"The 1% Use These SUCCESS HABITS To Become PRODUCTIVITY MASTERS!" | Nir Eyal & Lewis Howes

Let's just start with tomorrow as opposed to, oh, what do I want to do in five years and my vision board and my mood board and all that stuff. How would the person you want to become? Again, it's about living according to your values and nobody can tell you what your values are. How would the person you want to.

Become spend their time?

I think you gotta have a dream. The School of Greatness. Really? Yeah.

Please welcome the newest house. How do we hook people if we are an entrepreneur, a business owner, or if we are dating someone, how do we hook people to want to give us their attention over and over again in any area of life for our benefit and it benefiting them by them giving us their attention? What is that thing that you've learned over the last eight years now of applying from that first book to get people really hooked for good, not a negative way, but for good?

Yeah, yeah. So just to set the stage, so I wrote Hooked after teaching the Stanford Graduate School of Business for many years, then later I moved over to the Hasselplattner Institute of Design. And what I wanted to do was to steal the secrets of the companies like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Slack, Snapchat. I wanted to understand what they were doing so that the rest of us could use those techniques, could use those psychological hacks so that we can build the kind of products and services to improve people's lives. So I didn't write Hooked, my first book for the big tech companies, I wrote it for the rest of us. I wanted to steal their secrets and democratize that stuff. And why? Because they already knew these techniques. I didn't need to teach them anything. They've known how to do this for decades. So in writing Hooked, what I wanted to do was to give entrepreneurs out there a pattern, a model they could use to build healthy habits in people's lives. By the way, the book is not called How to Build Addictive Products. My publisher wanted me to call it that, and I absolutely refuse because an addiction is very different from a habit. An addiction is a compulsive dependency on a behavior or substance that harms the user, whereas a habit is simply an impulse to do something with little or no conscious thought. And we have many good habits as well as bad habits. My second book, Indistractible, is about how to break bad habits but Hooked is about how to build good habits in people's lives. And so, the book now has been published now for what, six years and sold over 300,000 copies and it's been used in every conceivable industry from education, Kahoot is the world's largest education software company and they use the Hooked model to get kids hooked onto learning. Companies like Fitbit use the Hooked model to get people hooked to exercising. There's all kinds of ways that we can use these techniques for good, that we can improve people's lives by building good habits.

Is there a formula for the Hooked model that has been upgraded since the book?

Oh, upgraded? No. The same basic four steps in the Hooked model of trigger, action, reward, and investment. And it's specifically for product design. It's really written for entrepreneurs. I read the inspiration for me was I read Charles Duhigg's Power of Habit. I loved it. I thought it was a great book. What I was looking for though was, okay, how do I apply this as an entrepreneur? How do I get people to come back to my business? Because that is a huge competitive advantage. If you think about Google, why does Google have 85% market share out there? It's simply because of a habit. It turns out if you look at head-to-head comparisons between Google and Bing, the number two search engine, if you stripped out the branding, People can't tell the two apart. It's a 50-50 preference split. And yet, every day when we say, oh, I don't know something, we don't think to ourselves, I wonder who makes the best search engine. No, we just Google it, right? With little or no conscious thought out of habit. So if you can create that kind of habit with your customers, it's a massive competitive advantage, and it's a way.

To help people form good habits in their own lives. Should we be thinking of this four-step approach in terms of our products and services that we create, or should we be thinking about who is our core audience and how will they, what is the psychology of this core audience? What is their needs and then building it based on their needs?

So those two are not mutually exclusive. It's actually a huge component of how we build habit-forming products is that we always start with the customer need. And in fact, we start with the itch. And the itch is what we call an internal trigger. There are two types of triggers. We have external triggers and internal triggers. External triggers are the pings, the dings, the rings, everything in our outside environment that tells us what to do next. And that's what everybody tends to think about in terms of, you know, triggers.

And the alarms of lack of action. The alarms of lack of action.

Waking up with an alarm. Exactly. Having a notification. Exactly. Emails, yeah, notifications, all that stuff. That's actually not as important as what we call the internal trigger. An internal trigger is an uncomfortable emotional state that you seek to escape from. And the solution to that discomfort is found with the products you use. So fundamentally, and this is really important to understand if you're trying to build new habits in your customers or trying to break bad habits in your own life, fundamentally you have to understand that your behaviors always originate from discomfort, always. Everything you do, even the desire to pursue pleasurable sensations, is itself psychologically destabilizing. And so when you think about how, oh, I'm feeling lonely, check Facebook. I'm uncertain, Google. I'm bored, oh, lots of solutions for boredom, right? You know, watch the news, stock prices, sports scores, Instagram, TikTok, yeah, all these things. Fundamentally, everything you do is about a desire to escape discomfort. So what that means, if you're building a habit-forming product, you have to identify What is that frequently occurring itch in the user's life? If you're trying to break a bad habit, you have to understand, wait a minute, what am I seeking to escape from and understand how to deal with.

That discomfort in a healthier manner. Give me an example. Someone's looking to escape from what's a common thing right now people want to escape from? Is it loneliness? Is it depression?

Is it uncertainty? Is it what is the thing? Let's make it personal, Louis. Tell me, is there a bad habit? Do you find that you get distracted?

What distracts you? What things in the world distract my attention that make me want to go there? Or what's the internal thing that makes me then... No, no.

Let's start with what is the distraction?

Probably, I mean, if they're distractions, but I look at it as research also because I'm in this space. So, I would say the social media apps, especially right now, Clubhouse, TikTok and Instagram. But again, I also look at it as I'm researching it for my business. But there are times where I'm like, oh, I catch myself, I'm being on here and not researching.

So this is a really, really good place to dive in. So let's start, let's actually back up a step and understand what is distraction. Distraction is one of these words that we toss around and most of us don't really understand. I certainly didn't understand what that meant. Let's talk about what is distraction. Distraction, the best way to understand what distraction is, is to understand what distraction is not. If you ask most people, what is the opposite of distraction? They'll tell you it's focus, right? Wrong. The opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction, if you look at the origin of the word, the opposite of distraction is traction. That both words come from the same Latin root, trahere, which means to pull, and they both end in the same six letters, A-C-T-I-O-N. That spells action. So traction, by definition, is any action that pulls you towards what you say you're going to do, things you do with intent, things that pull you towards your values and help you become the kind of person you want to become. The opposite of traction is distraction. Distraction is any action that pulls you further away from what you intended to do, further away from your values and becoming the kind of person you want to become. The difference between traction and distraction is one word. and that one word is forethought. Forethought. So if you plan the time to do quote unquote research, Louis, and that's what you want to do with your time, awesome. Just as if you wanted to plan time to go on social media or play a video game or watch a movie or meditate or pray or look at the news. Play a sport or a hobby, it doesn't matter, yeah.

Yeah, as long as it's done with intent.

So why is this so important? Okay, this isn't something that's just- so.

It'S done with intent where it's saying, I'm going to go on here for a free time to do whatever I want, but it's not necessarily pulling me away from my goals because I'm also spending time doing that as well.

Well, it's about forethought. It's about forethought. So here's the difference. So this is what used to happen to me almost every single day when I would sit down at my desk and I'd say, okay, I got to do all this stuff. I had a big long to-do list. We can talk about why to-do lists are terrible for your productivity in just a minute, but I would sit down and I'd say, okay, I got to do all this stuff. And I've got that big project I've been procrastinating on. I really got to work on that today. Let me get started on that. Right away, here I go, nothing's gonna get in my way, nothing's gonna distract me.

Bang, bang, bang, bang, email.

No, even worse, even worse, Louis. Let me just check email real quick. Yeah, email. Right, so not even the external stuff, right? Not even the pings and dings. But oh, you know what? I really should check on that thing, that Slack channel, probably somebody's waiting for me. Or let me just clear out my email real quick, or let me just, do this one thing that feels worky, right? I call this pseudo work. It feels like I need to do, I gotta check email sometime today, don't I? I better go check on it real quick. And what I didn't realize is that that is actually the most dangerous form of distraction. The distraction that tricks you into prioritizing the urgent at the expense of the important. Okay? So anything that is not what you plan to do with your time, research is great. Going on Facebook is great. Playing video games is great. as long as it's not what you plan to do with your time, as long as that, I'm sorry, as long as that is what you plan to.

Do with your time.

