they say is bad for us. Well, clearly, even when I removed the technology, the problem persisted, so it could not have been the technology. And so that kind of is why I went down this deeper journey to really understand the root cause of the problem as opposed to what I think is just the symptom of the problem.

Yeah, I like that you brought that up, because that does seem like the whole thing is like, ah, just cut everything off. Don't look at social media. You know, go get. Yeah, go get the dumb phones, not a smartphone. And. Yeah, and that's not sustainable, it seems like with just the way that the world is going these days.

I remember seeing a meme just on. On. On Facebook or something, and the irony is not lost, but I remember seeing, like, a meme on Facebook or Instagram or something like that. And it was a picture of, like, the 2018, 2019, and everybody was looking at their iPhone on a. On a train. And the caption said something to the effect of nobody looks up anymore. And then there was a picture from, like, 1950 of everybody on the train, and everybody was staring down at their newspaper. And the caption was, nobody ever looks up anymore.

Yeah, yeah, that's actually right. And you can even go back even farther. I was shocked when I started doing this research for the book. I found that all the way back to the time of Plato, Plato talked about this nature he called Akrasia, this tendency that we all have to do things against our better interests. He was complaining about how distracting the world was 2,500 years before the iPhone. So this is clearly not a new problem. That being said, I do believe that if you are looking for distraction, because technology products. And I should know, as someone who wrote the book Hooked, I know their tips and tricks. I Know how they use your deeper psychology to get you hooked to their products. If you are looking for distraction, then it's easier than ever to find. I mean, technology is clearly built to be more persuasive and it is more pervasive than ever before. So if you're looking for this stuff, you're going to find it. That's why I think the skill of the century is going to be to become indistractable. That I think there is going to be a bifurcation out there of two different kinds of people. The people who just let their time and attention and their minds and their life be controlled by somebody else. And those who say, nope, I am indistractable. This is who I am. I do not let my time and attention be controlled by others. I choose how I spend my time and my life.

Yeah, I agree, because it's. Well, at least in indistractable, you have so many just ways that, I mean, this goes not only to tech and business and email and all that in your office, but all the way to literally your relationships, your love life with your spouse. And there's just so many ways that if you can master distraction and understand what's happening, not to you, but just all of us and the science that's behind it. I think that's what's so interesting.

There's algorithms everywhere, and it's not just technology. Right? I mean, we saw that in the research. I did the number one source of distraction for office workers. I thought it would be the iPhone or your phone, your email, Slack channels. Turns out 80% of survey respondents said the number one cause of distraction was their colleagues. It was their open floor plan offices leading people to say, hey, can I just talk to you for a quick sec? Or did you hear that bit of office gossip? Or can I just interrupt you real quick? And that turned out to be the number one source of distraction. So distraction can come in many, many different forms. I thought I was going to write a book about tech distraction, but it turns out that it comes in all different forms of mediums. It could be your kids can be a distraction, your work can be a distraction, your spouse, news. All kinds of things can distract you from what you really want to do with your time in your life.

Yeah, I would agree with that. I would say in our current business, you know, we don't. We're not all working in the same office together, but our team is all on slack, so we all communicate on Slack. And I could see how the sort of same thing applies. We're not, you know, walking over to the water cooler and talking to somebody at an office, but our Slack is kind of going all day long and that's what's kind of pulling our attention away from. From the. Doing the actual work.

Yeah. And that's where I know you make a good point where there's group channels for people just on the slack vein. Because I think a lot of our audience is actually probably in a similar situation. If it's not their own team, it's with contractors or buddies of theirs. And these group channels, you say that's where the time suck is. When it's a one on one conversation, it's a little bit better. But you say just basically create boundaries around everything you do, meaning any kind of group channel as well, because that could get out of hand pretty dang quickly.

Yeah. And there's really a right way and a wrong way to use this stuff. I mean, we're a little bit jumping ahead. So we're already on step three when it comes to how to hack back these external triggers. And so there's a whole chapter in the book specifically about group chat like Slack and Hipchat and, you know, many products that people use. And there are very specific ways that we can use those products more effectively. But I think it's more important, I think, to back up and understand what the root cause of distraction really, really is that we tend to blame what's called the external triggers, the pings, the dings, the rings, our colleagues, anything that leads us towards distraction. But it turns out actually from a root cause perspective, that the main source of distraction for most of us is not the external triggers, but in fact, it's the internal triggers. Internal triggers are these uncomfortable emotional states that we seek to escape from. And so I think it's this cold, hard, icky, sticky truth that many of us don't want to acknowledge, that the reason we keep reaching for some kind of distraction to take our mind off of what we're working on is because we're not comfortable in our own heads. Let's face it, right? We reach for Facebook when we're feeling lonely, we check Google when we're uncertain, when we're bored, where do we go? We check sports scores, we check the news, we check Reddit. We use these products and services because we don't want to feel what we are feeling. And so what I learned in my research is that if we don't tackle that root cause of the problem, if we actually don't understand why we get distracted in the first place we will always find one thing or another, especially in the workplace, that when people feel out of control, when they feel in terms of a lack of agency, when they don't feel like they, what they're doing is really having an impact. Well, what do you do? You know, we know that there is a confluence of two factors in the workplace that literally drive us crazy. Literally drive you crazy. It's these two conditions that cause anxiety and depression disorder. And these two conditions are high expectations coupled with low control. If you have high expectations with high control, you're fine. But it's when you have high expectations and low control, that's when you're in trouble psychologically. And what do people do when they feel this lack of control? They send more stupid emails. They call more superfluous meetings out of this desperate need to feel agency, to feel controlled. And so not only do they distract themselves, it's one thing if you, you know, if you putz around on YouTube or check espn.com or something, that's okay, now you're distracted. The problem in the workplace is that when people have these psychological conditions that many people suffer from, it's not just clinical depression, it's just that, that malaise, that feeling of being not in, not having agency and control, they distract everyone else in the office as well. And then it becomes a chronic problem throughout the organization.

