Nir Eyal | Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life | Talks at Google

Hi everyone, my name is Fatzila Diora and I work in GBO in our Ads Policy team and I'm based in Sydney. I am so excited to moderate this discussion with Near Eyal today. Near Eyal writes, consults and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology and business. He's known as the Habit sky and invests in companies that build habit forming products that improve users lives. Some of his investments are crowd favorites amongst Googlers including Kahoot, Canva and Eventbrite. Nir has previously taught as a lecturer in marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Platner Institute of Design at Stanford. Nir is the author of two incredible behavioral science focused bestselling books, how to build habit forming products and his latest book how to control your attention and choose your life. I find these topics fascinating as we live in a world where so much technology and otherwise, but just so much is constantly vying for our attention and we're often giving our attention away without intention. So Nir, thank you for your time today. Welcome to Google. We're so happy to have you join us. Would love if you could share a little bit about these books and your work and then we can dive into questions.

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. Can you just confirm for me that you can see my slide? Is that on screen yet?

No, I can't see your slide just yet. Here we go. Thank you.

All right, terrific. Great. Wonderful. So welcome everyone. It's so great to be with you today. So what I wanted to do is to kind of give you an overview of my past decades, decade of research into this topic of distraction and how we can finally control what I think is going to be the skill of the century. And then we're going to leave plenty of time for Q and A. So let me tell you about how I got into this field and when I really had to reassess my relationship with distraction. I was with my daughter a few years ago when she was much younger than she is today. And I remember we were sitting together and we had this perfect afternoon plan, just some daddy daughter quality time. And we had this activity book of all these various things that dads and daughters could do together. Make a paper airplane throwing contest, do a sudoku puzzle together. And one of the questions in this book was if you could have any superpower, what superpower would you want? And I remember that question verbatim. But I can't tell you what my daughter said because in that moment, for whatever reason, I thought it was a good time to just check my phone real quick. And by the time I put my phone down, I realized that she was gone, that she'd left the room to go play with some toy outside, because I was sending her a very clear message that whatever was on my phone was more important than she was. And so if you ask me today what superpower I would most want, I would tell you it is the power to be indistractable. Becoming indistractable is the skill of the century. There is no facet of your life. Your mental health, your physical health, your career, your relationships. All of these facets of your life require you to be able to control your attention, because this is truly how we choose our life. Unfortunately, I think there's a very simple narrative out there that the reason we're all distracted is because of our technology. Right? You all are in this industry and, and you hear people probably every day blaming our devices, blaming the Internet, blaming YouTube, blaming whatever it is out there for our distraction. And to be honest, that was my knee jerk reaction as well. But what I discovered in my past 10 years of research is that this problem of distraction is actually much deeper than just whatever technologies we happen to be using. And the narrative of what's really going on in is actually way more empowering than this chicken little critique that we hear about technology today. The sky is falling and our brains are melting. That is just not true. Let me go back to the very beginning. It turns out that this problem of distraction is at least 2,500 years old. How do I know that? Because we know that the Greek philosopher Plato talked about this very same problem. He called it in the Greek akrasia, the tendency to do things against our better interests. And so we know if that people have been struggling with distraction for the least the past 2,500 years before the Internet. It can't be that our technology is the ultimate source of our distraction problems. So let me offer a new, fresh perspective on how we can all manage distraction and ultimately become indistractable, Starting with truly understanding. What does this word distraction even mean? If you ask most people what is the opposite of distraction, they will tell you the opposite of distraction is focus. Right? I don't want to be distracted. I want to be focused. Those are opposites, right? Wrong. It turns out if you look at the etymology of that word distraction, the opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction is traction. Of course it is. Traction and distraction. Both words come from the same Latin root trajare, which means to pull. And you'll notice that both words traction and distraction end in the same letters. They end in the word A, C, T, I, O, N, which spells action, reminding us that distraction is not something that happens to us, but rather it is an action that we ourselves take. So traction, by definition is any action that that pulls you towards what you said you were going to do. Things that you do with intent, things that move you closer to your values and help you become the kind of person you want to become, those are acts of traction. Conversely, anything that pulls you away from what you said you were going to do, away from your values, away from becoming the kind of person you want to become, those are acts of distraction. So let me make this clear. Just because something is a fun task, something that you plan to do, something that maybe is enjoyable, doesn't mean that it's a distraction. In fact, I think we need to stop moralizing and medicalizing behaviors like watching YouTube videos or going on social media or enjoying a video game. There's nothing wrong with those behaviors as long as you're doing them on your schedule and with intent. That is the difference between traction and distraction is this one word, intent. As Dorothy Parker said, the time you plan to waste is not wasted time. So if you've made time on your schedule to go enjoy these things, great, do them right. We need to stop moralizing and medicalizing and somehow saying, oh, playing video games, that's morally reprehensible. But watching football on tv, that's okay. Why? Anything that you plan to do with your time and attention in advance is traction, enjoy. Conversely, just because something is a work related task doesn't mean it's not a distraction. Let me see if this sounds familiar to you. For years, when I was distracted versus today when I'm indistractable, when I was distractible, I would get into work and I'd say, okay, I've got this big long to do list that I have to finish. Here I go. I've got that big important task, by the way, we're going to talk about later. Why to do lists are one of the worst things you can do for your personal productivity. Remind me to get to that in the Q and A. But I would sit down on my desk and I'd say, okay, I've got this big important project. I've been procrastinating on it. I'm not going to delay any longer. Here I go. I'm going to get started right now. But first let me check some email, right? Let me just scroll that Slack channel real quick. Let me just do those easy tasks on my to do list for a quick minute just to get started, just to get some momentum going. Right. And I didn't realize that that is the most dangerous form of distraction. As much as we talk about external distractions, like, you know, the social media or whatever else we might see, what we don't realize is that the most harmful distractions are the ones that we don't even realize are distracting us. So if you're checking email when you plan to work on a big important project, that work email is still a distraction because you don't even realize that you're off track. So just because something is a work related distraction doesn't mean it's not just as dangerous of a distraction as, you know, the typical usual suspects of video games and social media. If it's not what you plan to do with your time, it is a distraction. So now we have traction, we have distraction. Now let's talk about what triggers us to take these actions. What most people think about are the external triggers, the pings, the dings, the rings, all these things in our outside environment that can lead us towards distraction. But would you believe studies find that these external triggers, these pings, dings and rings, these things outside of us, studies find only account for 10% of our distractions. 