February 23, 2024 • 49 mins
In this episode, Nir Eyal dives deep into how we can learn to master internal triggers and regain Control of your attention. Nir explains how the underlying motivation behind every action is the desire to escape discomfort. Learning to distinguish between traction and distraction is a powerful first step in overcoming the universal struggle of staying focused in a world full of distractions. You’ll find many new insights and discover several practical strategies to keep your attention on where it matters in this conversation!
In this episode, you will be able to:
- Master time management and boost productivity with proven strategies
- Learn to identify and master internal triggers for improved focus and concentration
- Discover the importance of intentional planning for achieving success in all areas of your life
- Overcome distractions and cultivate a proactive mindset for enhanced performance
- Implement effective strategies for staying focused and on track daily, leading to greater accomplishments and satisfaction
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Do you ever feel like life is just one problem
after another. You finally feel like maybe there's a break,
and then bam, another problem. This is how it is
for many of us. But there is a better way
to respond, a way of responding that brings greater ease
into your life and returns some of the energy that
the problems drained from you. We are hosting a free
(00:20):
live masterclass on Sunday, March third, called Learn the Keystone
Habit to unlock energy and ease in your life. In it,
I will teach you how to tap into resources already
within you so that life feels less like a never
ending fight and more like an ever evolving dance. You
will learn the number one source of unhappiness that drains
(00:41):
your energy and keeps you feeling stuck, and a simple
mindset shift you can make right away so that life
doesn't feel like such a constant struggle. This will be
a live event and you'll have a chance to interact
with me and each other. I've really grown to love
these community events where we get to meet each other
and deepen our connections, and I hope that you can
become part of that. Go to oneufeed dot net slash
(01:04):
live to learn more and register for this free event. Again,
that's one you feed dot net slash live. I hope
to see you there.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Time management is pain management. Everything we do is about
a desire to escape discomfort.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Welcome to the one you feed throughout time. Great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
think ring true, and yet for many of us, our
thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
(01:51):
have instead of what we do. We think things that
hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. We
(02:25):
hope you'll enjoy this episode from the archive. Thanks for
joining us. Our guest on this episode is near Al,
author and previous lecture at Stanford Graduate School of Business
and Hasso Platner Institute of Design. His writing on technology, psychology,
and business appears in the Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic,
Psychology Today, and others. His new book is Indistractable, How
(02:49):
to Control Your attention and Choose your Life.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Hi, Near, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 4 (02:53):
Thanks great to be here.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
I am excited to have you on. We're going to
talk about your book, Indistractable, How to Control your Tension
and Choose your Life here in a moment. But let's
start the way we always do, with a parable. There
is a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says,
in life, there are two wolves inside of us that
are always a battle. One is a good wolf, which
represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the
(03:18):
other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed
and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he
thinks about it for a second. He looks up at
his grandfather. He's his grandfather. Which one wins? And the
grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to
start off by asking you what that parable means to
you in your life and in the work that you do.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
I think the parable is really about the power of habits,
that we are a sum of our behaviors. I don't
believe that people have fixed personalities. I don't believe that
there's an identity that we are stuck with from birth.
That we are able to in fact change ourselves anyway
we wish, and we are a sum product of our behaviors.
(04:00):
We can change those behaviors if we are diligent about
understanding why we do what we do and then take
the steps to alter our path so that we can
be the kind of people we want to be. And
that's to me, what feeding one wolf or the other
is all about. It's about which behaviors do you repeat
versus which behaviors do you starve?