As long as you scheduled it. Doing something. Exactly, exactly. So that's the big difference between traction and distraction. So we have to define what that is. One of the big mantras of the book is that you cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. Let me say that again. You can't call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. So if you're kind of floating through life saying, oh, I got a million things on my to-do list. I'll just get to them when I get to them. You know what's gonna happen. You're not gonna get to them. It has to be scheduled in your day. So that's the difference between traction and distraction. Okay, so now you can have a mental picture in your mind and this is kind of the key framework in the book. Two arrows, one to the right, one to the left, traction and distraction. Okay, now we have to ask ourselves what prompts us to traction and distraction? What prompts these actions? Internal triggers and external triggers. So coming back to what we talked about for a minute earlier, these external triggers, the pings, dings and rings in our environment, anything in our outside world that prompts us towards traction or distraction, Of course, you know, we have the usual suspects of our phones and our computers. It can be other people, right? The number one source of distraction in the workplace is other people.

Just asking you questions. Just asking you questions.

Yeah, exactly. Hey, did you hear about that gossip? Or did you see that show? Or, you know, let me just ask you a quick question for a quick sec and it doesn't take a quick sec. Yeah. That is actually the leading cause of distraction in the workplace. And at home, now that so many of us are working from home, it's kids, it's roommates, it's spouses. All these things are external triggers. Now, that is not the leading cause of distraction. There was just a study released about two months ago that found that 90% of the time we check our phones, 90-90, 90% of the time we check our phones, it's not because of any kind of external trigger. 90% of the time we check our phones, it is because of a bad feeling. Boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, fearfulness, stress, anxiety. these are the internal triggers that we seek to escape from. And the reason this is so important to understand, Louis, is that none of the tips, tricks, gurus, all the books, the seminars, anything having to do with time management is garbage. Does not work. Unless you start with the understanding that time management is pain management.

Pain management.

Time management is pain management, absolutely.

What does that mean?

If you don't understand how to that deal with that discomfort that drives you to escape, you're going to find it. You're always going to find it, whether it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, it doesn't matter. You will find distraction unless you first start with understanding and dealing with the internal triggers.

When did you finally deal with the internal triggers in your own life? And how was that process?

For me, there was a seminal moment in my life shortly after I had written Hooked, where I was sitting down with my daughter and we homeschool. We have for years. And we had this perfect day planned. We had this wonderful afternoon planned. And I remember my daughter and I had this book of activities that we could play together. And some of the activities in the book included, you know, Make origami, do a Sudoku puzzle together, make a paper airplane. There's all these cute little activities that daddies and daughters could do together. And one of the activities to kind of bring us closer together was to ask each other this question. If you could have any superpower, what superpower would you want? And I remember that question verbatim, but I can't tell you what my daughter said because in that moment, for whatever reason, I got distracted. I was checking my phone as opposed to being fully present with someone I love very much. Yeah, and if I'm honest with you, it didn't just happen that time and it didn't just happen with my daughter. It would happen when I was at work and I would say, oh, I'm definitely gonna work on that big project. I'm not gonna procrastinate and 30, 45 minutes later, I was doing something other than the thing I said I was gonna do. It would happen with my personal health. How many times did I say, oh, I'm definitely gonna go to the gym today? but I wouldn't. I'm certainly going to eat right, but I didn't. And so when I realized, wait a minute, you know what? If I could have any superpower, the skill of the century, I believe, is the power to be indistractible. That's why indistractible sounds like indestructible, right? Supposed to sound like a superpower because there is no facet of your life that is not affected by the ability to sustain and control your attention. That is the macro skill that we have to master to get anything else we want, right? Whether it's, hey, you want to read more books, you need to sustain attention. You want to exercise, you want to eat right, you need to sustain attention. You want to have good relationships in your life? Who doesn't know that you have to be fully present with people that you love in order to have better relationships? You want to be better at your job. Guess what? You have to do the work, especially the hard stuff that other people don't want to do. All of this requires you to control.

Your attention in order to choose your life. so how did you learn to control your attention?

So the book took me five years. And the reason it took me five years is because I kept getting distracted. You know, so I didn't write the book because I knew the answers. I wrote the book because I was looking for the answers. I mean, this is something that I struggle with. It was a very personal journey. And I did a lot of research. I wanted to write a very specific type of book, the kind of book that I like reading, which is one that is not only full of tactics that work, but also is backed by good research. And so when I went to look at the popular literature, the pop psychology of distraction, attention, time management, I found it was full of junk. Like old studies that could not replicate, many, many studies that can't replicate, old ideas that really should be tossed out. For example, the idea that willpower is a depletable resource. We've all heard this, right? Can't replicate. It's not true. The myth that we should run our life with a to-do list. Crap, it's bunk. It doesn't work. That there are much better techniques out there that just hadn't been explored. People were writing books with their little pet theories. And I said, no, no, no. I want to see the literature. I want to see the peer-reviewed study in an academic journal before I'm going to recommend it to others or use it in my own life. And so that's why I really wanted to boil down this massive amount of literature that's been published over the years about time management, focus, and attention into a four-part model that anyone can use.

And what's that model?

Sure. So we talked about earlier this picture in our head. So hopefully you can imagine this of an arrow pointing to the right, that's traction, to the left is distraction. We have two arrows pointing into the center. Those represent external triggers and internal triggers. And now we have the four points of our compass. So we start at the top with north, master the internal triggers. First and foremost, we have to have tactics to deal with that discomfort in a healthy way that leads us towards traction rather than an unhealthy escape into distraction. that's step one. Okay, so that's the first most important step. Internal triggers, like you said. Yeah, internal triggers, exactly.

Master internal triggers. So when I'm feeling sad, anxious, unclear, disappointed, it's learning those tools to master those feelings.

Exactly, exactly. And this isn't, you know, you don't have to go see a psychotherapist.

This is something anybody can do, but absolutely that is the first step. And what were the tools that you learned to use for your distraction, for the internal things that were holding you back.

The internal triggers, yeah. So for internal triggers, there are three big tactics here. So to define the two, so tactics are what you do, strategy is why you do it. So it's more important that we understand the strategy versus the little tips and tricks that you see on 10 ways to master your smartphone addiction. Giving people little tips and tricks, grayscale your phone, turn off notifications. Really? Seriously? That's the best we can do? I don't know. deeper than that crap and actually understand what's going on. So that's why we can't gloss over this idea that internal triggers are super, super important. So here's what we do with internal triggers. We have to reimagine these internal triggers so we can deal with them in a healthy way, not to quell them, not to squash them because we have to remember too that Feeling bad is not bad. Okay, I think part of my beef with the self-help industry these days is that we are sold this unrealistic and unhealthy fixation and obsession with happiness. And most people don't understand that we are not evolved to be constantly happy, right? That is an unrealistic ideal. that in fact, think about it logically for a minute, right? If you subscribe to the theory of evolution, think about what would have happened if there were a tribe of Homo sapiens who were sitting around the savannah happy all day, right? Just, oh, everything's great, everything's happy, everything's contented all the time. If that would have happened, our ancestors would have killed and eaten them, okay? That does not make sense on an evolutionary basis. You want a species to be perpetually perturbed. You want us to always strive, to always want more, to always be discontented so that we fix things. So we have to start, number one, with reimagining the internal trigger, reimagining the purpose of wait, why do we feel discomfort? So when we feel bored, lonesome, uncertain, anxious, fatigued, fearful, we have to start by understanding that these uncomfortable sensations are a gift. are a gift to help us use that discomfort as rocket fuel towards traction rather than trying to escape it with distraction. What most people do when they feel, you know, lonesome, bored, indecisive, fearful, whatever it might be, they look for escape. Oh, let me just turn on the news real quick because I feel fearful. Maybe the news will give me the answer. Of course it won't. You know, I feel lonely, so let me just check Facebook real quick so that I can feel connected to others. well, no, not really. That's not really gonna give you that wholesome feeling of friendship that you might get. It's a band-aid, right? We feel stressed. So let me just take a quick drink real quick to calm my nerves, have that glass of wine after dinner so that I don't feel stressed. These are escapes from these uncomfortable internal triggers as opposed to harnessing them, as opposed to using it as rocket fuel to make things better. Make your own life better, make the world better by reimagining the internal triggers. So discomfort is not necessarily a bad thing. Feeling bad is not bad.

How did you harness these feelings when you started to recognize you were having them and you had these tools? What did you start to do to put into practice?