10%. So what accounts for the other 90%? It turns out that 90% of the time that we get distracted, it's not because of what's happening outside of us, but rather we know that 90% of our distractions begin from within. We call these internal triggers. What are internal triggers? Internal triggers are uncomfortable emotional states that we seek to escape from and is the most important and first critical step we must take in order to become indistractable. Internal triggers like boredom, loneliness, fear, fatigue, stress, anxiety, these uncomfortable sensations that we seek to escape from. What we have to realize is that if we don't understand the source of that discomfort, we will always try and escape it. That fundamentally, distraction is always an unhealthy response to an emotional trigger, to something that we don't like to feel. And so we escape that discomfort, whether it's stress, anxiety, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, whatever it might be, with something that takes us off track. So what do we do about that problem if we want to master these internal triggers so they don't become our master? We only have two potential options. We can either fix the source of the problem, figure out what is causing us that emotional discomfort and do something about it, or we have to learn healthier strategies and to cope with that discomfort, starting with this understanding that blew me away when I started this line of research that fundamentally time management is pain management. Let me say that again. Time management is pain management. Procrastination and distraction is nothing more than an emotional control issue. And most of us, maybe all of us, we have not been taught how to deal with that emotional discomfort in a healthy way that leads us towards traction versus an unhealthy way that leads us towards distraction. Time management is pain management. So what do we do about this? Let me give you some very practical tips. We're not going to be able to go through everything in my book Indistractable, but I want to give you a few very actionable techniques that you can use today to start mastering these internal triggers. The first thing you can do, psychologists tell us, is to note the sensation. If you can simply write down what is that sensation that you're experiencing right before you get distracted. Whether it's boredom, fatigue, stress, anxiety, whatever it is, just noting it down is an important first step. Then what you want to do is to get curious about that sensation, not contemptuous. You see, people tend to divide into two buckets when it comes to distraction. We have the blamers. The blamers blame things outside themselves. Oh, it was my phone, it was my kids, it was my boss, it was the news. It's all this stuff outside of themselves that they blame. And of course, that doesn't work because people have always struggled with distraction, as we learned about earlier from Plato. Blaming things outside of you doesn't fix the problem. Then we have what's called the shamers. The shamers don't blame others. They shame themselves. They say silly things like, oh, I'm no good at time management. I have a short attention span. There must be something broken about me. Silly. It's not true. And in fact, we know that shame is a very uncomfortable internal trigger. And the more you feel shame, guess what? You're more likely to experience that discomfort, which leads to more distraction. So we don't want to be a blamer. We don't want to be a shamer. We want to be what's called a claimer. A claimer claims responsibility, not for that urge, not for that sensation. Did you know you cannot control your emotions? You do not control these urges any more than you would control the urge to sneeze. If you feel the urge to sneeze, sneeze, it's too late. You've already felt that sensation. All you can do is to choose how you will respond to that sensation. Are you Going to sneeze all over everyone and get them sick? Are you going to do the responsible thing and take out a tissue and cover your nose? So it's not about changing that sensation, changing that urge. It's about deciding how we respond to that sensation. Hence the term responsibility. So knowing in advance how you will respond to that sensation of boredom, stress, anxiety, fatigue, and having tools in your toolkit ready to go is the responsible thing to do. This is how we claim responsibility, even when the distraction isn't our fault. It's not your fault that you felt this urge, but it is your responsibility to know how to deal with it. So here's one tool that you can put in your toolkit right away. This is called surfing the urge. This comes from acceptance of commitment therapy, a very well known technique that's been studied in thousands of studies. Surfing the urge acknowledges that these emotions, these urges, these cravings, they crest and then they subside just like waves. And so it's your job to surf that urge like a surfer on a surfboard. How can you do that? Well, one technique that I use every single day is called the ten minute rule. The ten minute rule acknowledges that you can give in to any distraction. Whether it's checking that email inbox when you should be working on that big project, whether it's checking social media, when you said you were going to read a book, whether it's eating that piece of chocolate cake, if you're trying to lose weight, any distraction you can give into. But not right now, in 10 minutes. So for me, you know, I'm a professional author and researcher, so I'm writing every day, and all I want to do when I'm writing is to go check the news or go do some research or go look into this or that. And I know that those are all distractions in that period of time. When I said I'm going to do my writing and research, so what do I do? I tell myself, okay, I can give in to that distraction in 10 minutes. I set my phone for a timer for 10 minutes. I put the phone down, and now I have a choice to make. I can either get back to the task at hand or surf the urge. Now how do I do that? I close my eyes for a few minutes and I say a simple mantra. My mantra is, this is what it feels like to get better. This is what it feels like to get better. And just reminding myself that, you know, hard work is supposed to be hard. If it was easy, everyone would do it. And so reminding myself that it's okay that a task is difficult. It's okay that I'm experiencing these internal triggers and I start naming them to myself and I start reframing. And I teach you exactly how to do this in the book, how to reimagine the conversation you're having with yourself so that it serves you rather than hurts you. And here's what happens. Eventually, I decide to get back to the task at hand within those 10 minutes. And I forget about that urge ever existing because I allow myself time to ride the wave until it subsides. Because we think that these emotions are going to last forever. But of course, that's never the case. And if at the end of those 10 minutes, I do want to give in to that distraction, fine, I let myself. But nine times out of 10, that's not the case. And so what's going to happen over time? Is that the 10 minute rule, which pretty much anyone can do, right? We can delay distraction 10 minutes. Anybody can do that. What you're going to find is that the 10 minute rule becomes a 12 minute rule, becomes the 15 minute rule. And you're building your agency, your efficacy, to prove to yourself, hey, wait a minute. I. I'm not beholden to these pings, dings, and rings. I can decide when I will give into these distractions on my schedule, not someone else's. So that's just the tip of the iceberg. There are dozens of different techniques you can use. But let's move on to the next step of becoming indistractable. Making time for traction. Again, traction is any action that pulls you towards what you said you were going to do with your time and attention. Which means this is very important. You cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. Let me say that again. Write it down if you can. You cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. So if you have a calendar with lots of open white space, you cannot say you got distracted, because what did you get distracted from? Which means unless you're a child or you're retired, you have to schedule every minute of your day. I'm sorry. I know this is going to rub people the wrong way, but I need my time to be creative. But I need my time to be accessible to my team. What if my boss wants me? I can't possibly schedule. Yes, you can. All those excuses you hear in your head, and let me tell you, I've said them all to myself. I've heard them over the years from all kinds of people. And what we find is that by far the most effective time management technique you can possibly use after mastering those internal triggers is to schedule your days or someone will schedule them for you. And that means down to the minute based on your values. Now, this doesn't mean your day needs to be filled with work. I want you to schedule time to watch videos on YouTube. I want you to schedule time for video games. I want you to schedule time with your family, Whatever is important to you and your values put on your calendar. That is the only way that we know the difference between what is traction, what is on our calendar, and everything else becomes a distraction. So you can take those otherwise distracting things that you think are pulling you off course, and by putting them on your calendar, you're essentially taking distraction and turning it into traction. By making time for traction, what you're doing is you're planning the input. Our input is our time and our attention, not the output. We know that people who only plan output, these are people who follow to do lists. By the way, to do lists are one of the worst things you can do for your personal productivity because to do lists are nothing but registers of output. It's what we want to have done. But of course, without input, you can't get output. So it's much more important to only schedule the things that you. Sorry. To plan for that input of the things that must go into the output. And that is again, our time and our attention. I want you to stop measuring yourself by how many cute little boxes you checked off. That turns out to be a very ineffective technique for several reasons. Mostly because to do lists have no constraint. You can always add more to a to do list. And this is why we come home from work every day exhausted. And then we look at our to do list and we still haven't finished everything. And then we feel like losers. And what does that do for our psyche? If day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, you're constantly reminded, hey, you didn't do what you said you were going to do, loser. So a much better tactic is to time box that that task and not care about finishing it. What? Did you hear me correctly? Yes. Don't worry about finishing the task. Your only metric of success should be, did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction? That's it. It's not about finishing. It's not about checking those cute little boxes. It's about, did I do what I said I