Getting Your Users Hooked with Nir Eyal

Every product or service, online, offline, anything we use for one reason and one reason only doesn't matter what the product is. We use every product that we use to modulate our mood to feel something different. So your job in product design is to figure out what is that internal trigger and how does your product satisfy it better than the alternatives. We have to start with that. What many companies do is they say we want people to use our product, therefore we're going to, you know, we're going to gamify it. And I'm not anti gamification but it goes to show you where it's misapplied. Typically gamification falls flat and it falls flat because people first look at the tools. Let's look at games. Games are engaging. Let's do more game like things. Well, points and badges and leaderboards. Let's put that in our game. What we end up doing is we serve chocolate covered broccoli. Chocolate covered broccoli is when we take something that we want people to eat or eat your broccoli, it's super healthy, it's good for you. And we take something we think they want chocolate, we put it on top and then we serve an unholy mess. Nobody likes chocolate covered broccoli.

Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day to day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader. This is the Product Thinking Podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perry. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Today I am joined by the author of Hooked Near Al. Welcome Nir.

Thanks Melissa. Great to be here.

Yeah, I'm excited to have you. So I met Near a long time ago on the Mind the product boat trip that we took after that in San Francisco. And I hadn't written Escaping the Bill Trap yet, so I was like, oh, tell me about writing this book. And your book has made such an impact on product managers. Can you tell us a little bit about how did you get involved in the world of product and what led you to writing the book?

Sure. So it started a couple companies. First one had a successful exit. The second one was Aqua Hire type of exit. So it was good but not that great. And onto my next company I wanted to start another business. I started to look around and put together some hypotheses of what kind of products would be useful to work on. And I had this hypothesis that the future of product design would depend upon habits. Principally because this was 2012, so the iPhone was only four years old. And I could tell that as screens were shrinking as we went from desktops to laptops to mobile devices to wearable devices, and now we have products like the Amazon Alexa, that there is no interface at all, no visual interface at least, I realized that habits would become increasingly important because there's less screen real estate to trigger people with what we call external triggers. So external triggers are all the visual stuff that tells you what to do. Click here, buy now, play this, whatever. So as the screens shrank, that meant habits would be increasingly important. Why? Because if you're not in someone's visual field, right, if you're not on the home screen of their iPhone, all you have is habits. If you're not on the home screen of their, of their phone and you're not a habit, you're toast. Might as well not even exist because the customer won't remember to use you. So I said, okay, well, whatever it is that I do next, I have to figure out how to make it into a habit and so that it can positively improve people's lives. And so I looked around, said, okay, where's the book on how to build habit forming products? Couldn't find the book. So I started researching and writing and originally just blogging about the topic. I had many friends who were my former colleagues and clients at many of these companies. Now, you know, companies like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and WhatsApp and Slack and Snapchat. Like, I knew many of the people at these companies and so I kind of started poking them to figure out how do they do what they do, how are these companies so good at changing user behavior and forming habits? And I spent a lot of time at the Stanford Library and speaking with researchers in the field. And I coalesced what I learned into, you know, over two years of blogging it out, I coalesced this topic into what is called the hooked model, which is these four basic steps that we see repeated time and time again in all sorts of habit forming products. Enterprise, consumer, web, online, offline. You see the same hooks again and again and again. And so the idea was, you know, what if we could steal the secrets from these big tech companies so that we can democratize these methods so that we can make all sorts of products habit forming in a good way, what if we could get people hooked to exercise, fitbod does that. They get people hooked to exercise. What if we could get people hooked to education? Well, a company that used the Hook model. Kahoot does just that. Companies in every conceivable industry have used the Hook model as intended to help people form healthy habits in their lives. So that's kind of been my journey along the way. I taught at Stanford, at the Graduate School of Business and later at the Hassel Platter Institute of Design as well for many years. And then most recently I published a book called Indistractable. So Hooked is about how to build good habits. Indistractible is about how do we break bad habits. It's not a negation of Hooked. It's not at all that I think we can actually have our cake and eat it too. We can have habit forming technology that makes our lives better, but we should also know how to break the bad habits that don't serve us.

I'm curious about. You mentioned the Hook model can be used in enterprise companies and some of these larger companies. We have a lot of listeners who are working at banks or working at other large companies. A lot of them are doing internal tools. Have you seen this model applied to anything like that? Like workflow related tools or those types of things?