That is true.

This discussion's kind of cutting deep right now with our own current visit. We're actually in a scenario right now in our business where there's a partnership that we're kind of in talks with and kind of trying to figure out right now. And we're really excited about the potential of it, but we're just kind of waiting on other people to discuss it. So we feel that pain. And I do see it sort of manifest itself by us having this desire to get on more calls with people and talk it out and you know, have discussions and you know, get other people's opinions and insights on it. And that seems to be how we cope with that kind of thing. There's this high expectation but low control over, over it actually happening at the pace that we want it to happen at. So that's what we find ourselves doing, is just, just trying to have more conversations around it.

Yeah, yeah. Isn't, isn't. See, this is such an important insight because the knee jerk reaction is to always blame the thing outside of us. When it comes to distraction, we tend to fall into these two categories of people. There are the blamers and the shamers. The Blamers, they say, oh, it's my iPhone, it's slack, it's Facebook, it's this modern world. It's something outside of me that's doing it to me. Those are the blamers. Then you have what we call the shamers. The shamers say, and this is the category I used to fall into, okay, maybe there's something wrong with me. Oh, man, you know what? Maybe I am lazy or maybe I'm an imposter. I'm not really good at this job, am I? What are people going to think? There must be something wrong with. Maybe I have a short attention span. We shame ourselves into thinking there's something wrong with us. And for the vast majority of us, there's nothing wrong with you. You're not a bad person. You just don't have the skills to properly cope with these uncomfortable emotional triggers. And you need to learn those skills. So we don't want to be blamers, we don't want to be shamers. We want to be claimers. Claimers acknowledge that this stuff isn't your fault. Okay? You didn't invent email, you didn't invent group chat, you didn't invent Facebook, you didn't invent that piece of chocolate cake that you want to have but you know, you shouldn't if you're trying to lose weight. You didn't invent that stuff. It's not your fault, but it is your responsibility. And so while we can't control what we feel, we can't control the boredom, the stress, the anxiety, the fatigue, whatever it is that we're experiencing, we can control how we react to that discomfort. Right? That's the nature of responsibility, is the ability to respond in a way that leads you towards traction, towards things you want to do versus distraction, these things that lead you off track.

That's good because I could see that the blaming and the shaming and I would fall more. Like you said yourself, or how you used to be is more the side, more with the shaming, but not always. But that's the self talk. And that self talk is so powerful. Powerful. And that can seep in all areas of your life and, you know, affect everything in a very mood way.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And ironically, the part that makes the shaming so pernicious is that when we shame ourselves, we feel even worse.

Right.

When we tell ourselves these shameful things that it's something wrong with us, and, you know, we tend to feel worse. And what do we do when we feel worse? We tend to be more likely to get distracted. So it totally backfires on us. Us?

Yeah.

Now, I'm curious. We kind of skipped over this in the beginning, but how did you get into this work? Was there some sort of catalyst or something that made you decide to kind of devote this much time into this?

Yeah. So for me, it was really this seminal moment that made me reconsider my relationship with distraction was when I was with my daughter a few years ago. We had this afternoon together, and she had this activity book of things that daddies and daughters could do together. And one of the activities in the book was to ask each other this question that if you could have any superpower, what superpower would you want? And I remember the question verbatim. But I can't tell you what my daughter said, because in that moment, I decided to look at my phone. There's something. Something beeped or buzzed or whatever. And I picked up my phone and I looked at it, and my daughter got the message that whatever was on my phone was more important than she was. And I told her to hold on just a second. I just need to do this one quick thing. But by the time I looked up from my phone, she left the room and decided to play with some toy outside. And I realized I'd blown it, right? I'd blown this perfect daddy daughter moment. And it wasn't the only time it happened. It happened on more than one occasion with my daughter. It would happen when I sit down at my desk and decide I was going to work on that big project and somehow I procrastinate and do something else. It would happen when I would tell myself, I'm going to go to the gym, and yet I'd find myself checking Instagram or doing something else that was not what I intended to do. And so that's when I decided, wow, if I wanted one superpower, it would be the superpower to be indistractable. I mean, imagine what would happen. What would your life be like if you simply did what you said you would do if you lived with personal integrity? I mean, that, to me, is a superpower. That is an amazing ability that I wanted for myself. And so that kind of led me down this journey to first read other books on the topic. And those didn't cut it, as I mentioned earlier. And so I wanted to dive deeper and figure out, like, what was the solution for me that worked in my life. And so five years later, not only do I have a tactic and a methodology that really does work in my own life, it's backed by peer reviewed Studies. So everything in the book has, you know, there's 20 pages of citations. It's not just, you know, here's my personal methodology that no one else has verified. And it only works because I say it does. You know, take a cold shower at 4am I don't know, like, where's the study? I want to see the research. And so all the methodologies in the book are backed by peer reviewed studies. And so that was really important to me that not only is it, is it effective, but it's also credible. This is, this is, many of the research in the book is 30, 40 year old research, but applied to these new modern challenges that we have around distraction.