was going to do for as long As I said I would without distraction. And it turns out, here's the kicker. People who use this method, people who measure themselves simply by that one metric of 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 are more productive. They live out their intentions much, much better than the to do list devotees, because when they simply focus on one thing at a time, they have feedback to understand how long things take. This is called the planning fallacy. We know that people on average, take three times longer to finish a task than they estimate. Why does that happen? Because I say to myself, oh, I'm going to finish that project, I'm going to finish those slides, I'm going to finish that proposal. But then I start working on it for 10 minutes and then, oh, I've got to check that email and oh, my boss needs something and oh, I better do this and that. And it turns out that we never get a good assessment of how long things actually take. Whereas when we use a time box schedule and we only measure ourselves by did we do what we said we're going to do for as long as we said we would without distraction, we can look back on that time slot and say, okay, I worked on that for 30 minutes and I finished about two out of 20 slides. Okay, that means I need 10 more time boxes to finish the whole project. And this is how we get a feedback loop to understand how long things take us. So planning the time, not the input, is absolutely critical. Another thing we have to do is to spend less time communicating and more time concentrating. You see, so many of us are inundated with all these messages, all these things to respond to. And of course, that's part of everyone's job. This is called reactive work. Reacting to messages, reacting to slack notifications, reacting to requests, reacting to meetings. That's part of everyone's job. The problem is that we become habituated to only doing reactive work, right? How many of us, when we don't know what else to do, we check our inbox. Our inbox will tell us what to do. Well, that's a terrible strategy. What you've got to do is to put time in your schedule not only for the reactive work, but also for what's called reflective work. Reflective work is the kind of work that can only be done without distraction. Planning, strategizing, thinking, for God's sakes, can only be done without distractions. So I'm not saying your entire day has to be in a cave, isolated and not talking to anyone. No, no, no. But at least some part of your day has to be spent without distraction. So whether that's 15 minutes, maybe a half an hour, maybe an hour, if you can afford it, that work that can only be done without distraction has to be scheduled for. If you don't, I promise you, you're going to run real fast and in the wrong direction. You have to plan time for that reflective work. Now, part of the reason it's so difficult to find time for that reflective work time is that we are inundated, so many of us, with these external triggers, these requests from other people for our time. And we know that there is one industry where these external triggers are literally a matter of life and death. If I were to ask you what was the third leading cause of death in the United States of America before COVID the third leading cause of death? I'll give you the first two. Number one was heart disease. Number two was cancer. The third leading cause of death, if you would believe it, the third leading cause of death before COVID was prescription mistakes. Prescription mistakes. People in hospitals receiving the wrong medication or the wrong dosage of medication from healthcare practitioners. And by the way, this isn't a US only problem. This happens all over the world. And it's something that is a 100% preventable human error. This happens when nurses are dosing out medication and then one of their colleagues taps them on the shoulder and asks them a question, and then they get distracted and they make mistakes. Now, I know very few of you are in the healthcare profession, but I'm telling you this to illustrate a point that what we found with these nurses is that they didn't realize they were making mistakes until it was too late. It wasn't until they gave someone the wrong medication, and then they would suffer, and then that patient would suffer horrible consequences. So I asked you to ask yourself, how many consequences do you not realize are degrading your work performance as a result of distraction? You may not even realize how much better your work performance could be if you worked without distraction. So, thankfully, this story has a very happy ending. It turns out that nurses at UCSF decided to take on this problem of distraction with nurses when they were dosing out medication. And. And they found a solution that reduced prescription mistakes by 88%. They almost eliminated this problem completely. And the solution was not some fancy retraining program. It wasn't some new multimillion dollar technology. The solution was plastic vests. These cheap plastic vests that nurses wore when they were doing their Drug rounds when they were distributing medication that almost eliminated this problem completely. Now, how could we apply this amazing lesson to our own work life? I know very few of you are nurses, so why am I telling you this? Well, what if we applied something similar to our workspaces? What if we use a screen sign, which is in every copy of my book, There's a piece of cardstock that you can tear out or you can download it from my website, and we put this on our computer monitors to tell our colleagues, hey, for a certain number of hours per day, I need to work without distraction in order to do my best work. I know some of you are saying, yeah, but that's why I put on headphones. Let me tell you, when you put on headphones, people think you're watching some video or listening to a podcast. We need to be explicit about this message that we're sending, that it's all right to work without distraction, that we can't do our best work if we're constantly bombarded with requests every 30 seconds. Now, for some of you, I know you're working from home. No problem in this case, where the distraction is not your boss or your colleagues. Sometimes it's your kids. And so what do we do when we're working from home? So this is a picture of my wife, Julie, and she is wearing what we call in our household the concentration crown. And when my daughter was only six years old, we got this concentration crown. And we told her, when mommy is wearing the concentration crown, that means that she can't be interrupted for the next 30 minutes. The only case when you can interrupt is if you're bleeding. So if you're not bleeding, go find some toy to play with. Go do something else. Because when mommy is wearing the concentration crown, she can't be interrupted. This is something we got off Amazon for. I don't know. I. I think it was like, $5, $6. Online, you can use any silly hat, because, frankly, our kids don't know when we're doing something important that we can't be interrupted online or when it's something they can't interrupt us. This works really, really well with kids. It also works really well with husbands as well. You want to send that explicit message that interrupts the interruption. Another thing we can do to hack back those external triggers is to use the functionality on everyone's device. I know it's on Android devices, it's on iPhones, and this is called do not disturb while driving. A lot of people worry that, hey, what if somebody needs to Reach me. And I'm having my reflective work time. What if I've time blocked time to do a project, but somebody might need me urgently? No problem. You hit one button called do not disturb while driving. And if someone texts or calls you during that time, they will get a message that says, I can't talk right now, but if this is urgent, text me back the word urgent and then the message will come through. I've been using this feature for what, four years now? And I've never had anyone interrupt me because they know, okay, he'll get back to me very soon, right? The next thing you can do is to clear off all that digital clutter. How many of us have home screens that look like this? This is what my home screen used to look like. All these files. We don't have to live this way. We can clear all that away. I took all those files, I put them into one folder called everything. And of course, our search functionality on our machines is so good today, we can always find that file later. So we know that visual clutter, whether it's in physical space or on our desktops, contributes to distraction our devices. How many of us are inundated with all these notifications? Did you know that 2/3 of people with a smartphone. 2/3 of people with a smartphone never adjust their notification settings? Can we honestly say that we're addicted to our devices, that it's hijacking our brains, that it's stealing our focus, when we haven't even taken five minutes to change these notification settings, and so that only the most important messages get through? What we have to do is to hack back these. These external triggers by asking ourselves, is this trigger serving me, or am I serving it? And removing those external triggers that are not serving us. For example, an external trigger that tells you, hey, it's time for that meeting, or it's time to go exercise. That's great. It's not a bad thing. Technology is wonderful when it tells us to do the things that we ourselves want to do. But when I was with my daughter and we were having some quality time together, and I checked my phone because of some ping, ding or ring, well, now I was serving the external trigger. It wasn't serving me. The next thing we want to do is to leave those distracting devices outside of meetings, how many of us attend what we call zombie meetings, where we go to meet with other people, whether it's physically or virtually. And we can tell the bodies are there, but the brains are something else because everyone's on their device. So if we are going to meet physically, in person.