Speaker 1 (04:21):
As a wonderful way to start off and a good
summary for why we do what we do here on
this show. So your book is about being indistractable, how
to control our attention and choose our lives. And I
love this idea that where our attention goes really controls,
to a large extent, the quality of our life. What
(04:43):
we pay attention to really directs our experience. And so
I've got a spiritual habits course that I lead, and
one of the key principles we talk about in the
very beginning is the idea of what's my intention, and
then what am I doing with my attention? And if
you've got those two things sort of locked in, you
can do so much.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
That's absolutely right. I mean, there's a reason we call
it paying attention. There is a value there, there's a cost,
and for most of us, we just give it away, right,
And how crazy is that? Right? If we think about
our stuff, our physical possessions. We put our you know,
we put our money behind vaults inside banks, we put
security systems in our homes, alarms in our cars to
(05:23):
protect our stuff. But when it comes to the one
thing that everyone on earth has the same amount of
our time, Well, I don't care if you're Warren Buffett
or Bill Gates or anyone. You have the same twenty
four hours every day. And yet so many of us, unfortunately,
just give it away anybody.
Speaker 4 (05:41):
Who wants it.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Whatever's in the news, whatever happened on Twitter, whatever our kids,
our spouse, our boss, whoever wants it, Come on.
Speaker 4 (05:48):
Over, take as much as you want.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
And I think what's going to happen, especially in this
day and age, where you know, distraction is so easy
to find because it's so accessible in our pockets at
all times, with ourselves, phones, and other technologies that if
you are looking for a distraction, you will certainly find it.
And so I think what's going to happen, It's already happening.
Is a real bifurcation between people who say to themselves, look,
(06:10):
my time, my attention, my life is mine, and I
will choose how I allocate my time and attention, or
the people who say, okay, you know whatever, I'll give
it away to whoever wants it. And I think the
people who can proudly proclaim that no, they are going
to be in control of their time and attention and
their life, those are the people who'll be able to say,
I am indistractable. And that's what this book and hopefully
(06:33):
this movement is really all about. It's about creating this
identity of people who say I am indistractable. I decide
how I will spend my time and attention in my life.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
And that is the most important thing I often say
with coaching clients. You know, the fundamental life skill is
to be able to decide what's important and then give
it your attention and your devotion. So you start off
by saying that one of the things that we really
need to realize is that we tend to blame our
distractability on the things that distract us. And you know,
(07:07):
we live in a world, as you said, it's very
easy to be distracted. It's never been easier to be distracted.
But you say that, you know where most people are
blaming the devices, the technology, all of that, that the
root cause of this is a lot deeper than that.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Absolutely, yeah, that's absolutely right. So you know, there's two
types of approaches that I think most people take. We
have what we call the blamers and the shamers. The
blamers say, oh, you see, I got distracted because of
my iPhone, because of the email, because of what's happening
in the news, because of oh I hear this all
the time. This is my favorite the modern world these days.
Speaker 4 (07:41):
Right, Well, here's the thing.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
Blaming those kind of things outside of yourself is futile.
You can't change that stuff. Right, These technologies aren't going away,
and frankly, we don't want them to. These are wonderful technologies, right,
We use these companies make so much money because we
like to use these products and services.
Speaker 4 (07:58):
So it's not going away.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
And frankly, there's this myth of you know, the good
old days, that somehow there was a day when the
world was without trouble and wasn't distracting. And that's ridiculous.
I mean, twenty five hundred years before the iPhone complained
about how distracting the world was, and the Greek he
called it acrasia, the tendency that we have to do
things against our better interest twenty five hundred years ago.
So this is clearly not a new problem. So being
(08:22):
a blamer isn't very useful, It doesn't accomplish much. Being
a shamer is the other extreme. A shamer, they don't
blame things outside of themselves. They shame themselves. So a
lot of people do this, right, They have a self
image that says, oh, you see, I'm so lazy. Here
I go again getting distracted. That's so like me, I
(08:43):
can't I have a short attention span. They shame themselves.
And ironically, what we find is that shame is a
negative emotion. Shame feels bad, And it turns out that
the root cause of distraction is in fact unco comfortable
sensations that when we really look at why people do
(09:04):
things against their better interest. To answer Plato's twenty five
hundred year old question of why we do things we
know we shouldn't do, or don't do the things we
know we should. It's not a character flaw. It's that
we just don't know how to regulate our emotions. You see,
time management is pain management. That everything we do is
about a desire to escape discomfort. That most people have
(09:28):
this notion that motivation is about the pursuit of pleasure
and the avoidance of pain. Freud called this the pleasure principle.