Yeah, I'll give you a great example. So I used to have terrible stage fright, okay? But I'm a professional speaker for a living. It kind of sucks, right? And I used to, whenever I would get on stage, I would feel these cues my body was giving me of shortness of breath, even actually just thinking about it right now, I can feel it. Shortness of breath, sweating, I would start getting nervous and saying, oh my goodness, are people gonna see my armpits are sweaty? I've got sweat on my brow, that I won't be able to talk properly, I'm gonna tumble over my words, I'm gonna look like a fool. and you see what was happening? I was ruminating on the negative aspects of this feeling. All I wanted to do was get the hell out of there. Right, before I went on stage, I would secretly pray that the AV system would crash right before I was gonna go online, right before I was gonna go on stage, I should say, and so that I wouldn't have to do the talk. Well, that wasn't serving me, right? I was looking for escape and I would have done everything to get off stage. But here's the thing, when I started re-imagining the trigger and started seeing it as, wait a minute, no, no, this discomfort is a blessing. What this is telling me when I feel my heart rate go up is not that I'm going to mess up, I'm not nervous, I'm upping my game. My body is increasing my heart rate so I can get more oxygen into my brain so I can deliver the best possible talk. So I started changing the script that I would tell myself in order to reimagine the trigger. So we can do this with all sorts of internal triggers. When I sit down to write, okay, writing is really fricking hard, you know this, right? It's hard, man. Writing is really hard work, right? And I hate it when people say, oh, just turn writing into a habit. Make it into a habit. That's ridiculous. I've never turned writing into a habit. I've written thousands of articles by now, two best-selling books. Writing will never be a habit, people. It is not a behavior done with little or no conscious thought. It sucks the entire way through. But here's the thing, by understanding that it's supposed to suck, right? This is my big beef right now with habits. I think we have reached peak habit that everybody thinks that habit means the sucky behavior done effortlessly. That is not what a habit is. When people say, oh, I want an exercise habit or a writing habit, what they're really saying is, you know that really hard thing that I don't feel like doing? How can I do it and make it not suck anymore? that is an unrealistic expectation because here's what happens. People embark down this path of forming a quote unquote habit and then they see, oh, well the guru said that after 60 days, after 90 days, it's supposed to turn into a habit, but then guess what? It never does. Right? It never becomes effortless. Why? Because deliberate practice, you know, the whole 10,000 hour rule, all this idea of, you know, in order to get better at something, you have to focus. You have to engage with it. You have to be fully present. that is the antithesis of a habit. The opposite of a habit is deliberate practice. So when we have these expectations that, oh, I can turn everything into a habit, 60 days later, people say, wait a minute, how come exercise still isn't easy? How come writing doesn't come effortlessly? And you know what? They don't blame the author of that book that gave them a bad technique. No, they blame themselves. They say, oh, I must be broken. I must be messed up. There must be something wrong with me. And we leave them worse off than we began. So what we need to start doing is to not expect these behaviors that we want to turn into quote unquote habits to be easy in the first place. We need to be comfortable with discomfort. That reimagining the internal triggers is a very important step. It's one of these three steps that we can use to help us master and overcome these internal triggers so they serve us as opposed to us serving them.

How do you reimagine the idea of that writing is hard? What do you do for that when you sit down to write and you're like, man, this is every time I've been doing this, it doesn't get easier. Maybe it gets easier and you flow a little better, but it still takes time, effort, and attention. It's not just this thing you turn on automatically, right?

Right. So there's a few different ways we can do this, and I talk about this in the book, but really it's about reimagining that internal trigger so that when you feel boredom, when you're at your desk working, you know how to address it, right? When you, you know, many times when I sit down to write, you know, I feel like I want to do everything but write. Let me just go, I'm working on.

A book right now. That's me. I've been researching for a year and a half.

Yeah. Well, when you said research, I was like, oh, I know what he's talking about. And we justify it right back to what what we were saying earlier, we say to ourselves, oh, I just need to do this quick, I just need.

To Google this one quick thing. That turns into three hours and then.

You don't get anything done. Exactly. And most often we didn't really need to Google that one thing, right? We could have just kept writing. But why do we do that? We're doing it because we're seeking to escape. But if we keep glossing over that fact, if we keep thinking, oh, I really do need to Google this one thing, or where was that study, or where was that book that I was reading, where was that thing I need to put in my writing, if we don't realize the real reason why we're looking for escape, we're going to believe this lie that leads us towards distraction. So it's really about understanding, okay, wait a minute. Okay, this is hard. Writing is difficult. Why is it difficult? Well, you know why? Because I'm plowing through new territory. Right? When you are working on something that has never been done before, when thoughts have never been strung in the way that you are stringing them together, that's hard work, right? That's virgin territory and virgin territory requires more effort to get through, right? A path that's already been paved is very easy to walk through but when you're paving a new path, you got to clear out the brush and that clearing of brush, that emotional tax is what we feel in the form of boredom and uncertainty and fatigue. That's what it takes and we should recognize it and feel it. And so there's a few different techniques. For example, One technique I talk about in the book is the 10 minute rule. And this is not something I invented. As I mentioned, everything I talk about in the book is backed by peer reviewed studies. There's over 30 pages of citations, so I'm really into the research. So this comes from CBT, and this is a technique that is called the 10 minute rule. And the 10 minute rule says that you can give in to any distraction, but not right now. not right now. And this applies just as well with that piece of chocolate cake you know you shouldn't eat if you're trying to lose weight, with that cigarette you're trying not to smoke, with checking social media or email when you should be working on something else at your desk. The 10 minute rule says, I can give into that distraction in 10 minutes. Now, the first response when people hear about this technique is, well, why don't you just say no to yourself? Why do you need this silly technique? Just abstain. Okay? Unfortunately, what we know from the research literature is that abstinence frequently backfires. That when you tell yourself no, then we do that. Then we binge.

Exactly.

Why do we binge? Because this technique that, you know, the abstinence technique is like pulling on a rubber band, right? If you have a rubber band and you pull on that rubber band and you pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, eventually you can't pull anymore, it's gonna snap, but it's not just gonna snap back to where it started. No, it's going to ricochet across the room. And so when we tell ourselves, don't do something, that tension that's built up is itself an internal trigger. And ironically, when we give into it, we are reinforcing the very behavior we're trying to avoid. Let me give you an example. When someone tells themselves, don't smoke, don't smoke, don't smoke, don't smoke, don't smoke, okay, fine, I'm going to have that cigarette. that feeling of relief, that relief of that tension of telling yourself no is actually what feels good when they survey smokers and they ask them, do you actually like the sensation of smokers? The overwhelming majority of smokers don't even like the taste, the sensation of smoking. What they like, what they habituate to, what they get addicted to, turns out it's not the nicotine, it's in fact the relief of not having to tell themselves not to do something that they want to do. And as crazy as that sounds, I mean, this really blew my mind when I read this research. It's pretty extensive at this point. It's not just the nicotine. It's really about this telling yourself not to do something, giving into it eventually, and that feeling of the relief of that tension of telling yourself no is actually what we get habituated to.

So instead of the 10-minute rule, Yeah, it's not saying no, it's just saying no right now.

It's not saying no, it's saying not yet.

Not yet.

Not yet. So why don't we use the 10 minute rule? Exactly. We set a time, I literally take out my phone, I set it, I ask the lady whose name I'm not gonna say right now because it's gonna show up on my phone. I tell her, set a timer for 10 minutes, I put my phone down, and now I have a choice to make. I can go down two paths. I can either get back to the task at hand, in this case let's say it's writing, okay get back to the writing or if I feel like I have that urge, if I have that sensation where I just want to go check email, I just want to go do this one thing, I just want to go do whatever it's not, that is not what I said I was going to do, I'm going to do what's called surf the urge, surf the urge, kind of like a surfer on a surfboard. I'm going to ride that sensation because what we don't realize about emotions and these uncomfortable internal states is that they feel like they're gonna last forever, but they never do. Emotions are like waves. We think, okay, when I'm angry, I'm always gonna be angry. When I'm bored, I'm always gonna be bored. That's never the case. Emotions are like waves. So if we can ride that sensation like a surfer on a surfboard, what we'll notice is that the wave will crest and then subside. So giving ourselves the 10 minutes to just, okay, What am I experiencing right now? All right, I'm feeling frustration. Why am I feeling frustration? Well, this is something hard. This is something new. This has never been done before. And starting to change that internal dialogue until we feel ready to go back to that task at hand. Okay, so you're either surfing the urge or going back to that task at hand. And what you will find 99% of the time within those 10 minutes, you'll forget about that urge. When the timer rings, you'll be like, oh, I'm back into doing what I'm doing. I don't even remember what was going to distract me. So that's why we want to use this 10-minute rule to tell ourselves not no, but not yet. So that's one of many, many different tactics we can use.

And you mentioned that a to-do list is probably one of the worst things that we can do to be productive as ever. Why is a to-do list so ineffective in actually being productive?

Right. Okay. So let me clarify a bit and qualify a bit. It's not that I'm anti-writing things down. that's a time honored technique of getting things out of your brain and putting them on paper, very, very effective. What I am against is running your life with a to-do list. So what most people who keep a to-do list do, they wake up in the morning and they say, oh, what am I supposed to be doing with my time? And instead of looking at their calendar, they look at their to-do list. And the to-do list is a seductive trap. Because what people do when they look at the to-do list, you know what they do. They do the easy things first. Yeah, they do the fun thing first.

