Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life

Welcome everyone. I'm so glad that you're joining us today. My name is Nir Eyal and I am thrilled to tell you a little bit about my work over the past five years studying the psychology of distraction. You know, my first book was called Hooked. It's called, the subtitle is how to build Habit Forming Products. And the reason I wrote this book was that I wanted to democratize the techniques used by the world's most habit forming products. So companies like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and WhatsApp and Slack and Snapchat, I wanted to expose for everyone's benefit how these companies get us hooked. The idea was that we can build all kinds of products and services to help people build healthy habits in their lives if we can understand the basic psychology of designing a product for user engagement and retention. So that's what Hooked was all about. And in the past six years since that book was published, it became a best seller. And it's been used at all sorts of companies in every conceivable industry from healthcare to fitness to education products. All have used the Hooked model to get people hooked onto healthy habits. And I'm very, very proud of the impact the book has had. Now, the other side of the coin in studying how to build good habits is that I also have a background in what makes for bad habits. And a few years ago after I wrote Hooked, I actually found that some of these bad habits were getting the best of me. That in fact, I remember I had this one moment in my life that I really had to reass relationship with distraction. When I was with my daughter one afternoon and we had some time to spend together. And I remember we had this book, this activity book of things that daddies and daughters could do together. And one of the activities in the book was to ask each other this question, that if you could have any superpower, what superpower would you want? And you can hear, I remember the question verbatim. But I can't tell you what my daughter said because in that moment I got distracted. Distracted. I was looking at my phone. I don't even remember what was on my phone. But I decided to check my device for some reason real quick. And by the time I looked up for my phone, I realized that my daughter had left the room. She'd gone to play with some toy outside because she got the message I was sending that whatever was on my screen was more important than she was. And if I'm honest with you, it wasn't just with my daughter that I was distracted. I would get distracted when I was trying to do my work and somehow I would do something that wasn't what I planned to do. I would say I would exercise, for example. I would say I would definitely eat right, and yet I wouldn't. And so I wanted to know why. What was this secret of why I wasn't doing what I said I was going to do? And wouldn't that in fact be a superpower? So if you asked me today what superpower I would most want, I would tell you I would want the power to be indistractable. I think that becoming indistractable is the skill of this century. That there is no facet of your life that indistractibility doesn't touch that the ability to focus on whatever it is you want to do with your time, with your attention and your life is critical when it comes, of course, to the work you do. But it also is very important for the relationships you have for your physical and mental well being. All of these things depend upon becoming indistractable. So in the five years that I spent researching and writing this book, one of the first things I learned that I was actually about was that distraction is not a new problem. That, you know, many of us love to blame our cell phones and Facebook and Instagram or whatever it is, email, you name it. It turns out that these things didn't invent distraction. That distraction has been around for a very, very long time. That in fact, the philosopher Plato talked about this problem 2500 years ago. He called it Akrasia, the tendency that we all have to do things against our better interest. And Plato wonder, is it that despite us knowing what to do, we don't do it? Why do we do things against our better judgment? And if that was a pertinent question 2,500 years ago, it's even more important today. Because today we don't have the same excuse that Plato's generation had, right? Even our grandparents could throw up their hands and say, well, we don't know what to do. How do I lose weight? I don't know, how do I succeed at my job? I don't know. Today we don't have that excuse. If you don't know how to do something, Google it, it's all out there, it's all on the Internet. We all basically know what to do. The problem is we don't know how to stop getting distracted. And so this is the impediment to doing the kind of work we want to do, to living the kind of life we know we deserve to live. So one way to think about this problem of distraction is to truly understand it backwards and forwards by understanding not only what is distraction, but what is the opposite of distraction. If I were to ask you what is the opposite of distraction? Most people would say it's focus. But I actually disagree. If you look at the origin of the word distraction, the opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction is traction. That both traction and distraction have the same Latin root trajare, which means to pull. And you'll notice both words end in the same six letters. A, C, T, I, O, N. That