Absolutely. So the line of demarcation is not enterprise versus consumer. The line of demarcation is frequent or infrequent. So if a product is not used with sufficient frequency, it's almost impossible to change a consumer habit. And that frequency really is about a week's time or less. There are some exceptions, but by and large, if the user does not interact with a product, if they don't do the key habit within a week's time or less, it's almost impossible to change that habit. So if it's the type of product that is intended to be used with sufficient frequency, meaning at least within a week's time or less, then it's a good candidate for the Hook model. Now what kind of products are not good candidates for habit formation? The ones that are one and done. Type products. Sales driven type products. Think about cyber security software, right? So many types of cybersecurity software you install, it's on some server farm and nobody uses it until something terrible happens. Insurance. Another good example. Nobody habitually uses car insurance. That's a bad example. Do people habitually use, you know, to your point, a bank account? Yeah. Right. Did they check their balances habitually? Yeah. Lots of opportunity there. I've worked with many financial services company SaaS Products, the things that are used inside the enterprise for a software as a service product, if it's not used, you're toast. The customer's going to turn, they're going to stop paying, they have to use it or you're in big trouble. So it's not that every product has to be habit forming, it's that every product that has to be habit forming needs a hook.

Great, that's really good to know. I know a lot of times when I work with product managers, especially when they work in a larger enterprise, they kind of look at all the models or the tools out there and they go, well, it was built for like consumer products or it was built for B2C. We can't use it in B2B. But it's so nice to hear you talk about that because I do see it in every, in all these other types of models that we teach too. You can usually take some of the stuff that we may use in B2C that Twitter uses, Facebook uses, whatever, and just kind of refine it for your own use. And that usually makes better products. So that's really nice to hear that hooked definitely can be applied there.

It's a gold mine. What tends to happen is people tend to look to their sides. Like when we were in school taking a test and you wanted to cheat on your test, you would look at your neighbors to see if they knew the answer. Well, not only is that unethical, but they don't know the answer any more than you do. Right. So we really shouldn't only look at our competitors and see what they're doing because they're just as cool as. What we really want to do is the best of breed. We want to look at who's doing it better than anyone. And so when you want to build a product that is engaging, something that's sticky, something that people use because they want to, not because they have to. I think we should look at the best in the business. We should look at the companies that are really good, are masters of changing habits.

Yeah, I love that too, because sometimes when you work, especially like on internal tools, what I'll hear from product managers is, oh, it doesn't really matter. They have to use it. That person has to use that workflow. It's their only option. It's what they're doing. And I actually thought it was funny. I was teaching a workshop in Australia and I usually have people line up from one side of the room to the other based on the success of their last Product release and somebody went all the way to failure, which usually doesn't happen. Usually people are around the middle because they don't know if it was successful or not. I said, what happened? And she said, well, the company made us implement this tool, internal tool for developers. They said, nope, we're just going to use a third party. They have to use it. Everybody in the company has to use it. We're not going to do any good product management on it. And then every single developer got up and resigned after using it for a.

Month.

And it forced them to reconsider it. I like what you're saying. If we trap ourselves into this mindset of nope, your internal tools, people must use it right? Instead of we want people to use it or let's just look at what our competitors are doing and copying it. It doesn't really make great products.

So that is such a great point, especially in this age where there's such a talent shortage these days that if you make people's lives miserable, that's on you. Talk about, you know, many times I get asked about the ethical implications of is it okay to hook people? Is it okay to use their psychology to make them use your products? Not that you're making them use the price, it's the exact opposite. You have to make them want to use your product. To me, the real problem is not that a few companies have made products that are sticky. We think about how products like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, how they make products that suck you in. That's not the real problem for most companies. The real problem is that their products suck. That's what's unethical. What's unethical is that we are making products that make people miserable, that make people so miserable they want to quit. So if you're taking the lazy route and not figuring out how do you make a product that people love, that people want to use, that's on you. I think that is unethical. And there's so much opportunity out there. I mean there's so much low hanging fruit, especially when it comes to these products, that other people aren't thinking. Like in consumer web, you know, you're fighting with tooth and nail with people in the app store, but with enterprise products, gosh, there's so much opportunity out there for simple things that people can do to make their products stickier. There's just wide open space there.

That's great. Is there anything in like the hooked model that you think enterprise product managers should have to refine? Anything different than typical B2C consumers.