We.

We have to be there both in body and mind, not just in the corporate workplace, but also at home. Declare no phone zones. For example, in my family, what really works for us is at the dining room table, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That is a no phone zone. That's where we want to reconnect with each other. We know that children who have meals with their parents have fewer behavioral issues. They have fewer mental health issues, fewer eating issues like bulimia and anorexia. You really want to make sure you have that time declared as a no phone zone, both in the family space as well as in the workspace, so that we're fully present with each other. Finally, the last step to becoming indistractable is to prevent distraction with pacts. A pact is a pre commitment. The first recorded case of one of these pre commitments comes to us from the story of Ulysses in the Odyssey. Now, Ulysses is this Greek hero. 2500 years ago, he sails his ship past the Sirens island. Now, the sirens are these magical creatures who sing this song that any sailor hears and will decide to crash his ship onto the shore of the Sirens island and dies. Now, Ulysses knows about this threat, and so he makes a pre commitment he plans in advance. He tells his crew to put beeswax in their ears so they can't hear the siren song. And he instructs his crew to bind him to the mast of the ship. And he tells them, no matter what I do, no matter what I say, do not let me go. And you know what? It works. He's able to sail his ship right past the Sirens island, returning his crew and his ship safely home. So why am I telling you this story? Well, in this story, you are Ulysses. There's lots of distracting stuff out there. And of course, that could be you there on the shore of the Sirens island as well. And if you don't plan ahead, if you don't make one of these pre commitments, how do we make a pre commitment? We don't need to stuff beeswax in our ears. We don't need to bind ourselves to the mass of a ship. But we can take steps today to prevent getting distracted tomorrow. For example, we can use tech to block out distracting tech. So two tools I use every single day. On the right hand side, you'll see this app for for your desktop called cold turkey. Totally free, and it will block out certain websites anytime you set. So you know what? As the last line of defense, as the firewall against distraction, when I have my working hours. I don't want to check email when I'm supposed to be writing. I don't want to go look at the news or do whatever. So I put those distracting websites in this free technology that will block those websites during certain hours. Another wonderful app that I use, it's so simple. My daughter uses it all the time as well. It's called the Forest app. Forest works like this. You dial in how much focused work time you want. You hit a button, it plants that cute little virtual tree. You see that virtual tree on the left hand side. And if you pick up your phone and do anything with it during that period of time, that cute little virtual tree gets cut down. And you don't want to be a virtual tree murderer. So it's enough of a reminder to say, nope, that's not what I want to do right now. I want to stay focused on the task at hand. You can also get a Focus friend. One of the most underrated techniques is to call a buddy and say, hey, look, I've got this big project to work on. I want to make sure that I stay focused on it. Hey, let's, let's co work. Let's sit side by side or at a coffee shop or in the company canteen and make sure that we stay on task. If you're working from home, no problem. Technology to the rescue. There's a website called focusmate.com, i loved it so much I became an investor. Here's how it works. You find a time that you want to do focused work for. For me, it's early in the morning. I sometimes have trouble getting started, but I know, hey, there's somebody waiting for me at 8:30 who's dependent on me as their focus mate. And here on the right hand side, you can see a screenshot. This was a medical school student and he was studying anatomy. I was working on this presentation. We said, hello. Okay, go. And for the next 45 minutes, we worked without distraction. It's amazing how entering into that pre commitment with another person is an amazing way to help you stay on track. Now the idea here is to reduce distractions with packs by using tech to block out tech. There's all kinds of other pre commitments we can make, but be careful, okay? There's two words of warning here. Number one, this is the last line of defense. This is the firewall against distraction. It will not work. These packs do not work if you don't first do the other three steps we discussed of mastering internal triggers, making time for traction, and hacking back external Triggers do those three things first and then make these pre commitments. The other word of warning has to do with the fact that some people, when they fall off the wagon on the path to becoming indistractable, some people have a really tough time getting back on track. Now who are those people? Those people tend to be people who do not offer themselves self compassion. We know that people who are self compassionate are much more likely to reach their long term goals. So how do you cultivate self compassion? It's actually quite simple. The way to cultivate self compassion is to talk to yourself the way you would talk to a good friend. So if I had told you about what happened with my daughter, that I was embarrassed, that I was distracted when I blew this perfectly wonderful moment with my daughter, would you tell me that I'm a horrible father, that I'm a terrible human being? Not. If you were my good friend, you wouldn't say those things. And yet that's the kind of stuff I would tell myself all the time. And you know what? It wasn't helpful and it wasn't true. And here's what else isn't true. This idea that technology is hijacking our brains, that it's addicting everyone, that there's nothing we can do about it. That is not helpful and not true. There is so much we can do. We can master those internal triggers, we can make time for traction, we can hack back the external triggers and we can prevent distraction with packs. So what I want to leave you with is that there's so much we can do here. Fortunately, we don't have enough time to get into everything that's in the book. This is just a small sliver. We didn't talk about how to raise indistractable kids. We didn't talk about how to build an indistractable workplace. Very, very important we get into some of that in the Q and A. I'm happy to do that. But the message I want to leave with you today is that we can do this. We can get the best of our technologies without letting it get the best of us. We can all become indistractable. And with that, thank you so much. I would love to ask you for a very quick favor before we jump into the Q and A. On your screen you'll see a URL and a QR code. If you have your phone handy, you can take a picture of that URL and hopefully it'll take you to a website where or you can just type that URL. Opinion2us opinion2us. It'll just take you to a quick Google form for a quick survey. It's only five questions. Would love to know what you thought of the presentation. I read every single piece of feedback, so if you could just tell me what you thought, I'd certainly appreciate it. And the reward for that, if you'd be so kind, is that if you fill out that quick survey, you'll be given a link to my slideshare page where you can have all the slides you just saw. Of course, feel free to share that with whoever you like. And if we don't for some reason get to your questions, feel free to. Feel free to Visit my website, nearandfar.com, it's there at the bottom of the slide, nearandfar.com but near spelled like my first name. There's a, there's a contact link there. Please feel free to send me any questions if we don't have time to answer yours today. And with that, let's open it up to questions.

