Ep. 305: Become Indistractable W/ Nir Eyal

The time to build is upon us. Great power comes great responsibility. You know, the greatest danger facing us is ourselves. An irrational fear of the unknown. Not because they are easy, but because they are hard. This is the Superhuman Academy podcast.

Okay. Well, we are live in the Superhuman Academy studio with Nir Eyal. I'm super grateful that you're joining us today. How are you doing, Neil?

I'm doing great. Good to be here.

Awesome. Well, I know that a lot of people in the Superhuman Academy audience already know you. They know your work. But for those who don't and people like me who haven't read your books prior to this call, I felt guilty for that. So I'll read them after. Can you give us a little bit of background on yourself, a little bit of context? Sure.

So I am what you call a behavioral designer. So I help companies build the kind of products and services that people use because they want to, not because they have to. So I work with all kinds of different industries from edtech to help people form good habits around learning a new language, for example with an app like duolingo to health tech to help people make sure they stay on health regimen. Like an app called fitbot uses the hook model to get people hooked to exercise. I work with companies in financial services, in SaaS, products, enterprise products, any kind of product service that requires repeat engagement. And that is that methodology comes from my first book podcast, hooked how to build habit forming products which is all about how we can build healthy habits in users lives. Now the other side of the story, the what I've been working on the past few years is my second book called how to control your attention and choose your life and where Hooked is about how to build healthy habits in the products and services that we use. From a designer perspective, from a business perspective, indistractables for everyone who struggles with distraction, everyone who feels like they could accomplish more in their day to day life, they could get more out of life. They fear living with regret. Regret because they did something they didn't intend to do. Whether it's scrolling too much social media, whether it's watching too much tv, whether it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook. How do we get rid of all these distractions that take us off track. And so indistractable is about how to control your attention and choose your life. So it's about how to break those bad habits that keep us from living the kind of life we know we deserve. Awesome.

All right, I love that. And before we Started the recording before we started the live stream. I threw out the word addictive, and that got a reaction. So I want to hear more about that. You've mentioned that, you know, that word has some misleading connotations. So can you tell us. Tell us more about that?

Well, so addiction is a pathology. It is a terrible.

Condition that we should not minimize. And I think one of the things that really grates me is when I hear people calling everything addictive. Everything's addictive these days, right? Technology is addictive. And, you know, video games are addictive. And the news is addictive. And my. My wife got a box of shoes from dsw, and across the box it said danger addictive contents inside it's shoes, right? So we've really minimized this. This horrible affliction of addiction, which does affect about 3 to 5% of population. The problem is that when we toss this word around, particularly, you know, in my field around technology, when people talk about addictive technology and how technology is hijacking your brain, you hear some people saying. You hear other people saying how it's stealing our focus and attention. And the problem with that language is twofold. Number one, it minimizes this horrible affliction that people who really do suffer from addiction have by saying, if everything is addictive, well, then nothing is really addictive. And then secondarily, it disempowers the person saying it. You know, remember, the word addiction comes from the Latin addictio, which means slave. And one of the biggest problems I see out there is that people believe that they are powerless to resist distraction, right? We see stupid movies like the Social Dilemma movie. We hear tech critics telling us how we're all powerless, how technology is hijacking our brain. And look, it is designed to get you hooked. I know. I wrote the book Hooked. I know all about their tricks. And I will tell you, these tactics are good. They are effective. But it's not mind control unless you believe it is. If you believe you are powerless, then they got you. Because what do people do when they believe that there's nothing to be done? What do they do? Nothing. Because it's hopeless. It's purposeless. Why would I even try? It's called learned helplessness. And there's a large psychology canon around why learned helplessness is such a debilitating mindset which we see so often these days. You know, we live in a very. In a society that almost glamorizes victimhood. We want to blame Zuckerberg for hooking us to our technology. We want to blame the News. We want to blame all these distractions outside of ourselves, when in actuality, they do play a role. I'm not going to minimize their role. They certainly do play a role. But we are far more powerful than any of these technologies as long as we acknowledge our role in regaining that power.

So what is the. What's the difference in what's going on in the brain with, let's say, doom scrolling through Facebook versus a cocaine addiction?

Do you.

Do you know the neuroscientists or neuroscience there? Because I certainly don't.