Most important is that they meet the frequency test. Many times I meet companies where the product is just not used with sufficient frequency. So for example, in the travel industry, people don't go on vacation every week. It's not something they're going to use habitually. So we have to find other ways. Is there a habit you can bolt on? And there are some things you can do when the product is not used frequently to bolt on a frequently occurring habit. As long as the product is used with sufficient frequency and does provide some utility, you can't make people do something they don't want to do. It has to be useful, it has to provide utility. Then, yeah, it doesn't matter if it's consumer, enterprise, online, offline, as long as it meets that test of sufficient frequency and some utility, you can build a habit.

Great. So you've got the four different pieces of the hook model too. You've got the trigger action, variable reward and investment. When you start to kind of work with teams to plan these out or product managers to plan these out, at what phase of product development are you usually plugging in the hooked model? How do you go back and actually monitor it and make sure you're on track?

So typically I'm involved in two parts or my work is involved in two parts and people read the book or talk to me. It doesn't matter. So the first place it's useful is very, very early, before you plan a feature, before you start your business. If you're an entrepreneur, if you can sit down with a pen and paper and just plot out these four parts of the hook model and think that through before you commit any code, before you design any interfaces, just think about those four phases of the hook model as a pencil sketch. That's where it's very, very useful. The other place that it's useful is as a diagnostic tool. So this is where I work more with bigger companies, right? They call me the plumber because I. And fix the leaks, right? Why are users leaking out of the leaky bucket? They'll be really good at customer acquisition, right? There's this myth that growth at all costs, well, you can buy growth, right? So I see many companies or many times a VC will call me up and say, oh, we just put all this money into user acquisition. We acquired all these users, we ran all these ads and look at all the users we have. But our retention stinks. Nobody continues to use the product, right? So this is what we call a leaky bucket. Lots of users in and everybody leaks out. So the other place that the Hook model is really useful is as a diagnostic tool to figure out why there was some initial promise. Right. If people installed your app, if people started with your service, if they signed up, there was something they wanted but they're not getting, they're not sticking around for. And so that's where you can take out, you know, as opposed to saying, well, I don't know, let's go talk to the customer. Right? Which is a good thing. We should talk to the customer, right? Customer development is very important. The problem is that there are many things that customers cannot articulate to you. I mean, we've all been here. A customer will tell you, I want this. If you make this, oh, I totally use it every day. And then you build that. And they don't do it because they don't know. There's many things that are inarticulatable needs the customer has that we don't know. Just by asking them, they're not able to tell us. So instead of asking them to design the product for them, or even worse than that, is asking the Hippo what they want. Everybody knows the Hippo, the highest paid person's opinion, who knows? Why do we suddenly think that the CEO, just because they make more money than us, is going to have the answer to our problem? Certainly not the VCs. Never ask the investors, they have no clue. What we have to do is to look to some consumer psychology. Everything in hooked is 50, 60 year old research. I've just applied it to a new framework, a new lens for the product development industry, specifically around tech. But the research in it is decades old, very good research. So I think that should be our model, that should be our guide to figure out what do we build next, how do we refine? Where is the problem? How do we stop up the leaks? We look at these four steps of the Hook model and that's where we can diagnose the problem to hopefully fix it.

Cool. So one of the pieces I was always curious about, it's a variable reward. I completely understand that. Like in gaming. By the way, do you play wordle? I've been wanting to ask you this.

I know about it, I haven't played it yet. My daughter apparently is coding it in Python, so it was pretty simple. I haven't played it myself though.

That's so cool. Yeah, I'm obsessed with it. My friends and I are all obsessed with it. We were hanging out a couple nights ago, hit midnight and somebody went, oh, the new wordle's out. Let's all stand in a circle and do it.

Wow.

Completely hooked. But I'm obsessed. But for something like wordle or a game or anything like that, the variable reward makes total sense, right? Sometimes you fail, sometimes you don't get it. How does that translate into things like enterprise apps or anything that you would be using frequently for things like work or even just like monitoring your bank account?