Thanks so much, Nir. This was fascinating. I took so many notes. I have so many questions.

Yes, let's dive in.

But, um, just starting off, you know, this is just an interesting area, area of work. How, what led you to this field of research?

So for me it was a personal problem. I write books not because I know the answer, but because I need the answer. And so when I was struggling with distraction for myself, the, the knee jerk reaction was, well, it's technology's fault. Stop using technology. Because that's frankly what a lot of books tell you today, right? They tell you that our, our attention is being stolen, that our brain is being hijacked. Just stop using the technology. Well, that's really easy for a tenured professor to say, but I need to use technology. We all need to use technology to keep our jobs. So how do you just say stop using technology? That's silly. That's not a very practical solution or you're going to get fired. So, and frankly, you know, even when I did, one of the things I did before I embarked on this research was I got myself a flip phone from Alibaba, right? So one of these like $12 phones. And all it did was send calls and text messages and no apps on it whatsoever. And I still got distracted, right? I would still find, oh, I need to check out that book or I need to clean my desk or let me take out the garbage. I kept getting distracted because I realized it wasn't just the technology, it was that I didn't deal with the real issue. The Real core of distraction, which is the fact that I didn't know how to deal with these internal triggers and I didn't have these other practices in place. So it was only when I was so frustrated with all the other books out there that tell you how to manage your time and attention, that really weren't working for me that I needed to start with first principles and go into the psychology research and understand what works and what doesn't.