Yeah. And as you said all the way back to Plato days, 2,500 years ago, there's something in us as humans that if we can control the distractions in our actions to be more focused and present on whatever it is we're trying to do.

Talking to your daughter and having that moment is a prime example. I just had a baby myself, so I'm like, I can see that. I don't want to do that. And thank you for giving us the tools to prevent something like that happening.

Absolutely. And how to raise our kids. Because look, the fact of the matter is, if you think the world is distracting today, just wait a few years. It's only going to become more distracting as technology progresses. We're going to have virtual reality and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. I mean, I'm telling you, the world that our children will inherit will be even more distracting than our world. So it is imperative that we ourselves learn how to be indistractable and that we teach others how to become indistractable as well.

Yeah.

Now this is, this is kind of a weird question and hopefully it's not a dumb question, but is procrastination related to the same kind of things? Because I know in my personal scenario, when I'm sort of working on something, I'm pretty focused and dialed in. I think. I personally struggle with procrastinating more than I struggle with distractions while I'm actually, you know, doing my work. I'm curious if that kind of falls in the same vein or if there's science that's kind of similar around procrastination, like there is to the distraction stuff.

Yeah, no, it's a fantastic question. It's not a dumb question at all. It's a terrific question because it leads us to force us to define what is distraction. So the best way to understand what distraction is is to Understand the opposite of distraction, what distraction is not. So if you think to yourself, okay, what's the opposite of distraction? Most people will tell you it's focus. But I don't agree. The opposite of distraction is not focus. Focus is what you do when you are not distracted. The opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction is traction. So if you look at the entomology of the words, in fact, traction and distraction both come from the same Latin root trajare, which means to pull. And you'll notice that both traction and distraction end in the same six letter word. A, C, T, I, O, N. That spells action. So traction is any action that pulls you towards what you want to do. Things that you do with intent. The opposite of traction is distraction. Anything that pulls you away from what you plan to do with intent. So this is super important for two reasons. Number one, anything can be a distraction. So if you sit down at your desk, this used to happen to me all the time. Tell me if this sounds familiar. I'd sit down at my desk and I'd say, okay, now I'm going to work on that big project. Now I'm going to do that thing that I finally need to get done, the thing that I've been procrastinating on. Here I go. I'm going to get to work. But first let me check email, right? First let me scroll that Slack channel. Let me do that one quick Google search I've been meaning to do about this one thing that at work, right? And so we let distraction trick us into prioritizing the urgent at the expense of the important.

And that's a huge problem, right? We keep doing the urgent stuff, we keep reacting and we have no time to actually focus on the important stuff. So anything that takes you off track from what you plan to do is a distraction. Now.

All procrastination is a form of distraction. But not all distractions are procrastination. So for example, when I was with my daughter and I had planned to be fully present with her, I wasn't procrastinating. When I got distracted with my phone, that wasn't procrastination. I wasn't putting anything off. That's the definition of procrastination. It was that I wanted to do one thing and I wasn't fully present doing it. My mind was elsewhere. I was doing something else when what I really wanted to do was to be with my daughter. So all procrastination is a form of distraction. But not all distraction is procrastination. So just as Anything can be a distraction, anything can be traction. So this is really important as well, because, you know, so many people out there want to guilt us into making us believe that somehow some pastimes are morally inferior to others. Oh, you playing a video game, you watching YouTube, you on Facebook, that is way morally superior or, sorry, way morally inferior to what I do with my time. You know, me watching football for three hours, that's okay. But you playing a video game, that's not okay. And I think that's rubbish. That's ridiculous. Anything you want to spend your time on, as long as you plan to do it with intent, is traction. So, you know, in my schedule, I plan time to go on social media, I go on Instagram, I go on YouTube, sometimes I play a video game. There's nothing wrong with it if I have planned time for it, if I use it on my schedule, not on the app makers, not on someone else's schedule. So there should be no guilt involved with anything that you plan to do with your time. The problem is when we say we're going to do one thing and we do something else. And the reason this is so terrible is because when you live your life like this, if you allow yourself to constantly get distracted, you are reinforcing a self image that you're a loser, that you don't do what you say, that you're lying to yourself. I would do this all the time, by the way. I'm patient zero. I hope that's come through. I wrote this book for me first. First and foremost, I would say I was going to work out, but I didn't. I would say I was going to eat right, but I wouldn't. I would say I would stop procrastinating and work on that big project, but I'd delay it another day. And so every time we do that, we are reinforcing our identity to ourselves. And that over time, we begin to believe this is who we are. This is just how I am. Whereas when you become indistractable, you are the kind of person, the definition of becoming indistractable is you're the kind of person who strives to do what they say they're going to do. You live with personal integrity. You're as honest with yourself as you are with other people. And when you live your life that way, you're reinforcing this identity that. Yeah, you know what? When I say I'm going to do something, I do it. That's the kind of person I am. And that becomes incredibly empowering.

I love that, because that was actually my biggest takeaway after reading the book. You can almost set yourself up to win with micro commitments to yourself and just, just get the traction going, the momentum going that right direction. I mean, as simple as making your bed in the morning. I remember watching, I forget it was a Navy commander, I believe, talking about that's the most important thing. The first thing in the morning is make your bed. Okay, I can see that. But I started doing it and it actually does set me up in this kind of motivated feeling for the morning and sets up for the rest of the day. And it's just these little micro things I could see moving the right direction.