Sure, anytime there's something that's changing, there's some kind of variability, some kind of uncertainty. That's what the variable reward is all about. But to understand what the variable reward needs to look like, we have to actually back up a couple steps. The first step in the hook model is the internal trigger phase. The internal trigger is some kind of uncomfortable emotional state. So this is why you can't make people use your product. You have to figure out what they want. And not just on a functional level, but also on a psychological level. So the reason we use every product or service, every product or service, online, offline, anything we use for one reason and one reason only, doesn't matter what the product is. We use every product that we use to modulate our mood to feel something different. So your job in product design is to figure out what is that internal trigger and how does your product satisfy it better than the alternatives. We have to start with that. What many companies do is they say we want people to use our product, therefore we're gonna, you know, we're gonna gamify it. And I'm not anti gamification, but it goes to show you where it's misapplied. Typically gamification falls flat. And it falls flat because people first look at the tools, let's look at games, Games are engaging. Let's do more game like things. Well, points and badges and leaderboards, let's put that in our game. What we end up doing is we serve chocolate covered broccoli. Chocolate covered broccoli is when we take something that we want people to eat. Eat your broccoli, it's super healthy, it's good for you. And we take something, we think they want chocolate, we put it on top and then we serve an unholy mess. Nobody likes chocolate covered broccoli. And this is what tends to happen when we look at the the solutions. Before we understand the problem, we really have to understand the psychological need, uncertainty, boredom, fearfulness, stress, anxiety, core level, human stressors that our product is going to address. So in the enterprise environment, think about uncertainty. That's a frequently occurring itch, that's something that people feel every Day they sit down at work, there's uncertainty around what to do next. Am I going in the right direction? What's going to happen? All kinds of uncertainty. So when you look at, you know, marketing dashboards, for example, sounds boring. That's full of uncertainty. When you think about, how are my ad dollars performing, how's my marketing spend going? That fluctuates. There's uncertainty there, there's variability. So a dashboard that you check into every single day to show, hey, what's working, what's not working, That's a variable reward. When you think about communication software like Slack, that's variable. There's. It's what we call rewards of the tribe. What do people need? What are we working on? What's going on? What's the latest. That's full of uncertainty. When you think about project management software, Right. Where is the. How are things progressing? What's. Anytime you can find a customer need with a question mark at the end, that's the variable reward. So the variable reward satisfies that itch. It either brings more variability in cases where the user wants that. So, for example, if the internal trigger is boredom. So let's go back to the gaming space. If the internal trigger is boredom, gamification works really well because the antidote to boredom is entertainment and games entertain. But this is why it's so important to get the right internal trigger. If you give somebody points and badges and leaderboards. When the internal trigger is workplace uncertainty or anxiety, I don't want your stupid gamification get out of my face. Right. It doesn't solve the problem, it doesn't scratch the itch. So don't do it. If the internal trigger is uncertainty, give them assurance. So it's always about connecting the internal trigger with the variable reward.

Okay, that makes a lot more sense now. And I like that. I've seen so many people just put like badges on stuff that does not need to have badges.

It's terrible. You know, there's nuance here. Sometimes gamification is great, but in a corporate setting, it's almost always awful. Yeah.

And I think everybody listening to that needs to remember that. So don't try to gamify your things.

Right. It's kind of a lazy approach. And if you think about it actually for a minute, I often hear about like, well, aren't you advocating just gamification? No, I'm not. That's not what I'm saying at all. It's so much deeper than that. And even if you think, take a step back and you Think about games aren't that sticky. Games are, are engaging for a little while, right? Okay, today we're all playing Wordle. Like what? A week and a half ago everybody was playing among us and before that it was Angry Birds or whatever. Like these things are very fatty. Why? Because what happens is after a while what was variable becomes predictable. Okay, let's say among us. Played among us. Oh my God, everybody's addicted to among us. And then, you know, a hot minute later it became pretty predictable. The same game again and again and again. It wasn't that exciting because it wasn't variable anymore. So we need to look for, for instances if we want long term engagement, we have to look for instances that are in fact not very game like most games unless they involve other people. This is really important if you think about like World of Warcraft. People play World of Warcraft for decades. Why? It's not the game, it's the people, it's your guild. It's about the connection you have with others. So rewards of the tribe are much more engaging. Other people keep us engaged over the long term much more than what we call rewards of the hunt where it's just about the material or points or badges, those type of rewards.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think that's probably also why I like wordle, because all my friends are doing it. You see people on Twitter doing it, but there hasn't been a day I haven't gotten it yet. So it's not very variable, but I do enjoy that. So that makes a lot of sense with that. So you've got the different types of rewards you were talking about, like rewards of the tribe, rewards of the hunt, rewards of the self. When you're thinking about enterprise, you're pretty much what types of rewards are we usually going for?