Yeah, sure. So. So the brain has a natural circuit breaker. When we go overboard on something for. For neurotypical individuals, when we overdo something, right? Whether it's too much food, too much booze, too much news, right. Whatever it is that we are overdoing, the neurotypical brain will say, okay, that was too much. Right? We've all had that hangover the night after we've had a party, and we say, you know what? I need to take it easy. Okay? We've all missed an important deadline because we were watching too much Netflix or scrolling too much on social media. And then we say, okay, I gotta dial it back. We've all eaten too much, looked at the scale the next day and said, okay, I gotta reregulate here. The neurotypical brain does that. There's a small percentage of people, we're talking 3 to 5% of the population, where that fuse, that circuit breaker has burned out. Out. And despite these repeat harms, they have a very, very difficult time stopping. And this isn't to say that they are somehow broken. We know that addiction is highly correlated with what is happening in your life, with certain circumstances. So addiction is never about the product itself. Never. Addiction is always about the confluence of three things. The person, right? Their. Their proclivity towards addiction, the pain they are going through in their life. You know, we know, for example, that there's a very famous study around Vietnam War vets, American vets coming back from Vietnam. I think it was something like 30% were addicted to opiates when they were in the hell of the Vietnam War. Because to be honest, when you were, you know, drafted into this war, you didn't want to be there. Now you have to do terrible things to other human beings. The logical thing to do is to drug yourself to oblivion because it's a horrible situation, right? We see this with homeless people. You know, I'll be honest with you. If I was on the streets with nobody caring for me, I would also take drugs to Try and get my head out of that space, right? To cope with the pain of my life. It's a perfectly rational response to a hellscape of, of, of an existence. You take drugs to try and get your head somewhere else. So it's the person, it's the pain, and then finally the product, right there is the thing that they are abusing. Now what we know too is that when you change one of those three circumstances, the person, the pain or the product, then that individual can heal from addiction many, many times, right? The number one addiction recovery program is not Alcoholics Anonymous. The number one addiction recovery program is time. People age out, right? People have other priorities in their life. They have kids, they have work, they have circumstances in their life, just like those Vietnam War vets. What we found is when they came home, they didn't stay addicted. They gave up the heroin because they had responsibilities, they had a life. They had people caring about them and that they cared about, which made them kick their bad addictions. Now that's very, very different from ooh, I like Candy Crush or oh, I like Instagram or isn't TikTok fun? And you hear these ridiculous so called experts out there telling you that, oh, TikTok is like cocaine in the brain. And you hear, whenever you hear somebody talk about dopamine, Sy Squirts, you can instantly turn off whatever they have to say because it's so not even the same league, right? Like you look at the amount of dopamine that's released from a snort of cocaine, we're talking about thousands of times more dopamine released in the brain versus playing a video game. It's not even close, right? Because dopamine is released during anything that the brain wants to reinforce. So you release dopamine when you give someone a hug, when you learn how to play tennis, when you watch television, when you take a walk. All of these things release dopamine. There's nothing addictive per se, about dopamine. But if you are using a product to the extent that despite the harmful consequences, you come back again and again and you cannot control it, if I put a gun to your head and you still can't stop, okay, now we're talking about a pathology, but the vast majority of people, we're talking 95 to 97% of the population, it's not an addiction. When we're talking about these technologies, it's a distraction. But you see, we love using this language of addiction. We love thinking that we are enslaved, right? Why? Because then it's not My fault. Zuckerberg is doing it to me, right? The, the, the, the, my phone is doing it to me, the apps are doing it, all these people are doing it to me. It's not my responsibility. But when we actually call it what it is, which is not an addiction for the vast majority of people, but rather a distraction, that sucks now, now I gotta do something about it, that's no fun. And so I'm here to tell people that there is so much you can do about this, that these technologies, yes, they are designed to get you hooked. I'm well aware of that. I know all their tricks. But I will tell you that you are far, far, far more powerful than these technologies are. As long as you understand you are. If you give up, then they got you. And we're not just talking about, you know, the distractions that we tend to blame and shame around. Right. It's not just about video games and social media. It's the stuff, the worst kind of distractions. What I Learned in my 5 years of writing this book, Indistractable, is that the worst kind of distractions are the distractions that trick us into prioritizing the easy and important, I'm sorry, the easy and urgent work at the expense of the hard and important work we have to do to move our lives and careers forward. So we, we see people getting distracted by work, email. Well, it's a work related task. Don't I have to do that? Well, if it's not what you plan to do, it is a distraction. Right. So that turns out to be the most dangerous form of distraction. It's not video games and social media. It's that work that you didn't need to do in the first place. Right. That's the biggest form of distraction, at least when it comes to knowledge workers.

Yeah. So working as a coach, I've run into that a lot and I've, I've helped people through it with varying success. It's not something I claim to be like my main skill set and I think, you know, where I run into issues with that is. So I really appreciate the atomic habits, tiny habits, you know, advice basically, you know, when there's something that needs to be done but you don't necessarily, you're not super motivated to do it. You can design prompts and break tasks down into small pieces, but even that I find somewhat limited success with. Usually what I see is.

If you really put the time in, you're really intentionally design it. Well, it works until there's a pattern interrupt. So somebody, it could be a good thing. They go on vacation for, for a week, a weekend, somebody comes and stays at their house, they get sick, whatever, some sort of pattern erupt and all of a sudden that habit that they were doing really well at building up, that was good, or the habit that they were trying to break.

Either the good habits suddenly gone and it's really difficult to bring it back, or the bad habit snaps back into place. So what would you advise?