They don't eat the frog first.

Yeah. Right, right. They do the stuff that's easy and fun, not the important and urgent, not the stuff that really needs to get done. So they do that stuff that takes them off track from the first minute they wake up because you're looking at the wrong place. You shouldn't look at your to-do list. you should look at your schedule. And part of the reason that to-do lists are so dangerous is that there's no constraint with a to-do list. You can add more and more and more and more things to a to-do list. And this is what I used to do when I used to keep a to-do list. I read all the books that said to-do lists are the best thing ever. Run your life with the to-do list. And I would do this and I have a hundred things on my to-do list and I would never finish everything. And so at the end of the day, I was reinforcing a self-image of someone who doesn't do what they said they're gonna do. And day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, if you tell yourself, another day went by and I'm a goddamn liar, because I said I was gonna do these 10 things and I didn't do it. Now this is a conversation I would have with myself. So what happens? After years of doing this, oh, I must be bad at time management. I must not be very good at this. And we start believing this ridiculous script that we made up based on this bad evidence of using a crappy technique. And it wasn't us that's broken. There's nothing wrong with us. It's that this technique doesn't work. And because we believed it, we reinforced a self-image that made things even worse. Instead of a to-do list, what we want to do is to make a schedule. And this is part two. So section two of the book is about making time for traction. So step number one is mastering internal triggers. Step number two is making time for traction. And so when we use a schedule as opposed to a to-do list, we do have a constraint, right? We do have the same constraint that everybody else on Earth has, which is the same 24 hours in a day. You know, you can have limitless amounts of money. You can be Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates and have, you know, oodles of money, but you still get the same 24 hours. And that constraint changes the paradigm of how we measure ourselves. Okay, so people who run their life on a to-do list, they measure themselves based on how many boxes they check off, right? If I checked a lot of boxes, oh, I'm so good. If I didn't check enough boxes, I'm a bad person, right? Ridiculous, silly, very harmful. Instead, I want you to stop measuring yourself by how many things you finished. That's a ridiculous metric, okay? Stop doing that. The only metric of success from now on for you should be one thing. Did I do what I said I would do without distraction? That's it. That's all you gotta do. It's not about finishing anything. It's not about finishing anything because when you say to yourself in your calendar, I am going to sit at my desk and work on my book, as you said, Louis, right? For 30 minutes, 45 minutes, whatever it is you say you want to do. I don't care how long you work on it. Whatever you said you're gonna do. that technique has been shown, this is called making an implementation intention, which is just a fancy way psychologists call planning out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it. That technique has been shown to be more effective. Here's the kicker, the people who do that actually finish more, they actually get more done than the people who use the to-do list technique.

It's kind of like saying, okay, I'm not going to go run, for an hour today, but I'm going to put my shoes on and I'm going to go outside and I'm going to start the run for two minutes. And I'm just going to do that every day. But by saying, okay, I'm going to schedule this for 10 minutes or whatever, then you typically want to do more because you're already in the flow.

Right, it's a little bit more than tiny steps. It's actually saying for that period of time. So I respect the, you know, just get started technique, very nice. But it's a don't stop technique.

Got it.

More than just get started.

So don't get discouraged. Go for 30 minutes, go for the time you scheduled in your calendar.

Right, don't say, oh, I'm gonna run a 730 or whatever. Say, I am going to walk for 30 minutes and I'm not gonna do anything else that might take me away from working on this thing for 30 minutes in my life. Okay? I'm gonna be with my child without distraction for one hour. That's all I'm going to do. I am going to check email and do nothing but flush through my email inbox for 15 minutes without doing anything else. I am going to read a book and nothing else for 20 minutes. That is all you need to do to measure yourself. Don't worry about will I finish the book, will I get to inbox zero, will I have a beautiful relationship with my child, will I ever be in good physical fitness. Don't worry about the end goals. worry about did you put in the time to work on the task you wanted to work on without distraction? That's your only metric of success.

And what happens to our self-confidence or the belief in ourself when we constantly let ourselves down with this process of not doing what we say we want to do?

Right. So if you run your life on a to-do list and you don't finish what you said you're going to do, which barely anybody with a to-do list actually, you know, who runs a life with a to-do list actually does, you're reinforcing a negative self-image of another day went by and here I go, I didn't do what I said I was gonna do. Look, I still got all these things that I didn't get to, what a loser. As opposed to when you measure yourself based on this only metric of did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction, you are a winner with every time box.

Being your word, just being your word. Yeah, it doesn't matter the results you get, it's just that I was my word today. I was my word.

That.

And what I said I was going to do, I did it. And that builds in that self-image and self-confidence with self, right? Bingo.

So being indistRactable, first and foremost, is about personal integrity. It's about being as honest with yourself as you are with other people, right? We all know that we wouldn't want to be a liar. Being called a liar is one of the worst insults anybody could say to you, right? You wouldn't want to lie to your friends, to your family, to your co-workers. and yet we lie to ourselves every day, right? Oh, I'm definitely gonna go work out. No, you didn't. I'm definitely gonna eat right. Nah, I'm definitely gonna be fully present with the people I love. Not really. We lie to ourselves and that takes a huge psychic toll on our self-image and we don't even realize it until it's too late. And that's when people start concocting all these ridiculous ideas, oh, I have a short attention span or I'm bad with time management or hey, you know what, I probably need some kind of diagnosis, it's all ridiculous. For the vast majority of people, there's nothing wrong with them. They just reinforce this crappy self-image of someone who's incapable when they are perfectly capable if they had the right techniques.

How much does self-confidence or believing in yourself matter in terms of accomplishing the goals we set out for ourselves? If we have a low self-esteem and low self-confidence, Do you believe that we can still accomplish the goals and dreams that we have? Or do we really need to start building confidence and belief in our actions and in who we are with those actions in order to accomplish those goals?

Yeah, so this is where the psychology of agency comes into play, that believing that you can do something is incredibly empowering. The question of course is, well, how do I get that belief? And where most people go wrong is that they have these big hairy goals, right? We've all heard about, oh, you have to have a specific measurable action, well, you know, the SMART goals and all that stuff. and it turns out that the literature around, this is another one of these areas that we've seen, you know, the pop psychology is so off base, right? You know, one of the most popular things that you hear these days around goals is that you have to have visioning. Let's all sit down and make a five-year plan and a visioning board, right? So that we can envision what we want. And it turns out that studies show that people who do this are shooting themselves in the foot. Wow. That we know that studies find that thinking to yourself, oh, you know, I want that beach body is pretty much the worst thing you can do if you really do want that beach body. Really?

What should you do instead? Here's the difference.

There's a good visioning and bad visioning. Bad visioning is envisioning, you know, this bull, excuse me, that comes from this idea of the secret, right? The law of attraction that, you know, envision yourself wealthy, envision yourself being in love, envisioning yourself being in physical, in good physical shape. Terrible. Don't do that. The good kind of visioning is not visioning the outcome because what's happening when you envision the outcome is that you are satiating that desire by imagining it. You are satiating it. It feels like you already got it. Instead, the good kind of visioning is to envision what you will do when something gets in the way of the actions you have to take to get that goal.

When you're distracted, what are you going to do?

What are you going to do? Exactly. So instead of thinking, oh my God, I'm going to look so good with a six pack, instead think about what am I going to do next time I go up with my friends and they offer me a piece of chocolate cake? That's the right kind of vision.

Because envisioning this incredible result in a year or 10 years is nice in theory, but it's going to be extremely hard to get there with a big goal that you might have, a big dream, launching anything, a book, the physical body, the relationship, It's not just gonna happen instantly without effort and work. So that what I'm hearing you say is to focus on, that's gonna take a lot of work and time, energy. So every time I'm pulled away from that, envisioning how you're actually gonna show up for yourself to support yourself in getting there.

That's right. That's right. And so that's why reimagining these internal triggers is so important as we talked about earlier. What is the dialogue? What techniques will I have? What arrows will I have in my quiver ready to go when I am tempted with procrastination and distraction. What will I do in those times?

Is there good research on, what did you call this, revisioning or what'd you call this?