But in fact it's not true. Like a lot of
things with Freud, it's not true that, in fact, everything
we do is not about the pursuit of pleasure and
the avoidance of pain. Neurologically speaking, it's only about the
desire to escape discomfort. Everything you do, whether it's physiologically,
(09:50):
if you feel cold, the brain says, ooh, this is uncomfortable.
Put on a coat. If you feel hunger payings, the
brain says, this doesn't feel good, you should eat something.
So everything we do physiologically is about the desire to
escape discomfort, and the same holds true for our psychological sensations.
So if we are feeling lonely, we check Facebook. If
we're uncertain. We google if we're bored, We watch the news,
(10:13):
We check stock prices, sports scores, pinterest, Twitter, or read it.
All of these tools cater to these uncomfortable sensations. So
we have to address this fact that everything we do
is about the desire to escape discomfort.
Speaker 4 (10:27):
So it's about which wolf you feed? Right?
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Do you feed this wolf by escaping that discomfort? Do
you look for psychological escape from reality so that you
don't have to deal with whatever it is is around
you with too much booze, too much news, too much Facebook,
too much football, too much whatever to take your mind
off of those uncomfortable sensations. Or do you build the
(10:52):
habit of harnessing those internal triggers to lead you towards
traction rather than distraction. And so this is why we
don't want to be blamers. We don't want to be shamers.
We want to be what's called claimers. Claimers acknowledge that
you cannot control your emotions. Okay, your urges are not
(11:14):
in your control. Many people don't understand this fact that
controlling your emotion is like trying to hold in a
sneeze or a cough. You cannot stop that urge. You
can only act in response to it. So when you
feel the urge to sneeze, do you sneeze all over
everyone and get them sick. No, you take out a
handkerchief and you sneeze into a tissue, as opposed to
(11:36):
getting everyone else sick. And so the same thing happens
with our emotional sensations. How do we respond to those
internal triggers is incredibly important, and so you know, the
word responsibility is about how we respond to these these
uncomfortable sensations, and so that's the really the first step
to becoming indestractable.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
I don't want to go down this rabbit hole too far,
but I read the book and I've heard you talk
a couple of times about this idea that everything is
a response to pain, right, that it's not seeking pleasure
and avoiding pain, it's just a response to pain. And
I just wanted to understand a little bit more about
where you're pulling that idea and that research from. It's
(12:16):
an interesting idea. I'm not sure I agree with it,
but before I go disagreeing with something, i'd want to
know how to learn more about it. Buddhism has been
a big part of my life. And right we talk
about greed and aversion. Right, it's wanting, and it's wanting
good things and not wanting bad things. But so I'm
kind of curious that the neurological piece of that that
you talk about.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Yeah, it comes down to the neural wiring of the
brain that, in fact, pleasure is an abstraction from what
is happening neurologically. You said it yourself, it's wanting, craving, desire, lusting.
There's a reason we say love hurts because even the
desire for good things, wanting to do something, even if
(12:58):
it's the pursuit of pleasure is what you want, the
wanting itself is psychologically destabilizing. That the way the brain
gets us to act and do anything, even to pursue pleasure,
is not about what feels good. It's about what felt good.
That's a very important point. How does that work? The
(13:19):
way the dope allergic system works in the brain, The
way our reward system works is by having a memory
of a past experience that felt good, and then what
the brain does is cause us this itch, this desire,
this craving to feel that again. And that doesn't mean
(13:39):
that the way we should incentivize and motivate people is
by punishing them and with pain. That's not what I'm
saying at all. That absolutely that we know that the
best motivators are these intrinsic motivations, these intrinsic rewards for
something that is pleasurable. But that doesn't mean that the
desire to go pursue that pleasurable sensation is itself a
(14:00):
desire to escape the discomfort of wanting.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
That makes sense to me. That piece totally makes sense.