Yeah, I love that you brought this up before, before we went live. I, you asked me, what kind of stuff do you want to talk about? Like what's the kind of stuff should I avoid? And I said we, I don't want to avoid anything. Right. I'm, I'm an open book, whatever you want to talk about. And I said, let's talk about controversial stuff. So I'm really glad you brought this up because I think that we have reached peak habit. Peak habit, okay. We hear people talking about habits as if they are the solution to everything. Let me be very clear. When you hear someone say, oh, you should turn that into a habit, or I want to turn something into a habit, what they are really saying is, I want to have done this thing. I don't want to do it because I hate it. I want to have done it. I want an exercise habit because I hate exercise. I want a meditation habit because I really don't like meditation, right? I, I, I want to write a novel someday, therefore I should get into a writing habit. But boy, do I hate sitting down and writing. So let me turn into a habit because then it can become autopilot, right? And then I don't have to go through the, the, the, the pain of having to do that behavior. I'll just, you know, push a button and now it'll become a habit. Here's the problem with that. Let's go back to first principles. What is the definition of a habit? What is the definition of a habit? The definition of a habit is the impulse to do a behavior with little or no conscious thought. So you tell me, if I want to create an exercise habit, how do I exercise in a way that I get stronger with little or no conscious thought? I don't know. I've never done that. Right. I've never gone to the gym and mindlessly lifted weights. If you do, you're not getting stronger. How do I write with little or no conscious thought? Beats me. I've been a professional writer now for over a decade. I have two best selling books and thousands of articles. I have to work Very hard to write every single solitary letter of every word of every sentence and every paragraph that I write. To write with little or no conscious thought. What are you doing? Like, I don't understand how you write as a habit. Meditation. If you meditate as a habit with little or no conscious thought, you're freaking sleeping. You're not doing it right. Because meditation is about bringing awareness, bringing conscious thought to the act of meditation, right? So you're doing it wrong if you have a meditation habit. So people have. Have mixed up what it means to have a habit. Habits are great when you can turn a behavior into something done with little or no conscious thought. But there are only certain kinds of behaviors that will ever become habits. And the problem is, you say, okay, whatever, it's just semantics. What's the big deal? You know what I mean? Right? It's a habit. The problem is, here's where we get into danger. Exactly what you said, right? And this is why I think we've reached peak habit. Because what happens is people read some book or they listen to some guru like me telling them about how great habits are, and they are great when they are applied correctly. But then they misinterpret that, and they say, okay, well, I. I tried to make exercise into a habit. I tried to make eating right into a habit. I tried to make writing into a habit. And you know what? I did it for 44 days. I did it for 60 days, or whatever stupid number somebody gets in their head is the number of days that they have to do, which, by the way, there's no scientific basis for. And it still doesn't work. It's not easy, it's not fun. It's not effortless. So what happened? Right? So what do people do? They blame themselves. They say, oh, I must have not done it right. I must be broken. I must be no good at this. Well, there's nothing broken about you, but there's everything broken about this misinterpretation of this methodology. So what we need to do is to focus less on habits, which are only a subset of behaviors which will ever be done with little or no conscious thought, and focus on what happens before a behavior can become a habit. Before a behavior can become a habit, it has to be a routine. What is the definition of a routine? A routine is simply a series of behaviors frequently repeated, but that has no implication in terms of conscious thought. So going to the gym, that can be a routine. Writing in your journal, that can be a routine. Meditation can be a routine, because there's no Requirement for it to be done with little or no conscious thought. Now the difference here is, is that not every routine will become a habit, but every habit first has to become a routine. And so what I want people to realize is that if they want to create these routines, if they want to create eventual habits, what you have to do is to learn how to deal with discomfort. That is one of the most important lessons I learned in the five years it took me to write this book. And by the way, it took me five years to write Indistractable because I kept getting distracted. I wrote this book for me, right? I was one of the most distracted people I know because, you know, I didn't know what I wrote. I don't write books because I know the answer. I write books because I want to know the answer, right? That's my whole purpose as a writer. So when I learned about this importance of dealing with discomfort, I learned that it has a central place in behavior change. Because I think far too often we want things to be super easy, right? We quest for happiness and contentment. And that's not realistic, right? That if you think about it, contentment and happiness is not evolutionarily beneficial, okay? Think about that. How many books do we see these days about happiness? And happiness should be the goal of life. No, it's not happy. Evolution does not give a shit about happiness, right? It is not evolutionarily beneficial. Think, think about it for a minute. Let's say there were a group of, of of, you know, ancestral people go back 200000 years for the dawn of mankind. And we're on the Serengeti and there's a tribe of people who have this, this genetic quirk that they're always happy, right? They're always contented. They've reached nirvana. Now let's say this tribe of always contented people comes in contact with our ancestors who are not always contented, who always want more. Well, what do you think they're going to do to each other? I'll tell you what they'll do. That contented tribe will be killed and eaten. Because part of our ethos, part of what makes us human is that we always crave more. We want better, right? And that drive is what got us to the moon. It's what helps us create life saving technologies. It's what helps us overturn despots, right? So we want to lean in to that discomfort, that disquietude that pushes us forward. And what I Learned in my 5 years of research writing Indistractable was That all of us feel this discomfort. All of us feel that. That. That pain, right? Some of us succumb to it. What do I mean by that? If you think about what is the number one reason people don't achieve their goals? What's the number one reason? The number one reason people don't achieve their goals is that they quit. Makes sense, right? Don't achieve your goals, it's because you quit. Now, it's not to say that quitting is always a bad thing. Sometimes the right thing to do is to move. But let's just say, for a sake of discussion, the number one reason people don't achieve their goals is to quit. Now, let's go layer deeper. Why do people quit? Turns out the number one reason people quit is because they did not feel like continuing. It's not an external factor. It's not because of circumstances. It's because they did not fundamentally feel like continuing. I had a New Year's resolution to work out, but I didn't feel like going to the gym. I really wanted to make my sales numbers, but I didn't want to make my sales calls. I really wanted to write that book this year, but I didn't really feel like writing. So this is where habits fail us. This is where flow. By the way, you've probably also heard of Flow, right? The work of Csikszentmihalyi. Well, flow is only good if you read. If you actually read Csikszentmihalyi. Not the interpretation of his work, which has been bastardized. He talks about basketball players and surfers and people doing things they enjoy doing. You don't need my help to help you do things you already enjoy doing. That's easy. It's the stuff that's hard to do. That's where we get distracted. We all basically know what to do. You want to get in shape, you eat right, and you exercise. You want to have good relationship with your loved ones. You have to be fully present. You want to do better at your job, you got to do the freaking work, especially the hard stuff that other people don't want to do, right? So we already know what to do. And if you don't know, Google it. All the information on what to do is right there at your fingertips. First time in human history that you can get all the answers to all your questions instantly answered. The problem is not that we don't know what to do. The problem is that we don't know how to get out of our own way. We don't know how to stop getting Distracted. And that's why becoming indistractable is the skill of the century.