That's fascinating. I mean, I think this is a problem that many of us face. And like, honestly, that, that one sentence like time management is pain management is super interesting because when I got going through fitness or something, we're like, okay, we're trying to do this because it's going to help me get better. But I. I've never thought about connecting that to attention and to traction. So one of the things that I struggle, I think many of us struggle with is like, we come out with these best intentions. Like we plan our day or we plan our week and, you know, we start on a Monday, we'll be super into it and be very energized. But then slowly through the week, we'll kind of taper off. How do you. Does that happen to you? And then how do you kind of stay motivated and committed?

Yeah. So the idea of a time box calendar is that you don't set it and forget it. You're changing it. Not in the day, never in the day. You're changing that time box schedule to make it easier to follow over time. That's the idea behind this timebox calendar. So what you're going to do at the beginning of every week, for me, it's Sunday nights, 8pm I have that in my schedule. I sit down and I look at the schedule for the week that passed. And then I try and figure out how do I make the week that is coming easier to follow. And that's when you can change things around. So if you say, you know what, I'm much better doing my reflective work early in the morning versus in the afternoon, no problem, you can change that around. Maybe I need time for a walk in the middle of the day. Maybe I need to take an early lunch or more time with my family, or less time with doing email, whatever the case might be. I want you to sit down and ask yourself, how can the person you want to become spend their time? That's the key question. You're turning your values into time. So you can change your schedule from day to day and week to week. That's totally fine. But once you set that schedule for the day, now you have to follow it, right? You have to stick with what you said you were going to do because anything that is not that thing becomes distraction. So if you see, you know what, I'm losing energy, I'm losing steam towards the end of the day. Maybe that means you need to plan some more breaks in the future or you need to adjust your tasks accordingly. That's totally fine as long as you don't adjust them in the day.

Yeah, that's a really good, that's a really, that's a really good point. And then what about like, well, the other thing is, like, I think a lot about is, you know, when do I get my bursts of creativity or when do I get my bursts of inspiration? Like, you know, in many of our jobs we have to do a lot of problem solving and like pushing ambiguous problems forward. And I struggle with how I say, okay, this is my whiteboarding or whatever it is. So often it's in the shower or when you're running or something. So how do you think about creating avenues for creativity?

Yeah, let me give you a very, very high tech solution. Okay, this is it. The idea here is that I always have this with me, right? Is I have a piece of paper and a little pen at my desk at all times. The idea here is that when I have an idea or a worry, this happens much more for me at least, many more worries than creative ideas. What used to happen is every little spark of creativity, every worry, every concern, oh, let me just go take care of that real quick. And then of course, that would totally pull you away from executing your great ideas. The hard part about doing great work is not coming up with great ideas. Great ideas are cheap as hell. Everybody has great ideas. Nobody's that special. We all have great ideas. It's doing them. And doing them requires you to find focus. It requires you to work without distraction. So you are giving up so much every time. Like me, I used to do, oh, okay, I have to take care of that one thing. Let me go take care of that for 30 minutes. And now I didn't even finish the task I was working on. I didn't give that appropriate time. Instead, what I do now is every time I have a creative idea or I have a worry, I jot it down, okay? I put down a few words and then I have time in my calendar to worry. I literally have time in my schedule for worry time. Here's what's amazing about that. Number one, my brain can refocus on the task at hand, because opposed to me saying, oh, I might forget, I might forget, I might forget, I won't forget. It's right here. And knowing that I will have time later on to deal with it lets my brain relax and truly focus on what I'm working on right now. The other great part about that is that nine times out of 10, when I sit down for my worry time or my whiteboard time, I think about it and say, actually, that wasn't even that important. Right? Like, what was I worried about? That's not that important. Right. So the thing you think about in the moment, that, oh, my God, it's such a great idea, or, oh, my God, that's an important concern. If you give it some time to marinate, what you oftentimes find is there's something else that's more important that takes the time. So by putting it on a quick piece of paper, just three words, don't act on it. Don't betray yourself and get distracted at the moment. You put that time in your schedule for whiteboarding time and worry time. And a lot of people say, oh, but I need to be creative. I need to be spontaneous. That's your amateur voice talking professionals. What pros do, they sit down and do the work. They are able to sit down and actually create. And if you think, okay, I need to be creative whenever I feel like it, that's just not true. That model tends to really not work for people. Unless your whole day is spent that way. Right. Like, some people are just artistes all day. But in the modern working world, you've got meetings, you've got emails, you've got kids, you've got tasks. It's just not feasible. But if you plan time for, hey, here's my hour and a half or whatever it is for that creative work time, that's when you really turn pro, is that you're able to sit down, be like, okay, here's my list of ideas. Here's the things I need to think about. Okay, now's the time for it.

Yeah, that's actually. That's really interesting. And like, when you spend your day like this, you know, your days are time boxed. You know, every kind of hour is accounted for. How do you feel at the end of the day when you get to kind of that every single day?

Yeah. Yeah. So very few people these days have experienced what leisure actually feels like, Especially high performers, like people who work at Google. Very few of you have actually have any clue what leisure is like. Here's why. Because if you use the to do list mentality. If you use that methodology of I've got these things that I gotta get done. Even when you give yourself time to breathe, you go out with your friends, you sit down with your kids, you're having a nice meal, you're still thinking about all that stuff you haven't done.

Yeah, right, I know it.