Yeah. And if, look, making your bed isn't your thing, I'm not going to judge you. I would even argue if you want to wake up in the morning and play an hour of video games, go for it. But plan to play that hour of video games and then stop when you say you will. That's the most important tactic. The reason that doing what you say you're going to do is so important. It's not make the bed, it's not the bed itself that matters. It's the fact that you it, you are proving to yourself that you have agency. It's called an internal locus of control versus an external locus of control. And we know that people who have an internal locus of control, they believe that they can affect the world based on their actions. These people are much more successful, they have a higher sense of well being, they're much more likely to accomplish their goals. It's just a much better way to live. But the way you do that is by showing yourself that, yeah, I do have agency, I do have efficacy. And when I said I would play for an hour, I stopped after an hour. That's success. So this is part of why I hate to do lists. And I'm going to sacrifice some sacred cows here because I know everybody is told that to get things done, you just make a list and as long as you have a to do list, all that stuff gets done. Bullshit. I don't think that's true. I mean, I used to have a to do list of a hundred things that I was supposed to do and I would have an amazingly productive day and I would plow through 10 of those things on my to do list. And then I'd get to the end of my day and I'd say, oh man, I still have 90 things I didn't get done that I said I would. And so at the end of the day, you Feel exhausted and you feel like you lied to yourself yet another day. And so that's why I think most of the people who even use to do lists, they actually are hurting themselves by just using a to do list because they're not using them correctly. There's other things you have to do to make sure that you can get that feeling of success, that feeling of every time I live a day in my life the way I said I would live that day, you can get to the end of your day, as I do, and I can say, you know what? I'm going to enjoy Netflix guilt free. Because that's exactly what I said I would do with my time, as opposed to constantly feeling, well, I could watch Netflix, but I have all this stuff on my to do list that I still didn't get done and I still didn't achieve. And you feel crappy all day long because you're carrying this burden of lies to yourself all day long, as opposed to when you're indistractable, you're free of that burden. I think very few people have experienced how amazing that feels to end the day doing exactly what you said you would do.

Yeah, yeah. I personally use to do lists every day. But just to sort of further prove your point, I only put five or six things on my to do list every day. And usually I'll finish like four of them and go, I'll just roll the other two to tomorrow. Pretty much. There's a perpetual rolling two of them to tomorrow forever.

So the way we fix that. By the way, it's not that to do lists are evil, right? We need to use to do lists in conjunction with a calendar. And this is what most people fail to do. This is why I say that the current advice around to do list doesn't work. I also keep a to do list, but everything on my to do list is in conjunction with my calendar. So if you don't plan your day, somebody's going to plan it for you. And the fact of the matter is, if you have a bunch of white space in your day, you cannot complain about distraction.

Why?

Because how can you get distracted when you didn't know what you got distracted from? If I look at your calendar, you say, oh my gosh, I was so distracted, I didn't get as much done as I need to get done. And I say, okay, well, what did you plan to do with your time? What exactly did you get done distracted from? And you say, well, I don't know, I had a bunch of white space on my calendar. I didn't exactly plan out my time. Well, then don't complain. Everything is a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. Which is why we have to keep what we call a time box calendar. And the way we do this is we turn our values into time. What we do is we start with these three life domains. You start with you. Okay? You are at the center of your life. You're the most important person in your life. If you don't keep appointments with yourself to take care of your health, your mental health, your psychological well being, if whatever your values are, and I'm not going to tell you what your values should be, if part of your values are, for example, taking care of your body, well, do you have time in your day for proper rest, for proper nutrition, for proper exercise? Is that in your day? If it's not scheduled in your day, and if you don't keep that appointment the way you would keep an appointment, let's say your favorite rock star, your favorite musician, your hero, your sports hero said, hey, I really want to have breakfast with you. Will you make time for me?

Of course.

But we have to treat ourselves the same way and put that time, literally put that time on our calendar. And the reason that is so important again is because when you, your only goal should be, did I do that task? Did I do that thing for that set period of time without distraction, as opposed to a to do list. People put a million things on the to do list. Finish a workout, finish my presentation, finish this, finish that. But we are terrible at estimating how long things take us to complete. I'm sure you've experienced this. I always did. Or you think, oh, it's a couple hours, I'll crank out that presentation. It's never a couple hours. It's always more time than you think. So don't plan to finish anything, Right? What do I mean by that? Don't plan to finish anything. Instead of a big long to do list with all the things you plan to finish, your only goal should be to work for a set period of time. As long as you set for yourself without distraction. Because then you're reinforcing your self image of. Yep, I said I was gonna work on that presentation for 30 minutes and I did it. Now you're changing your self image. Now you are becoming indistractable. So that has to do with the first life domain around you. The next life domain is your relationships. So when it comes to important people in our life, our significant other, our, our kids, our friends, we have got to make time for them. I remember a few years ago, so I've been married for 18 years and I remember a few years ago my wife reminded me of where we met. We actually met in college. We were in an economics class. And we learned in this economics class this term called residual beneficiary. A residual beneficiary is the chump that gets whatever's left over when a company goes out of business. So when a company goes out of business, the debt holders get their share first, then the equity holders, then finally the residual beneficiary gets the scraps, whatever's left over. And so she turned to me one day and said, nir, you have turned me into the residual beneficiary. I get whatever scraps of time is left over after your work, after all the other important things in your life. And that's not fair. And she was absolutely right. And so we've got to make time for the most important people in our life or they're not going to get their fair share. This is why we are suffering from a loneliness epidemic in this country, particularly among men, is that we do not make time for our relationships like we used to. And this is not something that Facebook did. This is a long term Trend. In the 1990s, Robert Putnam wrote a book called Bowling Alone and he showed how we used to have these civic groups, right? The bowling league, the Kiwanis club, the church group. And people had time on their schedule to regularly get together with their buddies. And that's a problem, that people don't do this anymore. We need to bring those practices, these rituals back, very, very important for our psychological well being. And then finally, the last domain is our work domain where we need to make time not only for the meetings and the emails, of course, we need to time box that stuff, but we also need to make sure that we make time for reflection. So everybody's job has a certain balance of reactive work and reflective work. So a 100% reactive job might be if you work in a call center, okay? If you work in a call center, you sit at a desk, if the phone rings, you pick it up, you constantly just react. Okay, you don't need a lot of reflection. If that's the case, well then your time is occupied. That's all you do for that period of time. If your job is 100% reflective, right, let's say you're a software engineer, you need to be left alone so that you can concentrate, so that you can think, you're not reacting, you're reflective. Now most People's jobs are somewhere in between. There's a certain balance between reflecting and reacting. The problem is people aren't scheduling the time for the reflection. And so they're just reacting all day long to emails, to Slack notifications, to meetings. They're reacting, reacting, reacting even when their jobs require them to reflect. So that time has to be built into your calendar as well.