So I've got the word indistractable, which I know it's a coined phrase, but.

I think what you said, you know, distraction always means it's a separation. This is my words, a separation from something that you want on a deep level to be connected to. I might have butchered that, but that's off the top of my head. You got to be distracted from something. Is that. Is that fair? Yeah.

Yeah. You're not too off base. So let's. Let's. Let me help you out here. So let's. Let's start with the. Again, I like to go back to first principles, per the lessons of Richard Feynman. First principles here. What is distraction? Right? What does that word even mean? The best way to understand if you really know something is to ask yourself, what is the antonym? What's the opposite of that thing? So what's the opposite of distraction? Most people will tell you the opposite of distraction is focus. Right? I don't want to be distracted. I want to be focused. But that's not actually right. That's not correct. That if you look at the opposite of distraction, if you look at the etymology of the word, the opposite of distraction is not focused. The opposite of distraction is traction. Of course it is. Right? Now that I've said it's super obvious. Traction and distraction, both words come from the same Latin root trajare, which means to pull. And you'll notice that both words end in the same six letters. A, C, T, I, O, N. That spells action, reminding us that distraction is not something that happens to us. It is an action that we ourselves take. So traction, by definition, is an action that pulls you towards what you said you were going to do. Things that move you closer to your values, help you become the kind of person you want to become. Those are acts of traction. The opposite of traction. Distraction is any action that pulls you away from what you plan to do, further away from your goals, further away from your values, further away from becoming the kind of person you want to become. So this is super important. This isn't just semantics, because I would argue the difference between traction and distraction is one word, and that one word is intent. As Dorothy Parker said, the time you plan to waste is not wasted time. So we need to stop moralizing and medicalizing people's behaviors. There's nothing wrong with playing video games, okay? There's nothing wrong with going on social media. There's nothing wrong with any of These amazing, wonderful technologies, as long as you use them on your schedule and according to your values, not someone else's, certainly not the tech companies. So if you plan ahead, if you say, hey, in my schedule, I have time to watch Netflix or YouTube or play video games or whatever it is you want to do, I don't care, as long as you plan ahead with intent, that's traction. Now, anything that is not that is distraction, as you said. You said it perfectly. You cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. I'm going to say that again. It's so important. You cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. So if you have a big open white calendar with nothing on it, you cannot say you got distracted because what did you get distracted from? Right? Nothing. You didn't plan your time. So this uses, I think, what, what it has been the most studied time management technique that almost nobody uses, which is time boxing, right? So most people don't plan anything. Some people will use an antiquated technique called the to do list, which is terrible. It's one of the worst things you can do for your personal productivity. I want to hear more about enlightened ones. Yeah, we can totally talk about that. The enlightened ones, the people who are indistractable, they use the to do list, but they do something very important. There's nothing wrong with taking things out of your brain and putting them on a to do list. That's fine. What most people who use a to do list do or fail to do, they just leave it at that, right? To do list is a register of output. So the more things I have on it to do. Most people, they wake up in the morning, okay, what am I supposed to do? Let me look at my to do list. They come home from work, they have not finished everything on their to do list, and they feel like crap, right? Because the to do list has no constraints. You add more and more and more and more and more. There's no constraint to a to do list. So you come home from work, you work like a dog, and you look at that to do list and you say, oh, man, I didn't do all those things. So what does that do to your psyche? What does that do to your self image if day after day, week after week, month after month, you did not do what you promised you would do? Loser. Start. You start to believe this ridiculous stuff that you hear people saying all the time. Oh, I'm no good at time management. I have a hard time Focusing, you know, they start making up all these excuses. They're not broken. This technique of the to do list is broken because it has no constraints. Whereas indistractable people, they take those to do's and they put it on their calendar. Because remember, to DOS are just a register of outputs. But in order to get output, you need input. And what are your inputs? As a white collar worker, two things, time and attention. So you have to plan that time on your schedule. So this is where that technique of time boxing comes in. And so now essentially we have our four parts of the indestructible model. So if you can imagine an error to the right, an error to the left that represents traction and distraction. Now we have two arrows pointing to the center called those. These are our triggers. We have internal triggers and we have external triggers. And so now we can work through these four points like the arrows of a compass. Step number one, master internal triggers. That is the most important lesson of my book, is that if you don't master your internal triggers, if you don't master these uncomfortable emotional states that we talked about earlier, that drive turns out, get this, 90% of our distractions, 90% of the time that you get distracted, it's not because of a ping, ding or ring, it's not because of what's happening outside of you, 90% time that you get distracted, it's because of what's happening inside of you. Internal triggers. So that's step number one, master internal triggers or they will become your master. Step number two, making time for traction. Step number three, hack back the external triggers. And then step number four, prevent distraction with packs. And if you do some small thing in each of these four areas, you will be well on your way to becoming indistractable.