I used to be there too. So even when you're trying to have fun, when you're trying to relax, you can't because you're thinking about all the stuff left undone. As opposed to a person who uses a time box calendar has on their schedule. Time to play with my kids, time to exercise, time to meditate. And that's all you can do. Hey, time to play video games. Great. Do it. Time to go watch YouTube videos. Awesome. And now you can do those things without guilt because that now becomes traction. Anything else, even doing work becomes distraction.

Yeah, that's actually a really good point because you're always kind of not present otherwise to your initial anecdote. Okay, so I know we have a bunch of questions from the audience as well, so I'd love to turn over and see. So the first is from Sandeep Giri. In your research, how does one train differently for concentration versus contemplation versus open non judgmental awareness? Thanks for the question, Sandeep.

Yeah, I'm not, I'm not. I'll give it my best shot. My guess is with, with training, right? That like anything, if you want to get better at something, you practice it. The problem is that you know that things worth having in life take effort, take work and take focus. Right? If you want to have a wonderful relationship with somebody, you can't just say, oh, I'm going to take you to a fancy dinner and we're going to be in love. No, you got to put in the day to day relationship to work to have a close relationship. If you want to start a great business, if you want to be, have a wonderful career, you have to put in the diligent work day after day after day, right? If you want to get rich, you have to accrue money over a long period of time. There's no, you know, get rich quick scheme that works. We have to do that effort. So whether it's anything that's difficult, that's worth having in life, we have to put in that diligent work over time. One of my life mantras is consistency over intensity. That many people think that there's like one quick way, just let me take a pill Let me flip a switch and boom, I'll have the thing I want, I'll feel the way I want to feel. But that's pretty fleeting, right? The real things worth having in life require consistency over intensity. So whatever type of work style you want to cultivate, whether it's a high degree of focus and attentionality, that comes from practice. But we can only get in that practice when we make the time to do it without distraction.

Thank you. Next, we have a question from Sean. In tech, we need to task switch a lot. What should we do if our jobs require us to constantly switch in between tasks or are very reactive, for example, needing to be responsible, responsive to clients. Thanks, Sean.

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So I see this a lot in tech. Now we know. Just let's go to the other side. When it comes to reflective work, very few jobs require 100% reactive or reflective work. Everybody's job has some mix of the two. Sometimes that's not the case. Like for an engineer, for example, almost their entire day is spent doing reflective work. And we know that the number one source of bugs in code is distraction, right? It's somebody saying, oh, I need that TPS report. Meanwhile, the engineer was deep in thought and now they've, they've messed it up. They have difficulty getting back to where they were. So the one of the best things you can do as a manager is frickin leave your employees alone. Give them time to work without distraction. It's amazing. The productivity killer of stupid meetings that didn't need to be called, dumb emails that do nothing but circulate superfluous information. It's. And we talk about all this in, in my book, exactly how to hack back email, hack back meetings, there's a lot you can do there. But when it comes to how do you find that time for reflective work, one of the best things you can do is to do a schedule sync. A schedule sync is part of a practice that I call managing your manager or managing up now. How does this work? One of the worst pieces of productivity advice that we hear all the time is if you want to be more productive, you have to learn how to say no, right? How many times have we heard that? Learn how to say no better. What kind of stupid advice is that? You're going to tell your boss, you're going to tell your manager, the person who pays your bills, you're going to tell that person, no, thanks, no, I'm not going to do it. You're going to get fired. That's terrible advice. What you want to do instead is print out that time box calendar. We talked about timeboxing earlier during the presentation. One of the benefits is that now you have a physical artifact. You can literally print out out your schedule for the week ahead. You book a 10 minute meeting with your boss. 10 minutes, it's all you need. Say, hey boss, I just want to show you something. Here's my schedule. See here? Here's my Monday through Friday for how I'm going to spend my time at work this week. Here's that meeting you asked me to attend. Here's I'm giving two hours to work on this project without distraction. Here's where I'm going to go to XYZ meeting, whatever the case, here's my week ahead. Okay, now you see this other piece of paper here? On this other piece of paper I wrote down all the things you've asked me to do that I'm having trouble prioritizing. Can you help me prioritize? That is your boss's most important job. Your manager or supervisor's most important job is to prioritize. And so when you show them your timebox calendar, they will worship the ground you walk on because they're wondering what the heck you're doing all day. So by showing them, hey, here's what I'm doing. Help me reprioritize this stuff. You asked me to do that. I'm having trouble prioritizing. You're not saying no, you're saying help me prioritize. And so here's what's invariably going to happen. They're going to say, oh, you know that meeting, you really don't need to go to that meeting. What you really need to work on, what's way more important is that thing on this piece of paper over here. That's way more important. Let's swap those out. So you're giving your manager exposure to how you spend your time. And this, to answer the person person's question just now about constant interruptions, you're showing them when you are working without distraction. So you say okay here from 9 to 11, that's when I'm indistractable. See, okay, it's in my schedule. We talked about this, right? That's when I can't be interrupted. If that's a problem, let me know. I'll move it around. So by giving them transparency into your schedule, that's, that's a huge resource. Another thing you can do, by the way, if you work in the kind of job where you feel like you need to be responsive, the first Thing I would do is to ask yourself, is that real, or is it your fear that you will be needed? Right. The vast majority of people I work with, they think, oh, I need to constantly be on call. It's just an excuse their brain is making up from that prevents them from doing the hard work they know they need to do. What if somebody needs me? What if an employee? What if a customer? What if a client? They might need me. But when they actually sit down and work without distraction, they realize it's just a feeling. It's not objective reality. It's completely subjected. They just think they need they. That people need them all the time, and they don't. But let's say you're in a kind of industry where you do constantly need to check, no problem. Put in 30 minutes of focus work time, and then 15 minutes or 30 minutes or whatever amount of time for reflective or for reactive work time, that's totally fine. You can structure your calendar whatever way you want. The idea here, though, is to work that schedule to decide in advance how you will spend your time, because if you don't, other people will design decide how you spend your time for you.