Yeah, yeah there is. There's actually some, there's an article on my blog. I can give you a link in the show notes where I talk about the difference between good visioning and bad visioning. Very, very important because if there's one mantra I live by and is kind of the foundation of my life now since writing this book, and I didn't used to be this way by the way, I'm 42 years old. I used to be clinically obese. Really? Today I'm in the best shape of my life. I actually have a six pack for the first time ever. And I'm not saying this to brag. I'm saying this because what I've learned is that consistency is more important than intensity. Consistency over intensity in every area of your life. You want good relationships, you have to be consistently present with the people you love. You want to be great at your job. You have to consistently do the hard work that other people don't want to do. You want to have a, you know, be in good physical shape. You have to consistently show up and do the workouts. It's not about the intensity. It's not about, oh, it's New Year's. I'm going to make a resolution for five days and then quit. It's about consistent action. And that only comes not here's that, here's a really important point. It's not about knowing what to do. You know, we become so obsessed with, oh, what's the right workout? What's the right diet? What's the right way? This, that, you know, I better go get a book to tell me what to do. Like, let me go listen to some guru to give me all the answers, we basically all know what to do, right? And if you don't know what to do, Google it for God's sakes. All the answers are right there, right? We basically know what to do. What we don't know how to do is how do we stop getting in our own way? The real problem is not that we don't know what to do, it's that we don't know how to stop getting distracted.

So how do we get out of our own way?

Yeah, so we went through one and a half of the strategies. Number one is mastering the internal triggers. Number two is making time for traction, which we talked about a little bit in terms of why making a schedule is so very important. It turns out the vast majority of people don't keep any sort of a calendar. Two-thirds of people don't keep a calendar. Even those who do keep a calendar typically don't do it properly. And the proper way to do it is by using what's called a time box calendar. And I show you how to do that. This technique has been around for ages. It's been around for decades. It's actually one of the most studied techniques out there. Very, very well researched technique of planning your day It's called making implementation intention. But we can go beyond that too. Where what I advise in the book, and this hasn't been published elsewhere, is this process of what I call schedule syncing, which is very, very important. So making time for traction is all about deciding how you want to spend your time. But to do that, well, the question is, well, how do I do that? How do I decide how I'm going to spend my time? And this is where a lot of people get stuck with the time boxing technique. We've all heard it, but this is why people don't do it. They don't understand that what is the first step? How do I really get started in time boxing? The first step is to start with our values. Turning our values into time. What are values? Values are attributes of the person you want to become. Let me say that again. What are values? Values are attributes of the person you want to become. What we're going to do is we're going to ask ourselves, how would the person I want to become spend their time? And we're going to ask ourselves this in three life domains, these three life domains of you, you're at the center of these three life domains, then your relationships, then your work. Most people do it in the wrong order, right? They start with their work and then only then they give whatever scraps of time are remaining to their friends, their family, and to themselves. No, we want to start with you. So we ask ourselves, how would the person I want to become spend their time investing in themselves. Now, it is not up to me or anyone else to impose their values onto you. You have to ask this of yourself. How would the person I want to become spend their time investing in themselves? So how much time would they invest in physical fitness? If that's important to you, I'm not saying it should be, but if it's important to you, is that time to go to the gym, to go on a run, to go on a walk, whatever it might be, Proper nutrition, rest, oh my God. How many of us know we have to get quality sleep? Everybody knows this, I don't need to tell you that. You've read tons of literature that says sleep is important. How many of us have a bedtime? Right? How many of us actually have our schedule?

Scheduled.

Yes. Very few people do, right? We have to have that time scheduled because you know what you're gonna do if you don't, you know, check Facebook for another thing.

Distracted.

Watch another thing on Netflix. Right. You've got to have that time scheduled. Now again, if you say, the way I invest in myself is I play video games for four hours a day, I got no problem with that. I'm not one of these chicken little tech critics that's gonna say, oh no, watching football is okay, but playing video games is bad. No, ridiculous. Anything you wanna do with your time is fine as long as you decide in advance. So if you say, I want time to play video games, Great, but put it on your schedule. Don't do it according to the tech company's schedule, do it according to your values and your schedule. So that's the you domain. Next comes the relationship domain. And this is a really important one. Part of the reason we have a loneliness epidemic in this country, and we know that researchers tell us that loneliness is as detrimental to our health as smoking and obesity, Wow. It is a real crisis right now. The reason this is happening, this is not happening because of social media. Social media is the symptom to this disease, which is that the proportion of time spent in planned social engagements in this country has been in a precipitous decline. Okay? So if you read Robert Putnam back in the 1990s, he wrote this book called Bowling Alone. way back before Facebook and social media. And he documented this trend, this 50-year trend now, of people spending less time in scheduled engagements with their friends. So he called it bowling alone because bowling used to be a big social activity. You'd go to the bowling league and you'd see your friends and you'd get together every Thursday night with your buddies and that doesn't happen like it used to. The secularization of of the United States. Not that I'm, you know, I'm a pretty secular person. I'm not saying people should go to church or synagogue or whatever. I'm just saying that those regular pillars of social engagement in our life for more and more people don't exist, right? So the lack of those scheduled times for our relationships takes a deep psychological toll. So you have to ask yourself, how would the person I want to become spend time with the people they love? Okay, not giving them whatever scraps of time are left over between everything else. but actually booking that time, right? How many times we go, oh, we should get coffee someday. Yeah, okay, right. That's code for never, right? So having that time with your children, your family, your parents, your siblings, your best friends, having that time on your schedule, I know many of us are at home right now during COVID got it. Maybe one of the silver linings is that people now are more proactive about scheduling those Zoom calls. I think I hope those will continue, right? I'm spending much more time over Zoom with my parents than I was before COVID So scheduling that time with your spouse, very, very important. Having that time on your calendar to say, okay, this is our time together, whether it's a regular date day, a walk time, whatever it might be, having that time scheduled and sacred for the people you love. And then finally, the last domain is the work domain. And when it comes to work, we have to realize there are two types of work. okay? There's what we call reactive work and reflective work. Reactive work is a part of everybody's job, okay? It's the phone calls, the meetings, the Slack channels. It's reacting to whatever's happening in your work environment. And that's part of the job, I get it. Some jobs, few jobs are 100% reactive, okay? If you work in a restaurant, if you work in a call center, your job is to show up, You're not a schedule maker, you're a schedule taker. You take whatever schedule is given to you, you show up, you do whatever needs to get done, it's all reactive. Or almost all reactive. Other jobs are almost all reflective. If you're a software engineer, a marketing executive, a salesperson, you're not a schedule taker, you're a schedule maker. You have to sit down and say, wait a minute, how will I plan my day? How should I spend my time? and you have a tough job because your most important job is to figure out how to spend your time. What most people do is they take the easy default. The easy default is, I'll just take whatever comes to me. They think they're working in a reactive job, but really they're working in a reflective job. And those are the kind of people who suck at their jobs. Why? If you want a competitive advantage, if you want to be better than everyone else in your field, Let me give you a little secret, okay? That no one else is doing. Think. Think. Make time to actually sit and think in your day. You know why? Because nobody else is doing it. I promise you that.

It's the react. Nobody's doing it. Now they're reacting.

Exactly. They're constantly reacting. But look, to plan, to strategize, to think ahead, you have to sit down without distraction and make some time to be with yourself in your own head to figure out what to do next. You have to prioritize. That takes time to think without distraction. So I implore everyone, if your job requires some level of reflection, which almost everyone's job does, give yourself that 30 minutes, 45 minutes, heck an hour a day to work without distraction and put it on your calendar and keep it sacred. Okay, so now we have these three life domains. We have our time box calendar. The final step is to do what we call a schedule sync. And this is what's been missing, I think, from everyone else who's been taught, who's, you know, espouses this technique of time boxing, and it's been around again for decades and decades, is, well, what happens when in reality I have a boss and a spouse and I have kids and I have other people who demand my time, that schedule gets blown to bits. And the reason it gets blown to bits is because we don't do what's called a schedule sync. Here's what a schedule sync looks like. Let me destroy yet another piece of bad productivity advice, which is we've all heard that if you want to stay focused, if you want to be productive, the best thing you can do is learn how to say no. Haven't we all heard this advice? Learn how to say no to people. What kind of stupid advice is that, Louis? You're gonna look at your boss, the guy who pays or the guy or gal who pays your bills, and you're gonna tell them, you know what boss? No. Are you serious? Who would give that kind of advice? If you've actually had a job, you know you can't tell your boss no. You'll get fired. So instead of telling your boss no, what you're gonna do instead is to say, hey boss, look, Can we sit down once a week, Monday morning, it's gonna take 15 minutes max, and you're gonna show them your schedule. Now that you've made a time box schedule, you're gonna show them. You have a physical artifact you can share with them. And you say, hey boss, here's my schedule for the week. Here's all the stuff I'm doing per the priorities at work. Here's how I'm spending my time during the workday. Now you see this other list here. I wrote down on this other list here on this piece of paper all the stuff I couldn't fit into my schedule for the week, can you help me reprioritize? That's your boss's number one job, okay? A boss's job, number one, is to prioritize.