spells action. Traction is any action that pulls you towards what you want to do. Things that you are doing with intent, things that help you live life according to your values and help you be the kind of person you want to become. Now, the opposite of traction is distraction. Any action you take that pulls you away from what you plan to do, anything that is not in accordance with your values and helps you be the kind of person you want to be, that is an act of distraction. Now, why is this dichotomy so important? First of all, we have to realize that anything can be either traction or distraction. In fact, the same actions can be either one. Let me give you an example. How many times have you sat at your desk and said to yourself, okay, now I'm going to focus. Now I'm going to concentrate. I'm going to stop procrastinating. I'm not going to get distracted. I'm going to work on that big project. I'm going to finish that proposal, that presentation, whatever it is that I've been putting off. Here I go. I'm going to get started right away. But first, let me check email. How often does that happen to us? Let me just check those Slack channels. Or let me just do that one thing on my to do list. And we think we're being productive. We think we are acting in accordance to what we really want to do, but we're not. Because those are the most pernicious forms of distraction. The distractions that trick you into prioritizing the urgent at the expense of the important. And so we really have to be on guard for those things that feel productive. Oh, I'm just going to check email real quick. That's something I have to do anyway, right? Wrong. It's still a distraction. It's even more of a distraction than playing video games or scrolling Facebook. Because it's tricked you, because it's not obvious to you. That is not the action you intended to take so just like anything can be a distraction, anything can be traction. So today, you know, you hear a lot of people selling a lot of books and speaking at a lot of conferences and a lot of clickbaity headlines telling us that technology is melting our brains, that Facebook's algorithms are hijacking our brains, that everything's so addictive. And I'm here to tell you that it's utter and complete rubbish. And I wrote the book Hooked, and I taught for many years at Stanford Graduate School of Business, teaching exactly how this works. And I'm telling you that that is media mumbo jumbo. It's not true. There is no judgment call around these behaviors. Look, if you want to spend time on Facebook or Instagram or Netflix or watching football or whatever it is you like to do with your time, there's nothing wrong with any of it. At least not, you know, in my book. If you want to do that stuff and it's according to your values, enjoy it. But here's the difference. The difference between traction and distraction is one word, and that one word is intent. If you intend to go on Facebook or Instagram or watch something on Netflix, I want you to do it. Enjoy it. If it's according to your values and you've intended to do it in advance, I want you to do it without guilt. Now it's traction. So you can take something that was a distraction and turn it into traction by making it something that you intend to do. Remember, the time you plan to waste is not wasted time. So we'll get more into traction and distraction in a minute. But let me just talk about the things that prompt us to take these actions, either traction or distraction. The first type of trigger is called an external trigger, and this is what we tend to blame. These are the pings, the dings, the rings, all of these things in our outside environment that can lead us to either traction or distraction. We'll get back to what do we do about these external triggers in just a minute. But what I want to talk about for a few minutes here is the most prevalent source of distraction. The number one cause of distraction, believe it or not, is not the pings and dings in your life. It's not the external triggers. It's not what's happening outside of us, but rather, it is what is going on inside of us. These are called internal triggers. Internal triggers are uncomfortable emotional states that we seek to escape from. And if we are to tackle distraction and finally overcome it and get more traction as opposed to distraction, in our day, this has to be where we start. Because you see, in order to answer Plato's 2500 year old question of why do we do things against our better interest, what is the nature of distraction? We have to actually ask ourselves a more basic question. A more fundamental concern of wait a minute, why do we do anything? Actually, what's the nature of human motivation? And what you will discover, and then this shocked me, is that most of us have a misperception of why we do what we do. You see, most people think motivation is all about carrots and sticks, right? It's about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Jeremy Bentham said this, Sigmund Freud said this. Unfortunately, when you look deeper into what's happening in the brain on a neurological basis, it's wrong. It's not true. Because what motivates us is not the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, but rather one thing, not two do. It's all about the desire to escape discomfort. Everything you do is about a desire to escape discomfort. This is called the homeostatic response. We know this to be true physically. Think about it. You know, common