Yeah, I'm a manager, and I would love that conversation from everyone.

As a manager, by the way, it's kind of difficult because if you tell employees to do this, they feel like you're micromanaging them. So this is really an empowerment strategy to manage your managers. Right. You could do this with your manager as well. And, you know, of course, if people read this and see it's working for other folks, then hopefully this becomes an institutional practice.

No, absolutely. Next question from Karim. Can you share tips on how to tweak these techniques so kids can use them? Great question. Thanks, Karim.

Yeah, absolutely. So there's a whole section in the book, and I could do a whole another hour presentation just on how to raise indistractable kids. But I'll give you a few quick tips. The best thing you can do if you want to raise indistractable kids is to be an indistractable parent. We cannot tell our kids, oh, stop. You know, get off Fortnite and stop doing this and that when meanwhile, we're checking email or whatever on our phones. Right. So the best thing you can do is to set a good example for your kids. You. You can't raise indistractable kids unless you're an indistractable parent and tell your kids you're struggling. Right. That's totally fine. Right. These tools are made to be engaging. It's no wonder we struggle to put them away. That's totally fine. Put, you know, let them know that you're struggling with it as well. And then we can simply work around the very same four steps. So understanding what those internal triggers are, there's a, there's a much more in depth conversation around kids and the internal triggers. The internal triggers that kids face are different from what adults face. Right? So that's a whole. I encourage you to, to check out that section of my book around the internal triggers that kids are suffering from. There's, there's what's called the needs displacement hypothesis that when kids or adults aren't getting what they need offline in the real world, they look for those psychological vitamins, if you will, those psychological nutrients online. So if you're not feeling competency, autonomy and relatedness, these three psychological nutrients in the real world, you're looking for them online. So that's a big part of why kids overuse technology is that school today is, is in many, for many kids, in many cases a prison. And so they're looking for competency, autonomy and relatedness online. But that's another subject. Number one, internal triggers. Help your kids have these tactics to deal with these internal triggers in a healthy way. The next way is to schedule the same way we would for ourselves. Turning your values into time. Now, for kids, if they're in school, most of the day is already scheduled. But after school, one of the best things you can do for your kid is to schedule time for the things that you think are distractions, right? So scheduling time for video games, put it on their schedule. How much time do you think is for you? How much time, given all the other stuff you need to do, homework, chores, playing with friends, how much time works for you? This is a conversation I had with my daughter when she was just six years old. And now she has that time in her schedule she doesn't have to think about, oh, when do I get time to go on YouTube? When do I get time to do these things? It's in her schedule. She knows exactly. She doesn't have to think about it all day. Hacking back the external triggers. One of the best things you can do for your kids is removing any external trigger that, that interrupts sleep in the bedroom. So kids should not have anything that beeps, buzzes or boops in the bedroom. Very, very important. Quick tip. There's a lot of other things you can do as well. And then finally, preventing distraction with pact. So I showed that app forest that helps you. You set the time that you want to do focus work for. And then there's that cute little virtual tree. My daughter loves it. Every time she has to do homework, she uses that tool. I use it as well. And that's a wonderful way to make a pact to make sure that you stay on track. So it's really around teaching your kids these very four same four strategies to becoming indistractable them.

That's fine. The age of six, that's great. Like I feel, you know, we often think that oh, they're too young, they're too young. But the fact that you can stop very early.

Absolutely. And remember, you know, the goal of parenting is not to raise a child, it's to raise a future adult. So this is the skill of the century. I mean there's every. It doesn't matter what knowledge is in a book if you don't have the focus and attention to read the book. So we've got to teach our kids how to become indistractable so that they can pay attention long enough to absorb these amazing lessons to that the world has to teach them. So it's, it's absolutely critical we teach them how to do this. And if they, they don't learn now, they're going to have trouble in middle school and high school and of course in college when they're outside of the home, it's going to come back to bite them. So we really have to teach them how to do this.

Totally. I think you have time for one more. Hi Nir, thanks for the talk from Alan. You mentioned that to do lists were a negative influence on productivity. Could you elaborate? Thanks, Alan.

Sure. There's a few reasons why to do lists are dangerous for your personal productivity. Number one is that there's no constraint. Right. We talked about it a little bit early in the presentation. You can always add more to that to do list where as opposed to a timebox calendar, you only have 24 hours in a day. So it's a force constraint. When you have a timebox calendar, it forces you to make trade offs. The problem that people have is that they want to do everything all at once. Well, you can't. You have to make trade offs based on your values. And so that's a much healthier system. A time box versus a to do list that you'll never be able to finish everything. The other thing that's so bad about to do lists is that it doesn't account for the input. I can, you know, write a novel, start a business, you know, fall in love like I can write to do lists all day long, but that's output. There's no register of input. That register of input, again for knowledge workers is time and attention. And so that has to be on your schedule. And then finally, the last point we talked about a little bit, I think, in an earlier question around how when you use a to do list methodology, you have no sense of leisure because you're always thinking about the things left undone as opposed to a timebox calendar. When you say, oh, what I'm supposed to be doing right now is exactly what's on my calendar. I'm supposed to be enjoying time with my family. I can do so without guilt. So those are a few reasons why timeboxing beats to do list hands down.

Thank you. Oh wow. This, this hour has just, just flown by, really so nir. I think on behalf of everyone at Talks at Google, thank you for your time and invaluable insights during this fireside chat. Your research is so insightful and I've got like a page and a half of notes and I know that I and many others on the call will be trying these strategies ourselves at home and at work. So thank you again for your time and we're excited to read Indistractable.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it. And of course, if anybody has any questions I didn't get to today, please Visit near and far.com thank you.