Yeah, what's the most important thing right now that you need me to do? Exactly. And can you have someone else support with these other tasks? Can we delegate to some other things if you want me to do this right now? Absolutely.

So if you say, look, if there's something on this list that's not in my calendar, no problem. What should I swap out? Help me understand how to re-prioritize. Exactly, schedule syncing, doing that synchronization. Exactly, so that, and let me tell you, your boss will worship the ground you walk on. I've started two startups, most bosses have no idea how their employees are spending their time.

Zero idea. We are hiring more and more people and luckily we're pretty good at it because we use Slack and monday.com, so we have projects that are managed. project managers and all that, but I'm not looking in those things. So I have no idea actually what's being done unless I ask my project manager or my COO and say, Are people even working today? I don't even know. So it's luckily we have some of those tools. But if you were like, Hey, this is my calendar for the week, the things that I'm planning to create this week.

Time boxed.

Yeah. And you were like, Hey, what can we eliminate or how can I delegate this? then I'm sure it would make that person pretty excited.

Right, or reprioritize, or here's the thing, the boss is thinking, what the heck are people doing all day? Right? Why aren't things happening faster? Employees are thinking, oh my God, doesn't.

My boss know how much is on my plate right now?

Right. I'm overwhelmed. I'm overworked. Yeah, yeah. Exactly, and this, of course, because there's no visibility into our schedules. And I'm telling you, it's 10 minutes a week. 15 minutes max. If you sit down and say, here's my schedule, here's how I plan to spend my time, help me reprioritize. If you do this, your boss will say, actually, you know what? That one thing, you really don't need to be at that meeting. But that other thing is super important. Can we swap that out? This is how we get on the same page. This is how we synchronize our schedules. We can do this with our boss. We can do this with our spouses. Let me tell you, my wife and I used to get in so many fights because of household responsibilities. because of misunderstandings of, oh, I thought you were going to do this and I thought you were going to do that. Now we sit down, and now we involve my daughter too. We do it every week, the three of us sit down together and we synchronize our schedules miraculous. It's amazing.

It's clarity.

It's clarity. It's made our life.

Yeah, it's clarity. I've been a big fan of promoting the scheduling technique of your goals, your dreams, your values, all those things. for a long time because I learned this from my football coach. In football, we would have a goal as a team. Start of the season, what is our goal team? What do we want to accomplish? Do we want to win the championship? Do we want to go to the playoffs? How many games do we want to win? Do we want to become better in each position? All these things. And we would come up with the goals. And then I remember the first day of practice I ever went to football, I had a schedule in my locker and so did every person in the locker room. I was 15 years old and this first time I ever saw this, I was like, oh, there's like a, there's a calendar from every minute with intentional actions to help us reach the goal for that day. And there's a schedule for the week and for the season. We had a game every week to kind of measure the goals and how far, how close we are and how far away. But every, I mean, there was a five minute break for water. There was a 10 minute stretching break. There was an offense section, a defense section, a coaches talk. There was every place was scheduled. And that's when I said, oh, I need to do this in my life after sports. I was like, why would you do anything but schedule in what you want and actually follow through on this? So I've used this sports kind of, I didn't know it was scientifically backed. I think it was just like good planning by him. And I was like, I've just used that for the last 20 years where everything I want to do, it's got to be in the calendar. If I want to talk to my mom. It's in the calendar. If I want to go on a workout, it's in the calendar. If I'm working on writing, it's in the calendar. It's not just, I'm going to do this today, and then getting distracted. I've always done that, but I'm glad to hear that there's a lot of research and science backed by this, and you've created even more strategies for us to use this.

Is this called the schedule maker tool? Is that something you developed? Yeah. So, I have a very simple tool I put on my website to help people make these schedules. And I can give you the link for the show notes. But the best tool I get often asked, what's the best tool? Should I use this? Should I use that? What's the best app? The best tool is the one you use, right? The one that you consistently use. So you can use a tool I made. It's free. You don't have to sign up for anything. But frankly, you can do it with a pen and paper and a calendar. Paper calendar, you can do it with Google Calendar. Whatever you use to keep that schedule, and to revise it from week to week. You never revise it during the day, right? You would never say, oh, I don't want to do this anymore. Let me change it during the day. No, no, no. Once it's set, it's set for the day. But you're going to look at it once a week. 80% of the people out there that I've worked with, they have pretty good visibility to what the week ahead will look like so they can make that calendar for the week ahead. Takes again 15 minutes a week. You're going to revise that calendar. It's not something that's set in stone once forever and ever. No, no, no. you're going to look at it for, you know, for me it's every Sunday night. I sit down, I look at the calendar from the week that passed, I look at the calendar for the week ahead, and I try and make the week ahead easier to follow and I make adjustments, right? So if I say, oh, you know what? I really didn't have enough time for writing. I want more or I didn't have enough time for email. I really need to adjust it or I have this meeting that I can't move. So where am I going to move something else around? That process of sitting down and forming that schedule, you know, your schedule is not set in stone forever and ever. It's a dynamic process. because the right attitude is not a drill sergeant. A lot of people resist making schedules in their life because they feel like it's too restrictive, it doesn't leave them time to be spontaneous. No, freedom comes from these constraints by allowing yourself to adapt that calendar in advance to help you live your values, to make sure that your calendar becomes easier and easier to follow over time because, I mean, the simple mantra here is, you can't call something a distraction unless you know what it is distracting you from. Everything on your schedule is traction. Everything on your schedule is traction. Even if it's video games, that's fine. If you say, I want an hour to play video games or go on social media or do whatever, that's traction. Suddenly everything else is a distraction. And this is, by the way, the one more reason why running your life on a to-do list sucks. is because when people get home at the end of the day, okay, and they use the to-do list technique to run their life, and again, I'm not talking about simply writing down tasks, I'm totally cool with that. What I'm not cool with is running your life on a to-do list. You get home at the end of the day, this used to happen to me every day, and I still wouldn't finish everything on my to-do list, right?

But I'm exhausted. All I wanna do is just relax, play with my daughter, watch a movie.

On Netflix, just chill. But then you see your list that you didn't complete it and you're like, well, I'm not an integrity to myself. Exactly, and you feel like crap. So even when we have leisure time, even when we are relaxing, we're just thinking about work.

Exactly. And then you add more to the to-do list for the next day and the next day and it's like it never gets finished, right?

Exactly, exactly. And let me tell you, I bet 90% of your listeners, 99% of your listeners have never experienced the bliss of what it feels like to have real leisure. We don't, many people have not experienced, what does real leisure feels like? Real leisure is freedom, right? When I am playing video games, it's awesome because that's all I need to be doing, right? If I checked email while I'm playing a video game, the email becomes a distraction, right? If I get a work phone call while I'm with my daughter, that becomes a distraction because I planned to do X and that is all I'm gonna do. That is what real leisure feels like. The freedom to know, I don't care what's on my to-do list, nothing else matters but what I'm doing right now because that is what I planned and scheduled to do.

What else should we be thinking about in setting ourselves up to win with our big goals? And how should we set these goals? You mentioned you shouldn't think about the smart goals, which should we be thinking about on how to set our goals and dreams for our life?

Yeah, so goals are tricky. I would say that there's nothing inherently wrong with the SMART goals technique, et cetera. There is definitely a lot wrong with the visioning of, oh, this is what I, let me sit here and make a vision board and a mood board about my five-year plan. My best piece of advice is let's just start with tomorrow. Let's just start with tomorrow as opposed to, oh, what do I want to do in five years and my vision board and my mood board and all that stuff? How would the person you want to become? Again, it's about living according to your values and nobody can tell you what your values are. How would the person you want to become spend their time? And by blocking out that time to say, you know what? Yes, I have a dream that someday I'll write a novel. I have a dream that I'll get my PhD. I'll get a dream, a dream that I'll have a successful business. Okay, but how much time are you going to invest in that? And knowing that constraint to the same 24 hours with everything else that you want to do and that you dream of, forces you to prioritize. And that is essential, consistency over intensity. That is essential to getting to that long-term goal is to work on it day or over day after day after day, relentless forward momentum. This is how we accomplish these big goals, not just dreaming about them.

So dreaming about them is not bad, it's not wrong. It can set an intention of what you want to create. But what I'm hearing you say is, who's the person I want to be today? And what are those, what can I schedule on my calendar that will support me in that goal and in that today, tomorrow, and doing it consistently over time is what I'm hearing you say.

And understanding what's in your way. So for example, I had this dream of learning Chinese.

And visualizing the distractions and thinking about the distractions in your way and what you're going to do in response to those.