You see all three. So every habit forming product needs to have at least one. The most sticky habit forming products have all three. So you know, email is probably the mother of habit forming technology. It's a technology that been around for a very, very long time and we keep using it. Why? Because variable rewards of the tribe is that you don't know who the message is going to be from Rewards the hunt. What's in the message? Is it good news, a bad news? There's variability there. And then finally rewards the self. There's a sense of mastery, completion and competency that comes from checking those unread messages. Right. There's almost like a leveling up of okay, can I get to that mythical place called Inbox? 0. So it utilizes all three rewards. So we see the same going, you know, with Slack. I think part of the reason that Slack or any, you know, group messaging service is so sticky in the enterprise is because it utilizes all three types of variable rewards. But in the enterprise, you know, with any habit forming product, that is, you need at least one, but the more the better.

And then, you know, on the same vein, you've got different types of triggers that you were talking about too, kind of up the funnel. I was curious about this. You say like own triggers are some of the best triggers that you can do. Right. And for those who don't know what the own triggers are, they're really when your user gives you permission to notify them when they need to go in there.

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What about things like notifications or you turn on notifications, you give it permission. What happens when? And you probably see this in organizations, I'm sure you get called into it. But like what happens when? It's like, hey, I give you permission to do this, but then those triggers stop working.

Yeah, yeah.

How do you diagnose that?

Sure. So there's two big categories of triggers. Internal triggers we talked about earlier. And then there's external triggers. So external triggers is what will you'll be very familiar with. It's the pings, the dings, the rings, anything in our outside environment that tells us what to do next, as opposed to the internal triggers. This is where the information for what to do next is stored inside the user's memory. So an emotion and a response to an emotion. Boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety. That's internal trigger versus external triggers. Now among external triggers, we have several types of external triggers. Owned, paid, earned. There are different types of external triggers as well. To answer your question, in terms of what happens if it stops working after a while, typically this is a problem that occurs when there isn't a good connection between the internal and external trigger. So the ultimate goal where we want to go with a habit forming product is that the user uses the product on their own without external triggers. So it's not necessary. We have to understand why someone's not responding to that external trigger or sorry. Or what's happening with the external trigger. Sometimes they don't use the external trigger because they don't need it anymore. Meaning we know that most of the time that people check one of these habit forming products, whether it's email, whether it's Slack, Whether it's Twitter, 90% of the time, 9, 0 studies find it's not the external trigger, it's the internal trigger. 90% of the time. And that's the ultimate goal of a habit forming product, is that you don't need to send all those annoying pings and dings, you don't need to spend money on advertising, you don't need to send spammy messages. People use the product on their own. That's when the habit is actually formed. But if we're seeing it's not effective, we haven't created that habit at all, then typically the reason this occurs is because we haven't properly timed the external trigger. So the difference between an external trigger that gets a response that is welcomed, that is useful, and one that feels like spam is one word, and that one word that differentiates spam from magic is context. Context. So I'll give you a good story to illustrate the point. So I was on a transcon flight, this was before COVID And I remember I was sitting in the aisle seat and there was a guy across the aisle seat from me who was taking a nap, right on the flight. He had the pillow under his neck and he had a blanket up under his chin. And the flight attendant comes down the aisle and she turns to him and she says, sir. He doesn't wake up. He's asleep, right? So she says it louder. She says, sir. And again, nothing. So she says it a third time, this time really loud. Everybody like, you know, within earshot can hear it. She says, sir. And he wakes up, he says, whoa, whoa, what is it? What is it? And she says, sir, what would you like to drink? And this is such a great example, right? It's a ridiculous story. We've seen this happen and it's awful. And we're like, how could the flight attendant do that? And we do that to our users all the time. We send them pings, dings and rings on our schedule when it's convenient for us. Did that poor guy want a drink? Yes, but when he was thirsty, not when he was sleeping. So the idea here is that when you send those external triggers, they have got to be contextually relevant for that internal trigger. The closer together you can couple the external trigger with the internal trigger. You want to send that message. The minute the person feels that emotional itch, stress, anxiety, uncertainty, whatever that emotional itch is, whatever that internal trigger is, that's the moment in time and place when you want to send the external trigger. That's when it's most likely to get a response.

I love that story. That is a fantastic analogy. I'm like, I'm going to use that. I'm going to tell somebody that story one day. So what's the triggers too? We were talking a little bit about product ethics a little bit earlier and you mentioned how it's unethical to build bad products for people, which I totally agree with. I'm curious what your take is since you've done a lot with habit forming products on things like Instagram where people are talking about now these internal triggers, I guess of loneliness or wanting to see what's going on have become such a habit where people see all these images. A lot of people are getting depressed, a lot of people are not getting the right cues back from it, but they can't stop looking at these lives. This is kind of maybe more towards maybe a bad habit like you were talking about with indistractable. But how do you think about that type of habit and where social media has gone today?