That wanting is an unpleasant sensation that we then seek
to relieve, totally makes sense. So I love this idea
of time management. Is pain management, right? And what you're
talking about here, essentially there's lots of different words for it.
A term we've used on the show a lot is
it's emotional regulation.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
Right.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
It's this ability, as you said, to be able to Okay,
I feel an unpleasant emotion and instead of letting that
spin me off in a variety of directions, I'm going
to allow that to be there. I'm going to cope
with it, and then I'm going to act according to
what I value or what's important to me. So let's
break down from your perspective. How do we do that?
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Yeah, So becoming indistractable is really about these four key steps.
And the first we talked about, which is about mastering
these internal triggers. And that's the most important step because
you know, whether it's some technology today. You know it's
Facebook today or iPhone today, Tomorrow, it's going to be
something else. Fifty years ago it was the radio or
television or comic books. Every generation has these successive technologies
(15:12):
that everybody has a moral panic around and says, it's
melting our brain, it's super distracting. It's the same story
every single generation. But the real cause is always what
is going on inside of us. It's always about the
desire to escape discomfort. And so there's some tactics I
talk about three big tactics in the book about what
you can do to reimagine the trigger, reimagine the task,
and reimagine your temperament. So that's the first most important step.
(15:35):
The next step involves differentiating between traction and distraction. And
so this is a really important point to talk about
just a bit, because in order to understand what is distraction,
we have to understand what is the opposite of distraction. Right,
and so most people will say it's focus. The opposite
of distraction is focused, But that's not exactly right. The
(15:56):
opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction
is track. That In fact, both words come from the
same Latin root trahare, which means to pull, and they
both end in the same six letters action that spells action.
So traction is any action that pulls you towards what
you want to do, things that you do with intent.
(16:18):
The opposite of traction is distraction, anything that pulls you
away from what you plan to do, any actions that
you are doing without intent. So this is really important
for two reasons. Number one, anything can become a distraction. Okay,
so this used to happen to me all the time
before I wrote this book. You know, I would sit
down at my desk and I'd say, Okay, now I'm
(16:40):
going to focus. I'm going to finally get to work.
I'm going to stop procrastinating. I'm going to do what
I said I'm going to do. Here I go, I'm
gonna work on this big project. I'm gonna get so
much done today. But first, let me check some email, right,
let me do that one thing on my to do list.
That's kind of an easy thing to do to get
some momentum, right, And what I didn't understand is that
(17:00):
I was allowing distraction to trick me, to full fool me,
to pull the wool over my eyes, and that I
didn't realize that when I did that other thing, I
was getting distracted. And so that's a much more pernicious
form of distraction. Because look, if you're playing candy Crush
or watching YouTube video, or you know, putting around at
your desk playing candy Crush at work, you know that
(17:23):
that's not what you're supposed to be doing.
Speaker 4 (17:25):
You know that's a distraction.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
But if you check email, oh that feels productive, right,
that's kind of worky.
Speaker 4 (17:32):
But we don't.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Realize that when that happens, distraction has tricked you into
prioritizing the urgent at the expense of the important, and
that is toxic for your productivity and for your well being.
So anything can become a distraction, and conversely, anything can
be traction. So I am not one of these chicken
(17:53):
little anti tech people that say the sky is falling
and this tech is so horrible and it's melting our brain.
I know too much history to believe that stuff in
too much research that says that that is not true.
It's not hijacking your brain, it's not addicting everyone. That's
an excuse. That's what the blamers say, because look, the
fact of the matter is there is nothing wrong with
using Facebook or YouTube, or watching the news or playing
(18:15):
a video game, as long as you do it on
your schedule, not on some media company schedule.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
It's that idea of time that you enjoy.
Speaker 4 (18:26):
Wasting is not wasted time.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
Time you plan to waste is not wasted time. It's
exactly right if you plan that time. It's traction.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
That's such an important point. It's why when I'm doing
coaching work with people like we don't start with emotional regulation.