Exactly. And having these strategies ready to go so that when you go off track, so if it's something you really prioritize, and you say, okay, this is what I want to do with my time. I know the difference between traction and distraction. for that minute of my day, what am I gonna do when I feel bored, lonely, and decisive? Do I have those tactics ready? Do I know how to reimagine the tasks that trigger my temperament? These are the three big tactics around mastering internal triggers. Am I ready with that? Do I have those techniques ready? Do I have that time on my calendar? The second big step of making time for traction. The third step that we didn't get to yet is hacking back the external triggers. Maybe this is a good time to move to the next big strategy, hacking back external triggers. Remember in our model, we talked about traction, distraction, internal triggers, external triggers. We talked about internal triggers just a bit. There's a lot more there that we didn't get to. We talked about making time for traction, about how we make sure we schedule that time, we do those schedule syncs. Now the third step is hacking back the external triggers. So external triggers, We talked about earlier a little bit, the pings, the dings, the rings, everything in the outside environment that can move you away from what you plan to do can lead you towards distraction rather than traction. And the reason I call it hacking back the external triggers is because, you know, I use that word very deliberately. So to hack means to gain unauthorized access to something. So a computer hacker would hack into your bank account to gain unauthorized access. Now, the reason I use this term is because there is no doubt that all sorts of interests want to hack your attention, okay? Whether it's the social media companies, whether it's the television news companies, whether it's the newspapers, whether it's all kinds of people, your kids, they want to gain unauthorized access to your attention, okay? But here's the thing. We are not helpless victims. There is nothing that says we can't hack back. What is Mark Zuckerberg gonna do if you turn off those goddamn notification settings? Can he reach into your phone and turn it back on? Nothing. No, he can't do that. And so instead of complaining and moaning and groaning about, oh, these people are doing it to me, they're hacking my attention, they're making me do these things. They're hijacking my brain. They've addicted me, which is all rubbish. We can hack back. So this is the part of the book that's the most nuts and bolts, right? I tell you specific technologies that you can use to hack back. Let me give you a few examples. I love YouTube, okay? YouTube, I've learned so much. I've watched your videos on YouTube. I've watched so many smart people give amazingly good advice, sometimes not so good advice, but for the most part, there's great stuff on YouTube. And I love it. I think it's an amazing world-changing platform. My daughter is homeschooled. Half of what she learns, she learns from people who have posted these incredible videos on YouTube. It's amazing. Now, do I have to use YouTube the way that Google designed it? No. I can hack back. So one aspect of YouTube that I don't like, that I don't appreciate, are all of these external triggers. The external triggers that come in the form of the autoplay videos. Well, you can turn those off. There's a very easy setting. You can find it. They don't make it super easy to find, but it's there. You can turn off autoplay. Here's one that you can't turn off, but I'll show you how to hack. You know all those videos on the side? Yeah. All those recommended videos that include the ads, right? You don't have to see those. Those are external triggers. They are there to get you to watch the next video, the next video, the next video. We all know that. Is anybody tricked by what those are there for? They want you to spend time on their site. That's pretty obvious. That's how they make money. But we don't have to stand for it. So when I use YouTube, I only go onto YouTube using a Chrome extension called YouTube DF. It's a free Chrome extension. Anyone can go download it. YouTube DF stands for distraction free. So every time I see one of your videos, Louis, on YouTube, I just see you. I don't see all those stupid videos on the side. I don't need to see all those ads. They've been scrubbed out by this technology that hacked back the external triggers for free. It doesn't cost me anything to do that. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. So on Facebook, for example, I love Facebook. It's great. But I don't want to see the Facebook newsfeed. That newsfeed is algorithmically generated garbage. Okay? So what did I do? I went on to the Chrome store and I got another free Chrome extension that's called Facebook News Feed Eradicator. And it does exactly what it says. Whenever I go and I check Facebook, I see a nice inspirational quote where my news feed used to be. And guess what? Zuckerberg can't do anything about it.

That's cool.

And so these are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of different things that we can do for our technology. We can hack back. I show you techniques around email. Email is kind of the bane of everyone's existence these days. It's one of these habit-forming technologies that we hate but we can't stop using. I show you how to save up to 90% of the time you spend on email by hacking back. Meetings. Oh my God, how much time do we spend in pointless meetings, especially now that we're doing so many over Zoom? I show you how to hack back meetings. I show you how to hack back the distractions that come from your kids. You know, so many of us, we work from home, we're working away, we're trying to stay focused and yet our kid comes into the room and becomes a source of distraction. So we systematically go through these various different external triggers.

And you were going to mention, you were mentioning something about wanting to learn Chinese.

I think you're saying that. Yeah, yeah, that was back earlier when we were talking about different priorities. You know, I had this goal of, oh, I really want to learn Chinese. That'd be so cool. But before I wrote Indistractable, I would have just added it to my to-do list, learn Chinese.

And it would have just never happened.

It would have never happened. Never happened.

It's just always been on the bottom.

Exactly. By forcing myself to say, okay, where is that time going to come from? How much time am I willing to invest in this? It's part of my values for myself to invest in growth, learning, development. Great. But what is that going to come at the expense of? and because I only have so many hours in a day, putting that in my calendar made me prioritize to say, okay, well if I want to write my next book and if I want to have time with my daughter and if I want to work out and if I want to do this and I want to do that, something's got to give. And so that process of prioritizing means, you know, I can't do everything at the same time. Maybe that's a goal for 2022, I don't know. But that process of putting it on your calendar forces you to prioritize because there are constraints.

Are you studying Chinese?

Nope. Well, not really. I'm still experimenting to see. So I started with an hour a day and then I thought that it just didn't work for me. Because again, from week to week, I would experiment with it and found it didn't work. So now I'm going to try 15 minutes a day and see maybe that's...

I made it for 20 years. More like 15 for real, but for 20 years, I was like, I'd really love to learn another language. I barely feel like I know English, but I was like, I would love to learn another language. And Spanish has always been the one that's been the most interesting to me. I'm a very passionate salsa dancer. I used to go out two, three times a week for, I don't know, five to 10 years salsa dancing, and I would hear the Latin music and I'd be around Latin individuals who are speaking Spanish all the time, and I just appreciated the language. and every year I would say, okay, I'm gonna get the app, I'm gonna study this, and then it would never happen. I'd do it for a day, then it would be so hard in my brain that I was just like, it's too hard, right? You can't form a habit around something that's really this hard. You have to be intentional around it and schedule it. And so finally last year, I said, enough is enough. I've been thinking about this for 20 years. I keep losing confidence. and integrity with myself, I either need to say this is not something I care about anymore and let it off my set of goals and dreams and values, or I need to actually do something about it and schedule it in my calendar. So I actually found a one-on-one tutor to help me. We do it three times a week. At first I was going to do five days a week and I tried that and I was like, I can't do five days a week. It's not going to happen. And then now we're doing three days a week. And originally it was 60 minutes a session, but my brain was hurting so much the whole time that I was like, okay, let me do 45 minutes. And I feel like that has been the sweet spot now, three days a week, 45 minute sessions. I've got a session here in about 20 minutes, actually. And, and it's figuring out what's the best time of day to do this and, you know, and also making sure I work out in the mornings, Spanish class at night, run a business, train people, hire people, you know, All this stuff is, it takes time, but when you focus on values first, like you said, and you create those values for yourself and you determine what they are and you schedule the action steps to support those values, then you can see how you want to live your life and what's working for you, right?

Exactly, and iterate. I think what you're doing, which is super important, is that you are learning from this process of time boxing and scheduling to see what works for you. You know, we know that humans succumb to what we call the planning fallacy, that on average a task will take you three times longer than you think it will. That's on average, okay? On average, three times longer. Why? Because so few of our tasks in life provide any feedback, right? We work on that big report, it took us three times longer to do that RFP or that blog post or that chapter in the book we're writing or whatever it is, but there's no feedback loop there for us to reassess, wait, how long did that take? How did I feel? How hard was it? And so because there's no feedback loop, we don't learn from that experience and we keep making the same mistake again and again and again and again for the rest of our lives. As opposed to when we make a time box calendar, we say, okay, you know what? I budgeted an hour a day, every day, to write the blog post. and actually it takes way more time than I thought. Well, is that still a priority? Is that still part of my values? Or should I make more time for it? If so, great, let's make more time for it. Or let's dump it or let's reprioritize. So that's why the schedule sync of once a week sitting down with that schedule is so important because you're a scientist here, not a drill sergeant, a scientist. And a scientist collects evidence, you know, makes hypotheses and readjusts based on what.