All right, so my next question is, so, you know, coaching people, one of the first things that I focus on is I have what I call a top three values exercise. So I have people just what are the top three values that you want to live by that come to your mind? Because it's difficult to really think that through. It takes time. But what are the first three things that come to your mind? Have them write them down and then see, okay, well, does that feel like the right three things? And then we keep, keep making edits. But what I found in my experience is that I would say 90% of people that I work with, and this is all over the world, all ages, all professions, doesn't really matter, have never done that. They've never written down, these are my values that I want to live according to. And so getting traction in the first place is really difficult because it's not really clear what they want, what they care about. Those things are obviously in there, but they're kind of a, a mysterious quagmire.

Totally internally, you're asking, you're asking absolutely the right questions. I can tell you. You've done this before. So, so, so let's, let's dive deeper. When you tell people to do this exercise, which is a fantastic exercise, how do you define values? I say, what are values?

Yeah, so typically what I do is I ask people, like when you so first think of the first three words, ideas that come to head your, your mind so you don't have to think too hard. Just first three things, and then after that we define it. So it's, let's say somebody, kindness. It comes to their mind that for some reason they feel like they want to be kind. Then I ask them, okay, well, when you see kindness, what does it look like in action? How can you tell when somebody's being kind? Think of a time when you've seen somebody express kindness. You could point to and say, that's kindness. What did it look like? And so we write down those examples. That's usually how we determine what the value is. In terms of what values are, generally, I would say that they're, they're.

That.

Which defines meaning for a person. What is meaningful, what is not meaningful. That would be my, off the top of my head definition, but I'd love to hear yours.

Yeah, so, so my definition of a value is an attribute of the person you want to become. Sure. Values are attributes of the person you want to become. It's something that you cannot have taken away from you. It's an attribute. And so what I do is I, I, it's very, I find that when I ask people, what are your values? It's very difficult because as you said, they've never thought about it before. So what I try and do is to break it down and make it a little simpler and say, okay, let's talk about attributes of the person you want to become. In three life domains. We have three life domains. The first life domain is you. How would the person you want to become spend time taking care of themselves? Now, why do I do that? Is because this exercise is about turning your values into time. How do we measure values? How do we measure values? Because it's very easy to spout off, oh, I value this, I value that. How do you measure it? You measure values with two things. How people spend their time and how they spend their money. Everything else is hogwash. Everything else is just blowing hot air, right? It's how you spend your time and how you spend your money. So what I want people to do is to show me how they will spend their time to live out their values. So let's start with this first life domain of taking care of you. If you can't take care of yourself, you can't take care of other people. So how would the person you want to become spend their time taking care of themselves? We say, oh, you know, what are my values? You know what? Health. Health is so important, right? At the end of the day, nothing's more important than staying healthy. Okay, great. Well, on your calendar, do you have time for exercise? If that's important to you, I'm not saying it has to be important to you, but if you proclaim that's one of your values, show me where on your calendar you are going to spend time taking care of your health. Sleep. We've all heard ad nauseam how important sleep is. And you know, I would tell my daughter for years, you have to go to bed. You have your bedtime. It's past your bedtime. Then she said one day, daddy, when's your bedt busted? I was a hypocrite because I didn't have a bedtime. Now I do. It's in my calendar. I have a bedtime. Right? So first ask yourself, how would the person you want to become spend time taking care of themselves? By the way, it's not up to me or anyone else to judge how you spend your time. If you want to spend your time playing video games all day long, I'm not going to tell you not to. There are lots of people who make a living playing video games. That's great. So it's not up for anyone to tell you how to live your life. What I want to help you do is to live your life the way you want to, according to your value. So you don't wake up next year, the year after, in 20 years and 60 years and say, oh my God, what did I do? I didn't spend my life the way I wanted to, according to my values. So the first life domain is you. Okay? Take your calendar for the week ahead and fill out that time for when you want to take care of yourself. When do you want to turn your values into time to become the kind of to have the attributes of the person you want to become. Okay? The next life domain is relationships. Now, the reason we have A loneliness epidemic in the industrialized world is because we have stopped scheduling time for our most important relationships. And this is not something new. This is not something that happened because of the Internet or social media. This is a problem that's been happening at least since the 1990s. Robert Putnam wrote about this in his book Bowling Alone. That what has happened as society became more secular, okay, as people stop going to church and mosque and synagogues, etc. And I'm a secular person as well. I'm not advocating for, you know, adopting a supernatural belief per se. What I'm saying is that as society in the industrialized world became more and more secular, we forgot to keep a place on our calendars for the sacred practice of being with other people. We don't have that time on our calendar anymore. And so we are killing ourselves from loneliness. And I don't say that lightly. We know that loneliness is as detrimental for your health as smoking and obesity. We are literally going through a loneliness epidemic. So we can reverse that epidemic. We have to have time on our calendar. Part of your values is family. Show me on your calendar, where is the time set aside for your family? When do you call your parents? When do you spend time with your siblings? Do you have date time with your significant other? Or do you have playtime set and preserved as sacred for your children? It has to be on that schedule or else it's not one of your values. Finally, the last life domain is work. Now, work can be split into two categories. We have what's called reactive work, and we have reflective work. Reactive work is the kind of work that is led by things outside of us. Reacting to emails, reacting to notifications, reacting to emails, reacting to taps on the shoulder from our boss. Those are all types of reactive work. And every one of us has at least some of our day spent doing reactive work. Some of us have almost our entire day spent doing reactive work. Right? If you work in a call center, your entire day is spent picking up calls, doing reactive work. The problem is, is that far too many of us leave no time for what's called reflective work. Reflective work is the kind of work that can be done, that can only be done without distraction. Planning, strategizing, thinking, for God's sakes, requires us to work without distraction. So what I implore people to do is to make sure that at least sometime in your day, I don't care if it's 15, 20 minutes, maybe a half an hour, 45 if you're lucky, sometime in your day must be spent doing reflective work. If you don't, if you don't spend that time, if you don't schedule that time and keep it sacred for reflective work, I promise you, you are going to run real fast in the wrong direction. So when you look at these three life domains of you, your relationships, and finally your work, what you're going to finish with is a time box calendar, which allowed you to turn your values into time and forced you to make trade offs to prioritize. And this is again why I hate to do lists so much. To do lists don't make you have any trade offs because it's an endless list. And so this is why people feel like crap when they keep a to do list because they're never good enough, they never accomplished everything on the to do list. Whereas a time box calendar, you're not going to measure yourself by how many cute little boxes you checked off. I don't even care if you get anything done. It's not about that. Because what your new metric of success is, is whether you did what you said you were going to do for as long as you said you would without distraction. That's all that matters. Let me say that again. It's not about checking cute little boxes, it's about doing whatever it is you said you were going to do for as long as you said you would without distraction. And here's the kicker. People who do that, people who simply measure themselves not by how much I finish, but did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction? They finish more, they actually get more done than the people who keep the to do lists. And so that's why it's only by turning our values into time that we have an artifact. We can look at our schedule and we can say, ah, that's traction. Anything else is distraction, which by the way, can include Instagram, Netflix, video games, whatever you want, prayer, meditation, doesn't matter, you can put whatever you want on your calendar, but when you put on your calendar, now that's traction. Everything else is a distraction. That's how we turn our values into time and make sure, by making sure that we make time for traction.