sense tells us, hey, when your body feels cold, you put on a jacket. When it's too hot, you take it off. When you feel hunger pangs, you eat. When you eat too much, now you're stuffed, you stop eating. So these are physiological reactions. And the same thing holds true for our psychological reactions. When we're feeling lonely, we check Facebook. When we're uncertain, we Google. When we're bored. Well, there's lots of solutions for boredom. We check Pinterest and Reddit and YouTube, you name it. All of these things cater to uncomfortable sensations. So that therefore means if all human behavior is prompted by a desire to escape discomfort, by the way, even the pursuit of pleasurable sensations are psychologically destabilizing. Wanting, craving, desire. All of those things are in fact uncomfortable. Even if it's about the pursuit, the seeking, the wanting of something pleasurable. So if all human behavior is prompted by a desire to escape discomfort, that therefore means that time management is pain management. And so the first step to becoming indistractable is to understand the discomfort we are trying to escape. Listen, I've read pretty much every book on productivity and time management and I've read all the life hacks, I've listened to all the gurus, and I'm here to tell you that none of that stuff works. None of the. It works. If you first and foremost don't deal with what is causing you to want to escape. What Is the discomfort that you are feeling. That has to be where we start our journey to becoming indistractable. Mastering our internal triggers. You see, because there's only one of two things we can do about these uncomfortable states. We can either fix the source of the problem, understand what is causing us that discomfort, and fix it, or. Or learn to cope with that discomfort. So let me give you a few techniques that can help you master these internal triggers. Now, there's a lot more in the book that I won't have time to share today, but I just want to give you just a few techniques. First thing that psychologists can tell us is that we can note the sensation. Noting the sensation is a very powerful step to just simply write down what is that sensation we're experiencing? Boredom, uncertainty, fearfulness, stress, whatever it is that we're feeling in that moment. If we can block that habitual response, to look for escape, whether that's using too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, whatever it is, to block that habitual response, to seek escape for just a moment. And rather than distraction, we are acting in a way that is in accordance with our values by simply noting the sensation. That is a wonderful way to disarm that sensation. And then we want to get curious about what it is we're feeling and not contemptuous. We don't want to to beat ourselves up. We don't want to berate ourselves for feeling that urge. Remember, you don't control these urges. You don't control your feelings. Okay? Many people don't realize this. You do not control your feelings and urges any more than you would control the urge to sneeze. Can you control the urge to sneeze? Of course not. Once you feel the urge to sneeze, it's there. You didn't will it to be there. What you can do is decide what you do with that sensation, right? How you respond, hence the word responsibility, to that urge, to that sensation. So one technique we can use is called surfing the urge. So we can use what we call the 10 minute rule, which I go into depth in the book around how to use. It's a very, very effective technique which tells us we can actually give in to any temptation, do whatever it is that is potentially distracting us in just 10 minutes of surfing the urgent of sitting with that sensation for just a few minutes, getting curious about it, not contemptuous, getting curious about it. And then once the 10 minutes are up, what we find is that if you still desire that sensation, you can give into it and it Turns out by giving yourself that mental freedom, you actually, nine times out of 10, once that urge crests and subside, you no longer even desire it because that sensation has passed. The internal trigger has crested like a wave and then subsided. So that's a very, very effective technique called the 10 minute rule, where we tell ourselves we can give in to that temptation, but not right now. In 10 minutes. Now, the next step. There's a lot more. I'm flying through this because there's so much in the five years of research that I've done, but I just want to give you a few very practical tips here. The next step here, the next strategy to becoming indistractable is about making time for traction. You see, here's the thing. You cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it is distracting you from. So many people out there have a blank calendar and they say how distracted they are all day, and they say they have a million things on their to do list. And yet, here's the thing. If you don't know what it is you wanted to do with your time, you have no right to complain. If you haven't planned out down to the minute what you want to do with your time, somebody is going to schedule that time for you. I know what some of you are thinking, oh, that's too rigid. I can't do that. I don't want to live my life like this. I need to be spontaneous. I need to be creative with my time. Right? I can't budget my time like this. That's too much work. I hear you. I understand. And look, if you're doing everything you want to do on your to