Got it? Yeah. So, okay, so I love this. So you have the layers, starting with you, relationships, and then work. So if someone wants to put this into practice, starting with the you, how would you say from your experience teaching other folks, what are the most, I guess, successful things to set yourself up with with these little micro commitments, time boxing out this time? Is it things like just spending time with your kids or. I guess that would be relationships. But say meditation, for instance. Yeah.

So it doesn't, you know, it's funny you say meditation. So I only use the word meditation one time in my entire book where I talk about how I will not be talking about meditation. Not that it doesn't work. I'm going to get so much hate mail for people saying, no, meditation is the best thing ever. If meditation works for you, keep doing okay, great. If it works for you, wonderful. It's not enough. Okay? We can't sit on our butts to fix all our problems. We have to go out there and do stuff as well. Meditation is wonderful if it works for you, but that can't be the only solution. And I think there's a lot of other books that talk about meditation, so I didn't want to talk about it. But if meditation works for you and you want that time in your day, guess what? Plan for it. Make time for that meditation. If it works for you, just as I would say, make time for prayer, make time for a walk. Make time for whatever it is that is important to your values. Your goal should be to make your calendar a reflection of your values. Don't make one of these silly vision boards or five year plans or the regrets of the dying. How about we start with next week? Just show me what your values are next week. And so I'm gonna actually give you a link that you can share in the show notes where I built this free tool. You don't have to sign up for anything. You don't have to pay a dime. All it is is basically a template for your week. And what I want you to do is to just put in how you want to spend your time. Okay. According to your values. I call this turning your values into time. So you gotta put in the stuff that's important to you, right? So in addition to the facts of life. So if commuting is part of your day, okay, you got to have that time in your schedule. If making lunch is part of your day, making breakfast, making dinner, all of these practicalities need to fit in there. And when you have this constraint of a 24 hour day, seven days a week, you start to have to make some decisions. So don't worry about, oh, what are my values? Don't worry about that. All you have to do is ask yourself, what do I want to do with my time to reflect my values? How do I, you know, values are defined as the attributes of the person I want to be. And so when you look at that calendar, if you say, okay, am I making time to live out my values in the you domain, Am I making time to live out my values in the relationships domain? Am I making time to live out my values in the work domain, that 24 hour block every day, seven days a week, this is how we reflect our values. So start by filling out that calendar. And then, by the way, so that's cool. I think that's been written about a lot. This is called making an implementation intention. There's been thousands of studies that show how effective this is. But where it really is a superpower, where it really will change your life, where it's really magical, is when you start sharing your timebox calendar with others. So in my household, my wife and I would constantly fight about how I wasn't doing my fair share. Okay, why aren't you picking up the laundry? Why aren't you feeding our daughter? Why aren't you taking out the trash? We would constantly have these arguments about why I wasn't pulling my fair share. And she was absolutely right. She works outside the home. It turns out that studies find that in dual income heterosexual households still today, women take on a disproportionate share of household admin duties. And that was against my values. I wanted to be in an equitable marriage. And she was right. I wasn't pulling my weight. But I, I would tell her this, I would say, hey, honey, if I don't do something, just tell me what to do, right? What's the problem? Just tell me. What I wasn't realizing is that I was giving her yet another job. Now she's my babysitter. And so that's not fair. So by having a time box schedule, we sit down with each other, takes 15 minutes a week, no joke, 15 minutes every Sunday night. We sit down together, we look at our timebox calendar. This argument is eliminated. Our marriage is better than ever. We never have this discussion anymore because it's very clear not only what needs to get done, but when it will get done in the week ahead. You can also do this with your boss, your manager. Your manager will worship the ground you walk on if you show them what you want to do in the week ahead. Not just in terms of to do's, but in terms of how you spend your time. And we've all heard this trope that, you know, if you want to get distracted less, then you need to learn how to say no. Come on, give me a break. Are you gonna sit, stare your boss in the face and say no, I'm not gonna do what you asked me to do. Give me a break. That's not gonna work. Most people will not do that and I don't recommend they do what I do recommend they do. You take your timebox calendar to your manager and you say, look boss, this is how I plan to spend my time in the week ahead. Okay? You see all these time blocks that I put in for this project, for that project. This is how I plan to spend my time. Now here's this other list of stuff you've asked me to do that I couldn't find time for this week. That's now, can you help me adjust? So it's not you saying no. You're asking your boss to tell you what you should prioritize and what you should delay on. They will then reprioritize what tasks are important to do in the week ahead. And so you're not saying no. Your boss is saying no. It is a life changing practice.