So yeah, the next. Oh, Andre, I saw your mic. Come on, I want to give you there.

So I am working at a corporate and I totally agree with you that the to do list is the number one and the emails are the other. And everyone is working very hard and by the end of the day they have no idea what they completed because they are not using this Time box. I have time box. I'm using this method for a while and my difficulties is that my colleagues does not understand. A colleague does not respect that. Okay. I would like to spend two hours working on a plan. I mean any work related.

Written document. And now it's very good that nine's outlook. There is a. Or teams what we have in the company. There is a do not disturb mode and I try to teach my colleagues that use this do not disturb mode or switch off the email at all and just working on that task. So okay. If I am, if I am very productive. I mean I'm using this time box. We need the others as well to respect yourself. And this is in the. There's an example in the indestructible book. The nurses who are wearing this red. Red. I don't know what is the name.

Yes.

And. And I asked one of my friend who's working in a hospital in the UK and the nurses are really wearing it. But the doctors does not respect. So we need to teach others as well.

Absolutely.

But it's very, very, very difficult because you can be a situation.

Yeah. So there's two things going on here. So let me ask you just for your specific situation. How many colleagues do you find interrupt you during the day when you have your focused work time?

They cannot interrupt me because I am off. So when I am really working hard on something.

I. I change my, my computer to offline mode so they can distract me.

Okay, great. And what happens as a negative repercussion?

Nothing. I mean I'm ready with my job and I lost much less time working. I do not need eight hours to do my job.

So you are a beautiful illustration.

Of exactly my point. Nothing happens. Nothing happens. The problem here is not the actual objective reality that I need to let people contact me and to interrupt me because they want to. Therefore there must be something important that is not objectively true. It is a subjective perception in your own head, not yours. Andrea, you know exactly what's going on, that nothing will happen. The rest of us as individuals need to get it through our heads that nothing will happen if our colleagues wait for an hour to allow us to do our focused work. Nothing's going to happen.

And nothing will happen if you are not replying the emails immediately.

Exactly. Exactly. Which proves exactly my point that it's not reality, it's a feeling. Remember I told you earlier that the number one reason that people don't accomplish their goals is they quit. The number one reason they quit is because they don't feel like continuing to do it. So it's nothing more than a feeling. This stress, anxiety, uncertainty that we feel that someone might need us is an uncomfortable emotion that we are escaping by letting ourselves get distracted. So the problem is not the other people. The problem is not the other people. The problem is ourselves. We need to get through our thick heads that nothing's going to happen if that person waits for a little while. And I know somebody, somebody listening right now is saying, yeah, but I'm in the client services business. I have clients. I, I, you know, people. I need to be available 24. 7. Granted, I get it. Nobody says you have to be indistractable 24 hours a day. That's ridiculous. Right? So for Andrea, it might be two hours. For you and your job, it might be 30 minutes. There's very, very, very few jobs where somebody can't wait for 30 minutes. The problem is we sell ourselves short. Let me ask you something. If you worked as a brain surgeon and somebody needed to reach you and you were in the middle of performing brain surgery, you're going to tell me that somebody's going to barge into that operating room and say, doctor, doctor, stop operating. Your patient can die. Because I need to talk to you about your car insurance.

No, they're not going to let that call come through because there's something more important. And yet somehow, for the rest of us, we don't give ourselves the same pride that that brain surgeon gives themselves. Somehow we can be interrupted whenever people want. That's our fault.