do list every day, you tune into the wrong webinar. Okay? But if you have that mile long to do list, that day after day, you have been recycling from one day to the next to the next because you read some book on how to get things done that told you all you have to do is put things on a magical to do list and it'll get done. And yet you're not getting things done. I ask you to consider whether this is working out for you and if it is working out for you. Keep doing whatever you're doing. But if you find that you're not doing what it is you want to do with your time, that you're not living your life according to your values. How about we try something else? Let's plan just one day a week. You know what? Heck, let's plan one afternoon a week. And I want you to plan the time not the output you see to do lists are actually destroying your productivity. To do lists do nothing but make you feel guilty about not finishing what you said you were going to do. I talked to hundreds of people, every single person I talked to about using this to do list technique. When I said, when was the last time you didn't finish everything on your to do list? Ask yourself, when was the last time you didn't finish everything on your to do list? You know what they tell me me today, yesterday, day before that, day before that. It doesn't work. You know why it doesn't work? Because a to do list is a register of output. But you can't have output without input. Well, what's the input to create the output that you do? If you're a knowledge worker, your input is two things, time and attention. So don't worry about the output if you're not going to put in the input. Which means you've got to to make time on your calendar to do the things you want to do. And I mean down to the minute. And I show you exactly how to do this if you go to nearandfar.com schedule-maker again, that's nearandfar.com, near like my first name, N I R N FAR schedule maker. There's an absolutely free tool you can use that will show you exactly how to make this Timebox calendar. It's totally free. You don't even have to give me your email. It's totally easy, simple tool I built to help you do this. Now, what I want to make sure you put in on that calendar is not only time for communication, right? The emails, the pings, the dings, the messages, the slack channels. Make sure you have time for thinking. I'm going to tell you a little secret. If you want a huge competitive advantage over your competitors, put time on your calendar to think. Everybody these days is running around like crazy doing reactive work, right? Reacting to emails, reacting to phone calls, reacting to slack channels. The people who win, the people who come up with the best ideas, the people who are happier and more productive in life are the people who plan the time and protect it. They defend it. To think, to strategize, to plan. But that time will not happen if you don't hold it on your calendar. Now the next step to becoming indistractable is to hack back the external triggers. And we talked about these external triggers a little bit. These are the usual suspects, right? The pings, the dings, all of the things outside of us that can lead us towards either Traction or distraction? Now, there is one industry where hacking back external triggers is literally a matter of life and death. Let me ask you a question. If I were to ask you to guess what was the third leading cause of death in the United States of America last year, what was the third leading cause of death? I'll give you number one and two. Number one was heart disease, number two was cancer. Guess what number three was. Was it Alzheimer's or traffic accidents or suicides? Not even close. If fit were a disease, the third leading cause of death death would be. And it's not just last year, it's a year before that. And the year before that. It would have been prescription mistakes. People inside hospitals getting the wrong medication or the wrong dosage of medication from healthcare practitioners inside the hospital, believe it or not. And it turns out this problem is 100% caused by distraction. Why does it happen? Because studies have found that on average, when a nurse is dosing out medication, he or she is interrupted on average 10 times per dosing round. And that causes all of these mistakes. And it's 100% preventable human error that caused this problem. So this is something that a lot of hospitals in America just think, ah, you know, what are you going to do? It's just the cost of doing business. Until a group of nurses from UCSF decided to take on this challenge and they found a way to reduce this problem. They reduced the number of prescription mistakes by, get this, 88%. They almost eliminated this problem. How did they do it? Vests, cheap plastic vests that nurses wore that said drug round in progress. Do not disturb. This almost eliminated the problem because it hacked back. It eliminated the external triggers that caused them to do something they didn't intend to do. They got distracted previously, now they didn't because they hacked back the external trigger. Well, why am I telling you this story? I'm guessing very few of you are nurses. Why am I telling you this? Because we can do this in the office setting as well. So in the office, particularly if you work in an open floor plan office, you can use a sign like this, I call it the screen sign, where you simply put this on your computer monitor and it tells your colleagues, hey, I'm indistractable