So let's set the stage that for the vast majority of companies and for the vast majority of your listeners, this is not a problem. Nobody's getting addicted to enterprise software, right? Nobody's. I wish people would get addicted. Yeah, exactly. We wish they would. Right. But nobody's getting addicted to educational software, right? I don't know if you've seen the stats on completion rates for educational software. They're horrible. Right? So for the vast majority of people listening, their problem is not that people are overusing the product. The problem is people won't use the product.

Nobody cares. That's the bigger problem. But it's a good ethical question in terms of what do we do about these products that are sometimes overused. Now I think we need to distinguish what I think is ethical and what is unethical here. So I think that there are certain classes of people that deserve protection. Okay, Children for example. We have many laws in society that protect children. My 13 year old daughter can't walk into a bar and order a gin and tonic. She can't go into a casino and start gambling on the roulette wheel. There are certain restrictions around someone who's underage. Because they're not of sound body and mind. Right. We don't think that they're ready for that. So we pass certain laws to protect them. The other category that we don't currently protect that I think does deserve legal protection are people who are pathologically addicted. So when people say, you know, this term addicted has. Is so overused that it's lost its meaning, you know, an addiction is a pathology. An addiction is. Is not. Ooh, I like it a lot. Addiction is a persistent compulsive dependency on a behavior or substance that harms the user. So it's something that despite harm, despite someone trying to stop, they are still compelled to do it. So very difficult to stop. It affects around 3 to 5% of the population. But clearly not everything that is potentially addictive addicts everyone, right? Not everyone who has a glass of wine with dinner is an alcoholic. Not everyone who has sex is a sex addict. That's ridiculous. So clearly it's something that affects a very small percent of the population that does deserve protection. So I've argued for years and I've met with all the big tech companies about this, and unfortunately, they haven't done anything about it. But I think it's time that we legislate some kind of rule like this that says you need a use and abuse policy, that if you use our product more than X number of hours per week. Right, Give me a number. We're going to reach out to you and say, hey, you're using our product to the extent that it might indicate you're struggling with an addiction. Can we help? We need some kind of protections for people who are pathologically addicted. But if you're not a child and if you're not pathologically addicted, it's up to you. It's not your fault. It's not your fault that these things are so engaging. You didn't invent Facebook, but it is your responsibility. And the thing is that distraction. Let's classify what this is. So if you're not an addict and you're not a child, even though we liked saying, things are, oh, it's Mark Zuckerberg doing it to me, it's the tech companies doing it to me. They're all doing it to me. That feels good because it absolves us of responsibility. But if we're really honest with ourselves, it's not an addiction. For 95% of us, 95% of us, it's a distraction. But when we call it what it really is, oh, it's a distraction. Now Now I gotta do something about it. Oh, that sucks, right? But the fact of the matter is, people have been struggling with distraction forever, Literally. The Greek philosopher Plato was complaining about distraction 2,500 years before the Internet. So distraction is nothing new, right? In my generation, they called us couch potatoes because we watched too much tv. And before that, they talked about the radio and before that, the comic book. People will find stuff to distract themselves no matter what. But it's the people who stand up and say, no, I decide how I will control my time and attention. I will become indistractable. Those are the people who really do choose their life. And so that's why I really wanted to write this book. Indistractible for me, I was personally struggling with distraction quite a bit, and it was taking a toll on my family, it was taking a toll on my health, it was taking a toll on my work. And so I wanted to solve this problem for myself. And at first, I did what everybody does. Oh, I blame the technology. And then I found, even when I got rid of the technology, right, I got myself a flip phone from Alibaba for 13 bucks. I got myself a word processor with no Internet connection. And I would sit down and say, okay, now I'm gonna write, or now I'm gonna do what I said I'm gonna do here. I'm gonna work without distraction. And then I would say, oh, look, there's that book on the bookshelf that I've been meaning to read. Or let me clean up my desk real quick or let me just do the laundry real quick. I kept getting distracted even without the technology. And so that's why I wanted to dive deeper into. Wait, what was really going on here. Because if I kept finding excuses, I kept finding reasons to get distracted. It can't just be the technology, because I got rid of the technology. So that's why I think we need to take a step back and to ask ourselves, really, what can we do here? As opposed to saying, let's shake our fist at the tech companies because they make such engaging products, right? Think about how ridiculous this sounds. Netflix, your shows are really entertaining. Can you please stop making them? So good to watch Facebook, your app is so user friendly. I love it. Stop that. Apple, your products are so great. Can you dumb them down so that I don't have to want to use them all the time? It's ridiculous. We want these products to be engaging. That's the purpose. That's the point of these products, is to engage us. That's why they're there. So it's up to us. I think the price of progress, the price of all these amazing technologies that we have today is that we need to read the owner's manual of our own brain to figure out how to deal with distraction in order to get to the root cause of the problem. What's the real cause? Not just the proximal cause, not just whatever device is in our hand, but the root cause. We need to understand this fundamental truth that time management is pain management, that all distraction is spurred by desire to escape discomfort. It's back to those internal triggers. It's uncertainty, stress, anxiety, fearfulness that is the number one cause of distraction. So the first step to becoming indistractable is to master those internal triggers. A few very simple tools anyone can learn how to use in a few minutes to know what to do when you feel that discomfort. Right. When you feel stress, anxiety, fatigue, do you do what most people do, which is to escape that discomfort with. Let me just check the news. Let me take a drink of booze, let me eat some food, let me check Facebook. Let me do whatever to get my mind off of that discomfort? Or do you use that discomfort to propel you forward like rocket fuel towards traction rather than distraction?