We would like to feel ourselves, that we are important. I think most of the paper thinks that the, that's very, very important. I must be available. I must be, I must answer to the questions what is not true.

Yes, exactly. And I think it's in fact, reversing that. The really important people, they'll get back to you. They'll get back to you right. Right now they don't have the time. If you look at high performers in their field, right? People who are at the top of their game, they plan their day. It was, you know, I'm not sure. Many of your listeners probably know Mark Andreessen. Marc Andreessen is the founder of, one of the founders of Netscape. He's one of the most successful venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. And for years, people would tell me about, you know, your methodology is wrong. Look, Mark Andreessen, he's so successful and he wrote a very popular blog post that people spread around about how he doesn't keep any sort of calendar. If People need me. They call me, and I'll make time for them if I have the time right then and there. And about a year ago, he wrote an article and said, nope, this doesn't work. I give up. And he went to exactly my methodology of keeping a time box calendar. This is how people at the top of their game perform. Now, that's not to say that the organization doesn't play a role. So there's a whole section in my book on how to build an indistractable workplace, and there's a lot that we can do. If you are in a management position, if you do have a leadership role, then you do have a very specific responsibility to build an indistractable workplace. And we can talk about how to do that. But I don't want to minimize. The first and most important step is to become indistractable yourself. Right? That's how we affect change in our organization, is first we become indistractable, and then we percolate this culture of becoming indestructible throughout our company. This is how our companies change. And there's a lot companies can do and must do, but let's not discount that we have, you know, 90% of the responsibility in ourselves.

So my next question, because I have walked people through all those steps in my own version, which it sounds like is actually really similar.

And what I run into is.

A personality divide, and it might be loading on trait conscientiousness or something like that, I'm not exactly sure. But where it's. I can't escape from using a calendar like I use mine religiously. It's very detailed, all this stuff, but that works for me. But then, you know, talking through it with somebody else who's not as conscientious, not as orderly, not really oriented that way. The idea of having a calendar where everything's time boxed terrifies them. Sounds miserable. Sounds like it's putting them. It literally is putting them in a. In a box. They don't like it. And I haven't really found a great way around it. It's kind of like, well, you either need to plan your time or let life happen to you. Make a decision. Is there an alternative? Or do you see that as being. That's basically the choice, as I see it. Do you see it the same way?

Yeah. So one of my favorite questions to ask as a coach is the. Is the Dr. Phil question. The Dr. Phil question is, how's that working for you?