We start with a plan because until you have the plan,
you don't know, as you say so eloquently, you don't
know are you being distracted or not. If you don't
know what you plan to be doing, what you want
to be doing in this moment, then you don't know
if you're procrastinating or not. It's when you go, all right,
(18:55):
I should be doing this, and then you don't do it.
Now we know we've got a very clear example.
Speaker 5 (19:01):
Okay, distraction, right exactly.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
And so this is one of the key mantras of
the book is that you can't call something a distraction
unless you know what you are distracted from. You can't
call something a distraction unless you know what you are
distracted from. Meaning if you don't plan out your day,
you have no right to complain about getting distracted, because.
Speaker 4 (19:21):
What did you get distracted from?
Speaker 3 (19:23):
You?
Speaker 2 (19:23):
You know, if you have a bunch of white space
in your day, everything is a distraction.
Speaker 4 (19:28):
So what are you complaining about? And it's amazing to me.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
You know, two thirds of Americans don't keep any sort
of a calendar, and I've always kept a calendar, but
I was actually the one third of people who do
keep a calendar. But I didn't realize until I wrote
this book that I was doing it wrong because I
would interview people. I interviewed hundreds of people for this
book over the past five years, and the people who
were most distracted, you know, I talked to them and
they say, oh, you know, I'm so distracted these days.
(19:51):
I can't seem to get what I want to do done.
And you know, did you hear what's happening? In the
news and Donald Trump said this, and Kim Kardashian that,
and all this stuff that they get distracted with. And
then I would say, well, what did you plan to
do with your time today? And they say, oh, let
me show you. Look at my to do list. Look
at all this stuff I didn't get done today that
I planned to do. And I said, no, no, you
didn't hear the question. I said, what did you plan
(20:12):
to do with your time today? Show me your calendar?
Because what most people don't realize that the to do
list is evil.
Speaker 3 (20:20):
Right yeap?
Speaker 2 (20:21):
The to do list keeps most people as slaves. And
people don't realize this. This is a really important point.
I call this the tyranny of the to do list
because here's how most people use the to do list.
They use it as a device to reinforce their identity
of not.
Speaker 4 (20:39):
Being able to do what they say.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
They are using a method that reinforces their inability to
do what they say.
Speaker 4 (20:46):
And here's how it works.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
If you're anything like I was, I would keep it
to do list because you know that's what the productivity
guruz tells you. To get things done right, you have
to keep it to do list and day after day,
about half of my to do list I wouldn't get done.
I would just recycle that stuff from one day to
the next the next, and it just wouldn't get done.
And so what I was doing to myself is reinforcing
a self image. You know, when you see day after day,
(21:10):
week after week, month after month, year after year, Yep,
another day went by and you didn't do what you
said you were going to do.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
Loser.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
You start to believe that over time you don't even
realize the subconscious effects that it has on you. And
so instead of keeping it to do list, which is
fine if it is a temporary repository of tasks, what
most people do is they have a big, long to
do list and then they do whatever they want, whenever
they want, and they get very little done as opposed
to the right way is to keep a timebox calendar
(21:42):
where immediately, if something is important enough to make it
into your to do list, you put it on your schedule,
because that is the only way we can live out
our values. If you want to see my values, look
at my calendar. Why because I consciously sit down for
fifteen minutes. It's all It takes fifteen minutes and I
ask myself, how will I turn my values into time
(22:07):
this week? The values that I have around taking care
of myself, which include physical exercise, rest, education, meditation, prayer,
whatever it is that are your values. I'm not telling
you what to do, by the way, I'm telling you
that whatever it is you want to do, you have
to make time for it, even if it's video games.
Speaker 4 (22:25):
Right. Here's the thing, here's the amazing thing.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
This is why the tyranny of the to do list
is so evil because even when a productive person wants
time to relax.