That's great advice. Okay, yeah, that makes a little bit more sense about where those triggers come from. So your flip phone, I'm curious, do you still have it?

I think I have it in some shelf somewhere.

Okay, now that I understand, I went.

Back to my iPhone.

Cool. That's great.

This is what kind of bugged me about some of the advice out there. You know, when you read most books about distraction and focus, it's get rid of your phones, get rid of technology. Well, thanks. Stupid. I'll get fired if I do that, right? I need these tools. This is my job. I think many people feel that this advice of, you know, digital detoxing, it's not realistic and it's not helpful, and it's unnecessary because I really do think that we can get the best out of these tools without letting them get the best of us.

Yeah, I really like that philosophy. I've tried, you know, deleting email applications on my phone when I'm on vacation, that type of stuff. But you still go back to it. At the end of the day, it's definitely like an internal motivation rather than the app just sitting there looking at me. That I noticed.

And that awareness of knowing, hey, that's really what's going on. That's with any distraction, by the way, it's not just tech. It's, you know, I used to be clinically obese. And let me tell you, the reason I overate, it wasn't because I was hungry. It wasn't even because the food was delicious. It was because I was eating my feelings, right? I was eating when I was bored, I was eating when I was lonely. I was eating when I felt shameful about how much I had just eaten. That's what causes these distractions in all forms. Whether it's at work, whether it's at home, whether whatever facet of your life. If you're not doing what you said you're going to do, we've got to come to grips with this icky, sticky truth that it's because of a feeling we are escaping in emotion. If we don't master those internal triggers, they become our masters.

Yeah, fantastic advice. I'm sure everybody listening to this can agree with that too. So one thing I was wondering about too. We were talking about this a little bit. Distractions are not only on a personal level. I find that also corporations and companies get very easily distracted trying to go after, like the new shiny thing, the new. The new feature over there, or, hey, my competitor just did this. We have to keep up, you know, keep up with it, figure out the roadmap, go after it. Do you do any work with companies when it comes to trying to limit distraction? And can you use some of those principles in a corporation or in a company culture?