Right. How's that working for you? If it's working don't change, right? But if you've come to me because you've hired a coach to help you accomplish the things you're not accomplishing and to live the kind of life you know you're capable of and deserve, it's going to require some change, right? And so unless you are a child or retired, you got to keep a schedule, right? You got to keep a schedule. There's just no way around it. Because again, how can you call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from? You can't. You need to know what that, what traction is in order to know what is distraction. So let me give you maybe some pointers for, for the training wheels. How can you get people started on this process to really see? Because you know, once people try these methodologies that I described in Indistractable, Mastering internal triggers, making time for traction, hacking back external triggers, and preventing distraction with pact, once they try them, they start seeing the results. The results speak for themselves. Like, you can't go backwards. I know Andrea has tried many of them and I'm so happy to hear. I mean they are really life changing practices. And by the way, I put these four together, but this is backed by decades and decades of research. There are 30 pages of citations to peer reviewed studies. The vast majority of what's in the book is not new. It's just synthesized in a way that makes it practical enough to be useful. Right. Nobody's had this traction, distraction, internal triggers, external triggers model, but it is all backed by, you know, study after study of peer reviewed research. So it's not just my, you know, my what works for me, it's what's been validated with peer reviewed research. So how can you get people down this path of trying some of these techniques? Well, when it comes to the first step of mastering internal triggers, you want to have a script ready, right? If you can, if you can ask people right now, your script tells you that when something is difficult, you escape it with distraction. Right? Whatever it is that that task is, if I don't feel like doing it right now, I scroll, I check email, I whatever, I do something to get my mind off of that. So you need to replace that with a different set of behaviors. And so that's what mastery internal triggers about. Now let's go to timeboxing. You said you asked about that specifically. By the way. There's a dozen different techniques around internal triggers that you can use that are, that are in the book. But let's go to time boxing specifically. One thing you can do to get people started is to ask them, you know, not to schedule the whole week. Okay, that might be too big of an ask. What I do is to ask people to start by planning what one ideal weekend day would look like. What would the ideal Saturday look like? Because we all have had that experience. I know I certainly did. As I mentioned before, it took me five years to write this book because I kept getting distracted. I needed this book more than anyone. My. If you would ask me before this book, what would an ideal Saturday look like? It would be a Saturday of complete freedom, right? Because then I could get so much done. I have those, all those projects around the house I need to finish up and I need to, you know, balance my online checkbook and I need to do this, I need to do that. I just want a free day, Right. Wouldn't that be great if I just had an eighth day of the week? And those are the least productive days. I can see you shaking your head now. You know exactly what I'm talking about. Those are the least productive days because you putz around all day and you don't get anything done. So I tell folks, look, you know, weekends are low stakes. Let's plan what one weekend day would look like. I get up at this time, I exercise. If that's important to you. I spend some time with my family for breakfast, maybe I watch some tv. Whatever it is you want to do. What would that day look like so that you could. Not necessarily a vacation day. You're not going to Acapulco or something. What would an ideal day living out your values look like? Okay, for that weekend. So for example, on my weekend, I have a big three hour chunk of time with my daughter every Saturday afternoon. Now why do I plan that time? I plan that time. By the way, we don't know what we're going to do with that time. We call it planned spontaneity. Planned spontaneity. It sounds like an oxymoron. We don't know what we're going to do that with that time. So why do I plan it? I plan it so I know what I will not be doing with that time. I will not be on my phone, I will not be checking social media. I will not be making work calls. Because that time is devoted to somebody I love very much, my daughter. So you don't have to plan every single second of, you know, of every minute. You can have a big time of three hours time with my daughter. And if maybe she wants to go to the museum, maybe she wants to go to the park. Maybe she wants to get ice cream. I don't know. But I have that time planned. Anybody can do that, right? If you tell someone, you know, you don't have to plan every single second. Just plan big swaths of time so that you can live out your values for a weekend. And once they see, at the end of the day, hey, I can feel proud in the fact that I lived my life according to my values. That is such an amazing feeling. And it's a feeling that so few of us have actually experienced. So few people out there know what actual leisure feels like. Another problem with a to do list, what I call the tyranny of the to do list, is that the problem with just keeping a to do list rather than a time box calendar is that even when you take time to relax, okay, Even when you're with your family and you're having dinner and you're just enjoying your time, in the back of your mind is, oh, I didn't finish this, and I didn't finish that. And what about this on my to do list? And you're always thinking and checking, oh, I should be doing more as opposed to an indistractable person. On their calendar, it says, enjoy time with family. Watch Netflix, check Facebook, doesn't matter. That's exactly what you should be doing. And you don't have to feel guilty about it, because now that's traction. In fact, anything else is distraction. So you can actually let your hair down. You can actually take a deep breath and relax, knowing that that is exactly what you said to do. Finally, there's nothing wrong with having options in that time box. Let me give you an example. In my calendar, I have time for physical fitness because one of my values is taking care of my personal health, right? That's important to me. It doesn't have to be important to you, but if it is, you have that time. Now. I might go to the gym, I might go for a run, I might go for a swim. I have options in terms of how exactly I might express that value. So that's one way to give people that. That sense of freedom. Because there's a psychological phenomenon called reactance. Reactance is this tendency that we all have that when we are told what to do, we rebel. Everybody has this psychological reactance. And so the crazy thing is that we can elicit psychological reactance, even if it is ourselves telling us what to do do. Right? That's how crazy our brains are, right? But even though we're telling ourselves what to do sometimes we can elicit that reactant. So the way to disarm that reactance is to give yourself a few options. If you feel you need it, that's okay. As long as I'm expressing that value, I can do these three things. As long as I'm working on reflective work, I can work on this, that reflective task with these following few things, that's fine. But it's about scheduling that time to turn your values into time. That's the most important aspect of this.

Love it. Awesome. All right, well, I have one more question. We've got five minutes left. So I ask this to all the guests, kind of compiling a list of answers to this question, because I think it's fascinating, which is.

What does it mean to you to be human? And what does it mean to you to be superhuman? If those are different things.

Oh, good question. What does it mean to be human? And what does it mean to be super human?

So I think to be human is to be valuable, is to understand that we make mistakes, we all make mistakes.

And to bring it back to indistractable. You know, I. I titled indistracted, as you said. I made up the word indistractable. And indistractable is supposed to sound like indestructible. It's meant to sound like a superpower. So to say, what is superhuman? So Poelo Coelho has a wonderful quote. He said, a mistake repeated more than once is a decision. A mistake repeated more than once is a decision. So a distractible person keeps making the same mistakes. Right? Making a mistake once is human. That's part of being. Being a human being. I still get distracted from time to time. And I wrote the book indistractable. The difference is, now that I'm indistractable, I know why I got distracted. Right? So a distractible person keeps making the same mistakes. How many times can we say, oh, I got distracted by email, Facebook, social media, whatever. How many times can we keep saying that before we say, okay, a mistake repeated more than once is a decision? So an indistractable person says, ah, I see how I got distracted there. I'm not going to let it happen again. I'm going to take steps today to prevent getting distracted tomorrow. And so that is a superpower. That is what it means to be superhuman, to be indistractable.

Excellent. Well, very concise. All right, so you've got your two books. Is there anything else.

Anywhere else people can find you? Otherwise, I'm just going to tell them, go buy your books. Because I'm going to and I'm going to read them cover to cover.

Thanks, I appreciate it. So my website is nearandfar.com near spelled like my first name n I r and far.com and if you go to indistractible.com there's actually an 80 page workbook that we could not include in the final edition of the book. So we made it accessible for free, completely complimentary online@indistractible.com that's spelled in the word distract, A B, L E. So indistractable.com and that's where you can find that free 80 page workbook.

Excellent. Well, everybody listening to this, watching this go buy his books. You know you need it. Set aside some time to read them and follow through any final words for our audience.

Near. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me. And yeah, I hope to do it again soon.

Excellent.

The Superhuman Academy Podcast is hosted by Colin Jewett and designed and edited by Army Cinco with original music by Joshua Schoenig and voiceovers by Corey Page Schoenig, that's me. You can find past episodes and resources as well as access to the ever growing Superhuman academy community@superhumanacademy.com if you like the show, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review on your podcast platform of choice.