I love that.

Now with your timeboxing concept, how granular are you getting with it? Are you like time boxing out, brushing your teeth and taking a shower and all the sort of normal day to day things or just this sort of bigger items that you know, not the things that just kind of happen on default?

Yeah. So it's many times I'll, I'll say when my start time is for a series of small events. So for example, getting ready for bed, there's a bunch of little tasks, right? I gotta, I gotta clean up a little bit, put away my clothes, take a shower, brush my teeth. There's all these things I have to do. So I time box 30 minutes, prep for bed. But that, that time is, what's really important is that there's a time held on my calendar for that and how do I calculate when that should happen? Well, you know, we've all heard about the importance of sleep. I mean, you know, you have to be sleeping under a rock these days, in which case you get plenty of sleep to not know how important sleep is. So I don't harp on that. But I will say that, you know, this is a really important thing to do. We all know this, but we don't plan for that time. So you need to have a bedtime, right? Just like our kids. We tell our kids you need a bedtime because it's important for you, but then we're hypocrites. We don't give ourselves completely, right. So we need to have a bedtime for ourselves. And so that means that, okay, if you want to, to get to bed at 10 o' clock so you can get your eight hours of sleep, do you back up 30 minutes and say, well, that means that I have to start my shower and brushing my teeth about 30 minutes beforehand or whatever long it takes?

You gotcha. Yeah, because I was kind of wondering if there was some sort of psychological element to it of if you time box some of the things that you just kind of do by default anyway, you're kind of starting your day off right by.

Default, taking some of the actions that are in your time block, sort of validating that you are following through, you know, does that make sense?

Yeah, absolutely. But it doesn't need to be down to the minute, you know, okay, you must spend two minutes brushing your teeth and three minutes on the toilet. No, no, I'm not. That may not make sense. What you need to do is to give yourself, you know, a reasonable amount of time. You know, if anything takes less than 15 minutes, it probably should be bundled in with some other task.

That's good.

Yeah, because with my, with my own like sort of morning, the task list that I create for myself every day, one of those items is always kind of inevitably a layup, you know, like a real easy item for me to accomplish just to of sort of kick off my day, you know, I've already checked off one item in the first 10 minutes of my day kind of thing.

Well, that's it.

Sure. And the important thing here is that the lesson is that you're never done with this. You should approach your weekly timebox calendar like a scientist that you're running an experiment every week. So you make your calendar one week, the next week you look back at it and you ask yourself, where did you get distracted and how can I fix my week ahead? My calendar for the week ahead so it becomes easier to follow. Because for every distraction, there's only three reasons. For every distraction. It's either an internal trigger. You don't have the tools to cope with discomfort, in which case, how will you make sure you don't succumb to that, that discomfort again, in a way that leads you to distraction? So what tools do you need? It's an external trigger, meaning it was a ping, a ding, a ring, something in your environment. How can you make sure you hack back that external trigger so it doesn't trigger you next time? Or it's a planning problem, in which case, you know, I thought a task was going to take me 30 minutes, it actually took me 45. Okay, no problem. I'm going to adjust for that in the week ahead. And so you're experimenting week over week, and this process literally takes 15 minutes to do week over week. And the important thing is now you have a template. You can look anytime you get distracted, you can look at that calendar and you can say, huh, everything on my calendar is traction. Anything that is not, that is distraction. That's why this is so important. And by the way, we're not just planning the worky stuff. It's not just about being super productive in a work context. You're not one dimensional. You have other values. I want you to plan time for fun, right? I want you to put time for the big game. I want you to put time for Facebook, for video games, for whatever it is you enjoy doing. But I want you to hold that time so you can enjoy it without guilt. Because when you do those things, you should tell yourself, yep, this is exactly what I plan to do with my time. This is traction.

I love that. And this is the. I'm hearing freedom. That's the feeling that I'm getting from when you're talking right now. And it's kind of counterintuitive, it seems like when you put these blocks of time and constraints on your day. But like you just said, now you're giving yourself freedom to just relax and just be completely present in that video game and not give a shit what other things are happening. Don't worry about the email. I mean, if the kids aren't around and they're not the. It's not your responsibility right now. Don't worry about them.

Yeah, I'm so glad you said that. Because most people's reaction is, oh, that feels so stifling. That feels like I'm going to have, you know, I'm not going to have freedom. And it's exactly the opposite, as is so much in life, right. If. If you really have a crush on somebody, by telling them how much you love them, you drive them away. Right. If you want love, you have to be lovable, Then people will become attracted to you. And the same thing goes with our time, that if you want to feel the freedom to enjoy your time, you have to actually put some constraints in your day so that you can enjoy that time fully.

Yeah. Now, how do you recommend the reactive stuff that inevitably is going to come up? There is going to be emails that come to you that might be urgent, that cause you to rearrange your day, or obviously family health issues or things inevitably come up, you got to put out fires, there's going to be things you need to react to. How does that impact the overall system of scheduling? And how do you account for that kind of stuff?