Yeah. So there's a whole section in my book, Indistractable about how to build an indistractable workplace. Because there's a lot of things you can do as an individual to become indistractable, and we definitely should do those things. But, you know, I'm not so naive to not understand that working in a company, we are subject to the whims of other people. Right. If your boss wants this and your colleague wants that, you know, that could be very distracting. So how do you, how do you deal with that? How do you build an indistractable workplace? The good news is that there are all kinds of things that we can do to help manage our managers. So when it comes to company, I think your question is more of, like, how does companies stay on track? How do companies not get distracted? Well, from a strategy level, that's the boss's job, right? Like, the boss's job is to set strategy and stick to it. But what oftentimes happens is that when a boss isn't capable enough to set priorities, they'll shuffle that to a layer down, they'll say, here's all the stuff we need to get done here, do it all. And they'll just push it down the next layer and expect miracles to happen because they don't want to make the hard choices and the hard trade offs of prioritizing. I've been doing angel investing for years. I've invested in over 30 companies and six unicorns. The number one thing I look for in an entrepreneur is their ability to prioritize. It is the only job of a CEO, is the ability to prioritize. Everything else is detailed. So what happens if you have a boss or a manager who doesn't know how to prioritize properly, who does go from shiny pony to shiny pony, you know, one thing to the next, and pushes all that work down to you? Well, what you have to do is to show them how you spend your time. Okay? And this is gonna be a very foreign concept to a lot of people because it's gonna feel like micromanaging, but it's in the opposite direction. If someone asks you to do what I'm about to tell you, you'd probably say that's micromanaging. But what I'm telling you is you do it to your boss. Okay, here's how it works. This is called schedule syncing. Schedule syncing. Schedule syncing is when you sit down with your boss. This takes maybe 15 minutes a week. So you sit down Monday morning, you go to your boss and you show them your timeboxed calendar. And so we didn't get into timeboxing. But timeboxing is essentially when you plan what you're going to do with your time. It uses a technique called setting an implementation intention, which has been studied thousands of times. It is the most well researched time management technique and is by far the most efficient thing by the way, to do. Lists, just as a side note, are one of the worst things you can do for your personal productivity. One of the worst things you can do because timeboxing is way, way better. So when you have a timebox schedule, you can take that artifact. Now you have something you can actually show, you can print out physically and show your manager. You show them, hey, here's the week ahead. Okay, here's how I'm spending my time. See, I've got this meeting here. I'm going to spend two hours on working on this project. I'm going to spend an hour on email. Here's how I'm going to spend my time for the work week ahead. Now, you see this Other piece of paper. Here's all the things you wrote for me that you'd like me to get done. I'm having trouble prioritizing my time. Can you help me prioritize? What this does is save you from probably the worst productivity advice ever given, and we've all heard it a million times, which is, if you want to be more productive, you have to learn how to say no. What kind of stupid. That's the kind of advice only a professor could tell, right? Only someone with tenure would give you that advice. If you tell your boss no, you're going to get fired. That's stupid. So you don't say no. You say, help me reprioritize. Okay, here's my schedule. Here's. There's only so many hours in the day. Here's what I'm working on. Here's the stuff. I don't know where to put my calendar. Help me reprioritize. And what you are forcing them to do is do their job. Tell me what's more important. Do you want me to go to that meeting or would you prefer I worked on that other project? That's the only way to do it. It sounds like it's different. It sounds like it's a lot of work. It's a very well researched technique. It'll take you maybe 15 minutes to make that calendar every week. And it'll take you another 15 minutes to sit down with your job and have with your boss and have this conversation. And let me tell you, they will worship the ground you walk on. Because every manager is constantly thinking, what are you doing all day? Even though if they know you're busy, they don't know how you're spending your time. So giving them that insight, giving them that transparency and, hey, here is how I spend my time. Right? That is a game changer. And that can only be done with schedule syncing.

That's fantastic advice. And I know there's tons of product managers listening because they send in questions about this all the time of like, how do I get my boss to prioritize? Here you go. Right? Really good advice for them to look at that. And what you were also saying about not saying no. I think as product managers, we're told our job is to say no. I know I've definitely said that earlier in my career too. Be like, your biggest thing you can do is no. But as you were talking, I was kind of reflecting and going, yeah, that's true. I don't think I've told people explicitly no anymore. And the Thing that works is going, okay, if you want that, that means you don't get this. Is that good? Or do you want that? But you can't do both.

Exactly. How do you want to reprioritize? See, I mean, think about it. It's like it's as if you walked into a candy shop as a kid with an unlimited budget, you would take all the candy. Right? So you need a constraint. Bosses need a constraint to say, look, we are resource constrained. Constrained on time, constrained on people, constrained on money. What is the trade off here that you're willing to make? That is the boss's only job. Prioritize, tell us what to work on, what's more important? Right. So you're forcing them to do their job.

Yeah. And if you're a boss listening to that, please remember that is your job. So the micromanage it is to prioritize.

Exactly.

Definitely. Great advice. Well, thank you so much, Nir, for being on the podcast with us. If product managers want to go learn more about you, where can they find more of your work?

Thank you. My blog is near and far.com that's spelled N I R, like my first name. So N I R and far.com and my two books. The first book is called how to Build Habit Forming Products and the second book is how to Control youl Attention and choose youe Life. And they're both available wherever books are sold.

Great. And I'm hoping all the product managers listening will go out and buy those books. They are fantastic. I've read them. And for those of you listening, if you enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a review. Wherever you listen to podcasts, make sure you hit that subscribe button so that you get notified every Wednesday when we get a new episode out there and we will see you next week.