Speaker 4 (22:35):
Okay, I used to get home from work and say,
I just want to watch some Netflix.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
Right, even when I was watching Netflix, or worse, even worse,
playing with my daughter in the back of my mind, Oh,
there's all those things on my to do list, I
didn't get done yet. And let me tell you, a
tiny percentage of people in the world have ever experienced
the bliss that is watching a movie, playing with your kid,
(23:00):
going out to dinner with your spouse, or whatever it is,
without the guilt of thinking in the back of your head, oh,
I should be doing something else. That's such a beautiful
feeling and it's so ironic that by keeping a to
do list and not finishing what you said you would do,
you're actually not even enjoying the leisure time you do
give to yourself, And so that's why that technique really
does backfire.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
I would say it slightly differently, but I agree one
hundred percent. I mean, for me, the to do list
stands like you said, it's a place to hold things
until I can marry them to my calendar.
Speaker 4 (23:32):
Right as quickly as possible.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
I start each day by sort of just writing out
thirty minute intervals all day long, and then I look
at what's actually already on the calendar, so okay, that
covers the things that I've already prioritized enough to put on.
And then I look at the to do list, and
I go, okay, what's getting plugged into those rest of those?
And like you say, now I kind of know all
day long, at any given moment what I'm doing and
(24:15):
prioritized in there are all the things that are also important,
like exercise and meditation and spending time with friends and
all of that. And so I agree one hundred percent.
And I think that like Friday nights for me is
I know Friday nights with unless something else comes up.
Friday nights are like pizza and Netflix night. And I
do it and I love it because I know it's
(24:35):
exactly what I'm supposed to be doing. It's so freeing
right in my calendar. I have time for social.
Speaker 4 (24:41):
Media every night.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
I have time on my calendar to puts around on
Facebook and YouTube. And it's great. I love it and
there's nothing wrong with it. And I took something that
used to distract me all the time and I turned
it into traction simply by deciding with intent when I.
Speaker 4 (24:58):
Will do it.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
This process is life changing in large part. I think
a second order benefit is that when you have a
physical manifestation, I don't tell people to do this every day.
I advise most people can do it once a week
and it literally takes.
Speaker 4 (25:10):
Their team minutes.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
In fact, I'll give you a link for the show
notes where I built this online tool to make it
super easy. You don't have to buy anything or even
give me your email. It totally totally free. Anybody can
use it. It's just basically a calendar template for the week.
And what it does is when you do this, you
have a physical manifestation of what your week will look like.
Speaker 4 (25:32):
And this is.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Really powerful for a few reasons. One, you can know
for every minute of your day what is traction. What
is on your calendar is traction. Anything else is a distraction.
So that's really important. Now you can at least identify
the enemy right Toila Coilo has this great quote where
he says a mistake repeated more than once is a decision.
And in many people, including myself, before I wrote this book,
(25:56):
I made the decision essentially effectively, to be distracted all
the time time. Well, we can make the decision to
be indistractable, but that starts by identifying, Wait a minute,
where did I get distracted?
Speaker 4 (26:06):
People feel distracted, but.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
They don't actually identify what did they get distracted from
in order to understand the distraction. So that's a really
important point. The second point is that when you have
this artifact of yep, this is my schedule for every
minute of the day for the entire week, it sounds
like a lot of work. Believe me, it's not right.
It's actually and it sounds like it's stifling people's Oh,
I want to have spontaneity. You can plan spontaneity, as
(26:29):
oxymoronic as that sounds. You can plan time for that
as well. You can reserve that time to you know,
go hang out with your kid. You know, every Saturday,
I hang out with my kid for three hours. We
don't know what we're going to do. We might go
to the park, we might go get some ice cream,
we might go to the museum.
Speaker 4 (26:43):
We don't know. But what I do know is that
I will not be on email.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
I will not be checking social media. I will not
be doing something that's a distraction. That time is reserved
for her. But the spontaneity is still there because the
time is reserved. But the other point I wanted to
make here is that when you have that artifact, you
can take it to the important stakeholders in your life,
like your boss. So when you go to your boss,
you know, we've heard this, this ridiculous trope that gets
(27:09):
repeated in every single productivity article I read. If you
want to be more productive, you have to learn how
to say no, give me a break. You're gonna go
to your boss, the person who cuts your checks, and
you're gonna say no, you're.