Yeah. So the good news is that we run this experiment every week so we can rerun the experiment. So if what I typically tend to see is that there's much more prevalent the fear of, well, what if something happens that takes me off schedule versus the reality of something actually coming up and taking me off schedule. And so people resist making these calendars, but I would argue that you can actually plan for the unexpected. Okay, let me give you a perfect example. If you commute to work, let's say you drive to work every day, right? You drive to work, and sometimes there's no traffic, and sometimes there's a lot of traffic. If you had a very important job interview and you had to show up at 9am on the dot to get that job that you've been wishing for your whole life, what do you do? You say to yourself, well, the traffic might be bad, so let me leave a little bit earlier, okay, so you can budget in your calendar. Look, I know that in my day there tends to be something that can take me off track, like traffic. So do you budget? Oh, my fastest time to work was 15 minutes. Therefore every day is 15 minutes. No, maybe you say, my worst time to get to work was 30 minutes, and I budget a little bit more time for that. So you can add these kind of buffers to make sure you're less likely to go off track. That's what we call a planning problem, that we just didn't plan accordingly for how long something should take us. And then if, hey, you have some extra time. Well, brilliant, right? You can spend that time listening to some music or doing whatever it is you want to do with that spare few moments any way you wish. But, you know, even, even the reactive work, we can actually plan time for that as well. So a lot of people say, well, you know, I need to check email frequently because I'm in the client services business. I work in a distributed team. People need to be able to contact me, no problem. So that will be the default. You will want to check your email. That's not the problem. The problem is you won't want to do the hard work, you know, you have to do. So how do we protect the reflective time? And so what you might do in your day is to say, look, I'm going to work on reflective work for an hour. I'm going to work on that big project. I'm going to think about whatever, you know, the strategic plan, whether it's working on a presentation, whatever it might be that requires reflection and requires you to focus. I'm going to put that time in my calendar. And then after one hour, I'm going to check email for 20 minutes. And maybe you'll work like that the entire day. One hour, 20 minutes. One hour and then 20 minutes. There's nothing wrong with that. But again, it's about doing it with intent. It's about finding the cadence that works for you between reflective and reactive. What most people do is they say, well, something might come up, so I'm not going to plan anything. And then they never get done the reflective work, and they're just stuck in this reactive cycle. And this is, frankly, I'll be honest with you, this is where most people are that the people who really excel in the workplace, I mean, let me let you know a little secret. It's the people who make time in their day for reflection. It's the time to just think. I mean, look, people hire me and I'm giving away my business model here, but people hire me to help them be more productive. And I charge a lot of money for my time. I charge thousands of dollars for my time for a consulting session. And when they pay me this money to tell them how to do what they do, most of the time I spend on the phone with them, I'm just listening to them. Like literally 90% of the conversation is them talking. And so if you think about it, you can get that value right now. Make time in your day to sit down with a piece of paper and reflect. Write down what it is you're struggling with. That same conversation that people have with me you can have with yourself every day. It is a huge competitive advantage if you are one of these people who makes time in Their day to reflect. You have an instant leg up over your competition because you're making that time that other people aren't making for one of the most important things you can do in your day, which is time for reflection. When we don't make that time, people tend to run real, real fast in the wrong direction. Yeah, right. How pointless is that? So it's only by making that time for reflection do we actually make sure that we're running in the right direction.

I love that. Yeah. And that uncovers. It's like the Onion. You got to uncover all of this stuff that's happening that a lot of folks. It is reactive stuff. So if we're reflecting on. All right, what's all this reactive stuff that's kind of pulling me in ways that I shouldn't be going or that I don't want to go? Not traction, distraction, and. Yeah, I love that. So just simple. It's almost like a journaling practice if you want to do it in that regard. And time blocking time, boxing that out. Now I know we're getting a little closer on the time. You're a big fan of apps. So for, like, external triggers and stuff, I wanted to just talk about some of your. Maybe your top three or so iPhone, computer apps, anything in between that people could just be like, okay, dip their toe in and start trying them out.

Yeah. So I love technology. I'm not a tech luddite. I love this stuff. I'm actually wearing three different body tracking devices right now. Which ones? I love this stuff. So I'm wearing the oura ring, I'm wearing the we things watch, and I'm wearing the whoop band.

Okay, nice.

I'm constantly tracking all this stuff. I love tech. And obviously we talked about how. I don't think tech is the boogeyman here. I think that we can use this stuff to get the best out of technology without letting it get the best of us. And ironically, part of the solution, we only talked about two steps to become indistractable. Number one, being how to master the internal triggers. Number two, making time for traction. Step three that we didn't get to is about hacking back the external triggers. So that's about removing all the pings and dings and other people perhaps, who distract you in your day. There's all kinds of ways we can hack back all of those external triggers. Emails, meetings, group chat. All that's in the book as well. And the fourth step, and this is to answer your question, is about preventing distraction with pact. And pacts are the last resort. It's the last line of defense to prevent us from getting distracted. And ironically, we can use technology to prevent tech distraction. So one tool I use all the time is this app called Forest. And Forest works like this every time you want to do focused work. And again, you only do this after you've done the other three things. After you've mastered the internal triggers, after you've made time for traction, after you've hacked back the external triggers. This is the last line of defense. This is this beautiful app. You open the app, you dial in how much time you want to do focused work for. So 30 minutes, 45 minutes, however much time you want to do focused work for. And as soon as you hit this button, a little cute little virtual tree is planted on your screen. And if you pick up the phone and you try and do anything with it, the little cute virtual tree dies. And you don't want to be a virtual tree murderer.

So it's enough of a promise that you've made with yourself. Oh, nope, that's not what I want to do right now. I wanted to stay focused. I'm going to prevent myself from getting distracted. Another tool that I love so much I actually invested in the company, is a product called FocusMate. And if you go to FocusMate.com, you'll see it. So, FocusMate, here's how this works. So do you guys remember Chatroulette?