at the moment. Please come back later. If you're lucky enough to have an office door, you can put a sign on this door that says, I'm indistractable right now. Please come back at a certain time if you work from home. I know many of us work from home these days and we Work next to our kids many times. What do you do about kids when they distract you? They can be external triggers as well. Let me give you a fantastic technique. I've been homeschooling my daughter for the past five years. Here's how we do it. Go around your house and find your silliest hat. Everybody has a silly hat that they have, you know, whether it's a silly baseball cap or whatever. Find the silliest hat you have. And every time you do work that you need to focus on work that requires your concentration when you do not want to be distracted. When you have that time on your calendar set aside for reflective work, I want you to put on this hat and tell your kid beforehand that this is called the concentration crown. And I'm telling you, a child of four years old can understand how this works. Every time mommy or daddy wears a concentration crown, that means that he or she can't be interrupted. It works like a charm, by the way. It also works really well with significant others. Spouses works really well with them too, because you're interrupting the interruption. Very, very effective. We can also use technology to help us block out distraction from technology. Everybody's phone these days comes with the do not disturb while driving mode, where as soon as you push one button, if somebody calls or texts you, they'll receive an automatic reply that says, I'm sorry, I can't talk right now. If this is urgent, text me with the word urgent. And if they send you a message with that word urgent, then the caller text message will come through. Very, very effective. And they don't have to know whether you're driving or not. You can be in your office or your home doing the focus work you need to do. Another thing we can do is to clear away all of that digital clutter. How many of us have desktops that look like this? We don't have to live like that. Take all those external triggers and stuff them away in a folder. Search for them if you need them. We know scientists tell us that when we have all that digital clut, this degrades our performance. Very simple to do. This is kindergarten stuff, folks. This takes five minutes. So the same goes with our phones. All these notifications. You know, 2/3 of people with a smartphone never take the 5 minutes to turn off those notification settings. We don't need all those pings and dings. We can turn this stuff off. It takes just seconds. And we have no right to complain that technology is distracting us if we haven't just taken these simple steps to Only keep the external trigger that serve us. This is the critical question. You see, there's nothing wrong with technology. There's nothing wrong with external triggers. If the technology is telling you, hey, it's time to do that thing you wanted to do, it's time to work out, it's time for the phone call, it's time for the meeting. It's serving you. But if it's taking you away from what you wanted to do, for example, when I was with my daughter and my phone buzzed and now I'm checking my phone as opposed to being fully present with someone I love, well, now it's leading me towards distraction. I'm serving it. So ask yourself that critical question. Am I serving it or is it serving me? And adjust the notifications that are not serving you. Then finally, what we want to do is to leave those distracting devices outside of meetings. Whether it's meetings with our friends, our family, and certainly in the workplace, if we are going to be together in the physical world, we need to be present both in body and mind. So declare no phones zones. The last strategy to becoming indistractable is to prevent distractions with pacts. Now this is the last resort. This is the thing we do as a fail safe, as a firewall to prevent distraction. And the first recorded case of someone using one of these pacts comes to us from the 2,500 year old story of Ulysses told by Homer. This is the story of a Greek hero who had to sail his ship past the island of the Sirens. Now, the Sirens are these mythical creatures that sing this magical song. And any sailor who hears the siren song sails their ship onto the Sirens island where the ship crashes and dies. Okay? Now Ulysses knows this is going to happen and he makes a pact. He makes a pre commitment with himself and his crew. Here's what he does. He instructs every member of his crew to put beeswax in their ears so they can't hear the siren song. And then, then he tells them to bind him to the mast of the ship. And he tells them, no matter what I do, no matter what I say, don't let me go. And you know what? The plan works. He's able to sail his ship past the island of the Sirens and not get distracted, not do something he doesn't want to do, because he made a promise, a pact, in advance. Now, I hope you see the metaphor here you are Ulysses. There is lots of distracting stuff out there in the world. And of course, that could also be you there dead on the side. Sirens sure. Now, you don't want to be those dead people. You want to be Ulysses here by making these pacts. Now, how do you make pacts? There are thousands of free tools out there. I describe many of these in my book that you can use. Most of them are absolutely free that you can use to block out tech. Guess