They'Re learning to make their schedule and the experiment more successful? Oh, man, I feel like I could go on and on about this for a long time and hopefully we'll have you back on in the future. But I want to wrap things up here with a few final questions. Before I ask these final questions, I want to make sure people get your book, both books, because they're both powerful, Hooked, how to build habit-forming products and Indistractible, not distractible, but indistractible, how to control your attention and choose your life. backed by a lot of research and science to support your findings, which I think are really powerful. So, I want to make sure people get that and they can also follow you if they want to be distracted, they can follow you in a good way. They can follow you on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. I really like watching your content on LinkedIn the most so they can follow you there. I think you've got great stuff there. And it's near Ayal, I believe is how I pronounce it, right? Near Ayal. everywhere except for near anyyal99 on Instagram, correct?

Right, right. But the best place to go is my blog, which is really easy to remember. It's nearandfar.com, but near spell like my first name, so N-I-R and far.com nearandfar.com.

Lots of great content there. All the information about where to find you as well. Your books, again, I highly recommend checking those out. Whether you're just looking to improve your life, whether you're an employee somewhere or you're an entrepreneur and you're trying to develop better products that really get people to be more involved in those products. This is a question, what's a question that people should be asking you more that they don't ask you?

Should be asking me more. Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know if there's one question.

With all the research you've done in the last eight years to these books and everything you're finding about productivity and living a better life and getting people bought into your products and services, what should we be asking you?

I think it's a general attitude. I think that there is a general attitude of, unfortunately, more cynicism. that troubles me, I think, these days than skepticism. You know, it used to be, so when I moved to Silicon Valley back in 2006, skepticism was a healthy thing, right? I still think skepticism is great, right? Wanting to see evidence, being skeptical of results, you know, skepticism is a good value, I think. Today, I think that there is this move towards cynicism, which is very scary to me. that today with many different fields, particularly, you know, I see this in the technology field, there's this idea that it's all about power plays and if someone can manipulate and control you, then they're going to and it's about, you know, there's no way they can do anything right because of who they are and we see this in many different facets. You can see the subtext here and I think that's troublesome because I think it leads us to this helpless mindset, right? I mean, I think many people have seen the Social Dilemma movie. I was actually interviewed for that film for three hours. I sat down with them back in 2018. And they didn't include anything I had to say in the actual film. I'm in the credits, but they didn't include my commentary because my message is one of empowerment, right? I'm not naive. I know what these tech companies are doing. I know how they manipulate you. I know how they get you hooked. I wrote the book on how to do it, right? I know exactly how they get you hooked. and I can tell you their techniques are good. They're not that good. Right? This isn't mind control. They're not brainwashing you. They're not brainwashing you, yeah. No, and you know what the funny thing is that, okay, so the social dilemma movie, you know, the entire movie was about how powerless you are, right? They don't give you any techniques. It's not until the final credits, literally the final credits that anybody says, hey, what do you think about turning off notifications? It's like, it's the entire film is like, call your senator and, you know, like, let's, you know, we have to wait for the tech companies to change something or the geniuses in Washington to do something about it. And that's silly because why the heck would we wait? Why would we wait for them to do something about this problem? We can do something about it right now. I mean, there's these four steps that we can take, master the internal triggers, make time for traction, hack back external triggers. We didn't talk about the last one. preventing distraction with PACT, I mean anyone can do this. And the irony here is the more we believe we are powerless, the more we believe these tech critics who tell us there's nothing we can do, it's hijacking our brains, this leads to learned helplessness. This is exactly what the tech companies want. They want you to believe you are addicted, right? Because when there's an addiction, there's a pusher, there's a dealer, there's somebody doing this to me. But when we call it what it really is, not an addiction, it's a distraction, right? And we can do something about distractions. That there is no distraction that we can't overcome when we use forethought. You know, one of the things that makes our species so special is that we can see into the future with higher fidelity than any other animal on the face of the earth, right? We know what is going to happen and predict what is going to happen better than any other animal. so it doesn't matter what the distraction might be. Because if you wait till the last moment, for sure they're gonna get you. If you wait till the chocolate cake is on the fork, you're gonna eat it, it's too late. If the cigarette's in your hand, you're gonna smoke it. If the phone is on your nightstand, it's gonna be the first thing you reach for in the morning. We know this, of course they're gonna get you, you already lost. But if you use forethought, if you plan ahead, this is what separates distractible people from indistractible people is that they understand that they can overcome any distraction that might occur tomorrow by taking steps today. And that's really the message I want to get out there.

Ooh. And what do you call that again? Vision, visualizing something, the distraction that'll come up, visualizing how to handle that, what is that term called?

Right. I would summarize it with forethought. Okay, if you want to summarize my entire book in one mantra, it's that the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. That whenever we go off track, whenever we don't do what we say we're going to do, whenever we lie to ourselves, it's always a problem of impulsiveness. But there is no impulsiveness that we cannot overcome if we use forethought. That's the secret to our success.

I think it's brilliant. I studied meditation about four and a half, five years ago and learned a strategy where you meditate in the morning, a simple 15-minute meditation. You think about what you want to create for the day, you visualize it, you imagine your day and what you want to create. And then also, as if all the things you want are going to happen seamlessly, Right? But then you also think, what if everything doesn't happen the way you envision? How are you going to respond? Are you going to respond with a negative reaction, with resentment, with anger, with triggers? Or are you going to be using a positive trigger to respond in a loving way when someone's negative or when someone drops the ball or you missed expectation or whatever? How are you going to show up when there's a distraction in your day like that as well emotionally? So, I think it's a great strategy to have, you know, to create a goal for yourself, but then also have the foresight, forethought to plan how to respond when you get distracted in your life in any way. So I think that's brilliant. This is a question I ask everyone at the end. It's called the three truths. I'd like you to imagine for a moment it's your final day on earth many, many years away and you've accomplished everything that you want to accomplish, even though you only think about the next day and you're not dreaming five, ten years out, you've accomplished it all. You've got the great relationships, everything you can imagine, it's happened. But for whatever reason, you've got to take all of your body of work with you. This interview goes with you, your books, no one has access to your content anymore. But you get to leave behind on a piece of paper, again, hypothetical question, you get to leave behind three things you know to be true or the three biggest lessons that you've learned that you would share with the rest of us. What would you say are those three truths for you that you'd share?

So one of them I just mentioned is the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. I think there's a lot there. A lot of this, I dropped these truths in the time we had together. I think another one is consistency over intensity is a big one. And then the third one, I'm still working on this and I think this might be the subject of my next book. Something around agency. There's something super important in terms of feeling control in one's life. And I haven't quite figured that out one out. So that one's TBD, but there's something very important and special around the psychology of agency.

Is that agency meaning like identity to how we identify with ourselves or?

The agency meaning that we can affect outcomes. So there's a lot of fascinating research coming out around that the brain is not a computer, we used to think, you know, every age we think that the brain is just like our machines, right? During the Industrial Revolution, they thought there was, you know, valves and pumps in the brain. During the information age, people thought it was like a processor, and it's neither of those things. What we're learning now is that the brain is actually more of a thermostat. It's called predictive processing. And what we're learning more and more is that it's really about our ability to predict our own ability to affect our outside environment. There's a lot there that, again, I'm still chewing on and don't understand and talking to researchers and experts in this burgeoning field. But the more you look about into depression, anxiety disorder, the role of placebos, the role of psychosomatic disorders, in all of these, the common thread seems to be something around our ability to affect effect change. And that's what I mean by agency. So, I don't have it encapsulated into an easy-to-remember mantra yet like I did with my first couple of books, but no worries. Check back with me in a few years.

No worries. Well, Nir, I want to acknowledge you for the consistent effort you're putting into creating this information in useful ways so that we can consume it, we can be more equipped and have the understanding, the complex, and make it more understandable so that we can use these tools to be less distracted and have more fulfilling lives. And also, you know, all the habit forming strategies that you put together as well. I know how challenging it is to come up to package ideas so it's consumable and understandable when things are very challenging for people. So I acknowledge your mission and your ability to consistently create great work. I love watching your stuff on LinkedIn and checking out your articles. So thanks for showing up for yourself and showing up for the world in this mission, in this pursuit. My final question for you, and I want to make sure everyone checks you out at nearandfar.com, but my final question is what's your definition of greatness?

My definition of greatness is living out your values. That to me is my definition of greatness and those values as defined by you. with intent, with forethought.

My man, thank you so much for being here.

My pleasure. Thank you. This is great.

If you're looking for more greatness in your life, make sure to check out this video right here. And also check out our free PDF, the Three Secrets to Unlock the Power of youf Mind to help you change your life. Download it right here.

The lesson that I learned from her is go do it now. Like, stop talking. Just go do it. If you don't have an excuse, then you shouldn't be wasting time.