Yeah.

Okay, so it's kind of like chat roulette, but without all the nasty, dirty stuff. Okay, that's probably good. It's safe for work. Here's how it works. If you're the kind of person like I used to be where I'd have trouble getting started on something, this is for you. So here's how it works. You go to focusmate.com you book a time when you want to do focused work, and you are matched with another person in their network that also wants to work during that period of time. Then you log in at that appropriate time, and if you don't log in, you'll get a bad review. So that's your incentive to show up when you say you will. And you see them on your screen, they see you over the video feed. You can see each other. You say, hey, okay, what are you working on? What are you working on? Go. And for that segment of time, all you have to do is do your work, and they are watching you, and you are watching them as you're working. Okay? And it's not like they can see your screen. They wouldn't know if you cheated, to be honest, but it's enough of an it's amazing how just working next to somebody, making that promise to somebody else that, yep, I'm gonna focus on just this one thing for the next hour or so can be an incredibly effective way to stay on task. So those are two of my favorite products in this space.

I really love that concept for Focus Mate. It's almost like because I hear some folks will say if they can't get stuff done in their own office, they'll go to a coffee shop. And it almost like obviously no one's looking at them specifically checking on their work, but at least it kind of puts you in a different zone. You have eyeballs on you. You're almost in a credible kind of spot. But I'm going to check both those out.

And forest I remember that they work really, really well. It's actually really surprising how effective and yet simple they are.

How cool. Awesome. Nir. All right, so you mentioned you do have a link with the weekly schedule. I'm curious what that link is.

Yeah, I'll share it in the show notes. My blog is nearandfar.com, and it's an article about Schedulemaker, but I'll give you the link. It's a little bit of a longer URL, but my blog is nearandfar.com, it's spelled like my first name, N I r&far.com and if you want more information on the book as well, then that's@indistractible.com there's also an 80 page workbook there that's completely free. Anyone can get that. But if you do buy the book, make sure you keep your order number because if you enter in your order number@indistractable.com, i will send you this video course that we made that's complementary to the book that will help you on your journey through to becoming Indistractable. And as well that's totally free@indistractible.com love it.

That's cool. I love your domain name too.

Near and Far. You like that?

Yeah, I do. And if you have another book recommendation, obviously your books are amazing. Is there another book that you would recommend to any of your your friends? Something that you find yourself kind of pulling to pretty often?

Oh, there's so many good books out there, it's hard to name just one, but Mindset by Carol Dweck is fantastic. Lost Connections, if you want to understand the nature of addiction, is a really Interesting book, Factfulness. I think every entrepreneur should read Factfulness by Hans Ronsling. That's another one. One of my favorite that inspired me to start writing is a book called Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham. And then if you're looking for a fiction work, it's worth revisiting Moby Dick. I think that it's amazing how in Moby Dick, it's this epic story of obsession and distraction, believe it or not, and how distraction versus traction, what we want to do versus what we get sidetracked by and how that affects people around us. It's a really deep story, actually, that is surprisingly timeless. Even though it's about whaling, it's the same exact story that a lot of people struggle with today.

Perfect. Awesome. Thank you.

Those are all new recommendations. I don't think any of those have ever been recommended on the show. So.

Perfect. Awesome. Good.

We love finding new gems to dive into.

Yeah. All right, Nero, I appreciate your time. We both do. And we have a lot from this, so people are going to love it. Can't wait to share it. So thank you very much.

Thank you, guys.

Have a good one. Hey, hey, hey. Thank you for listening to that episode. This is Joe Fear. I'm sure you probably already knew that. And Matt. Matt is not here right now, but I'm pretty sure he enjoyed the episode just as much as you and I did because, you know, he went into the production of kind of making that thing right along with me. So thank you very much, and I want to give a quick shout out to our buddies over at Easy Webinar. These guys have been supporting us for a while, a long time, and Casey Zieman is just a super good guy all around. He's actually been on the show before. He's the founder of Easy Webinar. So if you look up Casey Zman on any podcast platform you're listening to, go check him out. Go check out his backstory, what he's all about. You can learn a lot about webinars as well. And right now, you know, Easy Webinar, these guys are actually hooking you up with a great trial. It's a completely free trial to test out their software, Soup to nuts. Check it all out and see if it's a good fit for you. If you go to easywebinar.com hustle, that's H U S T L E. If you didn't know how to spell hustle, there you go. So if you go to easywebinar.com hustle, you can go grab a free trial and EZ webinar literally lives up to its name. It's super simple. I mean, super easy. And it does all the stuff that you're looking for in any kind of thing with webinars. I mean, they literally cover every single type of webinar you possibly can do. So from live to automated to scheduled at specific and all these crazy features in between, can't even list them all out. I'll be here way too long. They give you a ton of advanced analytics. What's working, what's not. During your webinar, based off all these actions, you'll see who attended, how long they stayed, if they clicked the offer or if they didn't. Basically, you're gonna make more money and you're gonna work less with this thing and you're gonna create better relationships with the folks that are listening. Cause it's a good experience. You wanna give that good experience along with some great content, of course, and a killer offer if that's what you got for them. So go try it out yourself. Go check out easywebinar.com hustle. That's easywebinar.com hustole. Alrighty. So that is the end of this episode. Thank you so much for listening to this episode, enjoying it. Hopefully you did. I'm pretty sure you did, if you lasted this long. And go check out Easy Webinar when you get the chance. And we will talk to you later next time. Bye. Bye.

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