what? With tech. So these are a couple apps I use almost every single day. On the left there is Forest, which is a wonderful little app on your cell phone that anytime you want to do your reflective work, when you have that time on your calendar, when you need to work on without distraction, you dial in how much time you want to spend doing that task, you push a little button that says plant, and that cute little virtual tree is planted on your phone screen. Now, if you pick up your phone and do anything with it, the cute little virtual tree dies. And you don't want to be a virtual tree murderer. So it's a bit of a reminder to tell you, oh, that's not what you wanted to do. It's a very, very effective free tool. Another thing you can do is to find a focus group friend, right? Just working next to somebody can be an incredibly effective way. And I know many of you are working from home, perhaps, or, you know, work remotely. What do you do then? Well, technology to the rescue. This is a company I love so much. I actually invested in the company. It's called FocusMate.com. here's how it works. You find a time when you want to do your reflective work. You book that time on their calendar. At that time, you log in. And if you don't log in, you get a bad review. So it's an incentive to make sure you come on time. And when you log in, you will see a little video on your screen of the person you have that is your focus mate. This was the screenshot I took from a medical school student in the Czech Republic who was memorizing human anatomy while I was preparing this speech. Very, very effective tool. If you're the kind of person who has trouble getting started on something like I do, this is a wonderful way to make a pact with another person to make sure you get started and do the work you know you need to do. So we can reduce distractions with pacts. We can use tech to block out distraction. There are several other pacts. There's an effort pact, a price pact, and an identity pact, which I talk about as well in the book. Unfortunately, we don't have time to go into all of those. But let me give you One word of warning that this is a technique you need to be careful with because this technique can backfire. It can backfire in a few ways. One, if you do it out of order, you have to first master the internal triggers, make time for traction, hack back the external triggers only last do you use this technique of preventing distraction with pacts. The other way this can backfire is that some people, when they fail, as we all invariably will from time to time on our path to becoming indistractable, some people have a really tough time getting back on track. Now who are those people? These are the people studies find who lack self compassion. Self compassion is critical to achieving our long term goals. And people who give themselves self compassion are much more likely to do what they say they're going to do. It's not about being mean to yourself and being a bully, but rather the opposite. The way we cultivate self compassion is to talk to ourselves the way we would talk to a good friend. Sort of like the way you would talk to me. If I told you what happened with my daughter. Daughter. If I told you that I was embarrassed that I got distracted when I was with my daughter, would you tell me that I'm a horrible human being? Would you tell me that I'm a terrible father? Not if you were my good friend, you wouldn't. But I'll be honest with you, that's a kind of self talk I used to say to myself all the time. And it wasn't helpful and it wasn't true. And here's what else isn't true. This idea that technology is somehow addicting all of us, that there's nothing we can do about it. That is just not true. Because look how much we can do about it. We can master the internal triggers, we can make time for traction, we can hack back the external triggers and we can prevent distractions with pacts. And so there's a lot more that I didn't get to today. But I really hope you'll check out the book Indistractable how to Control youl Attention and choose youe Life. And the message I want to leave with you today is that we can do this. I really believe from my experience of the past five years of researching this book, applying these techniques to my own life, that anyone can become indistractable. That we can be the, we can get the best out of these devices and these tools and these technologies without letting them get the best of us. We can all become indistractable. Thank you very much. And with that I would love your opinion on this presentation. If you'd be so kind as to go to this URL, it's @opinion2us. Notice it's opinion2, but opinion2us. If you have an iPhone, you can simply point it at that QR code and with your with your camera and it'll take you right to this URL you'll have if you just fill out that very quick survey. It's only five questions and tell me what you thought of the presentation. There will be a link at the right after you submit that survey that you can click on to get all the slides you just saw. Feel free to share them with your friends, with your colleagues, with your family. And if you need to reach out to me, I'm very happy to answer any questions. You can reach out to me on Twitter, there's my handle or through my website. There's a contact form there as well. I'm@nearandfar.com my website is nearandfar.com you can see it there. Near spelled like my first name, N I r. Thank you so much. Stay strong and stay indistractable.