Speaker 4 (27:23):
Not gonna be in business for very long. You're gonna have.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Fired, right, right, You can't say that to your boss.
That's stupid advice. Instead of saying no, what you want
to do is to get your boss to say no,
how do you do that? You show them your schedule.
You say, hey, look, boss, I made my schedule for
the week. Here's how I will do all the things
you asked me to do this week. Now you see
this other piece of paper, You see this other thing
over here. I wrote down all the things you asked
(27:46):
me to do that I don't seem to find time
for because look at the week ahead, I don't you
know there's no extra time left over. Can you help
me reprioritize what's more important?
Speaker 4 (27:57):
Okay? Is it the task here that's on my calendar?
Speaker 2 (27:59):
Or should I rearrange the calendar in some way to
make time for another task you think.
Speaker 4 (28:03):
Is more important.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
First of all, your boss will worship the ground you
walk on because most employers have no idea how you
spend your time, and most of them assume you're slacking
off in one way or the other. So when you
show them here is how I plan to spend my time.
Speaker 4 (28:18):
They crave that visibility.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
Let me tell you, as a boss, a founder of
two companies, I'm telling you from personal experience. They want
to know, but they don't want to ask you to
do this because they don't want you to feel like
you're being micromanaged. But when you voluntarily show them, hey,
here's how I plan to spend my time, help me
reprioritize that visibility is a game changer. The same tool
of that timebox calendar can help you in your home
(28:42):
life as well. You know, I used to fight with
my wife all the time about domestic responsibilities that you know.
She would say, why why aren't you know, Look, the
laundry needs to be done, or our daughter needs to
be fed, or the house needs to be cleaned up,
why aren't you doing it? And my response was always.
Speaker 4 (28:57):
Honey, if you want me to do something, don't you
just ask? Right.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
What I didn't realize is that when I said crap
like that, I was giving her yet another job to do,
which is to be my babysitter essentially. And so now
we never have those fights anymore. By the way, this
is a statistic that across the board, in dual income
heterosexual relationships, women still take on an outside share of
(29:24):
household responsibilities even when they have a job outside the
home as well. So we are really slacking here, guys,
And let me tell you a lot of it is
not maliciousness. It's just ignorance. Right, I didn't know what
I was supposed to be doing.
Speaker 4 (29:36):
So what do we do? We sat down, we said, Okay,
here's all the.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
Stuff that needs to get done, and now that stuff
has time in my calendar. It's not just part of
my to do list. I know every Saturday, these are
my responsibilities to do today and when they get done.
Because many household responsibilities have contingencies. Right, you know she
can't cook lunch if I haven't cut the vegetables, things
like that, and so I know when I will do
those things. So by having this weekly schedule, sink, Okay,
(30:02):
where are you going to be this day?
Speaker 4 (30:03):
Do you need the car? Who's taking our daughter? Things
like that.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
It takes ten minutes, ten fifteen minutes a week. We
do it every Sunday night. Life changing. We never have
those fights anymore because of this simple practice.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
It is a really powerful way to live, to be
that intentional about your time and like you said, to
make it visible, because I love that idea too, of
taking it to your boss. Because you're right, you can't
be like no I'm not going to do that. But
the great question is always like, help me understand how
to prioritize all this if I can't fit it all in,
(30:36):
you know, instead of just not fitting it in or.
Speaker 4 (30:39):
That's a distraction.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
Boss, no thanks, I'm learning how to say no break.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
So an important point here is, like you said, this
sounds like it's overwhelming to do, like the amount of effort,
and it sounds like it's control freaky. But I found
that it's really not that much time and effort, and
that you know, there's a lot of productivity systems out
there that because way too much, and there's all this
endless categorization and all this stuff. But this time boxing
(31:07):
method is actually pretty straightforward and simple.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
It is it is, and most importantly, it's backed by
really good research. I didn't invent timeboxing. It's been around
for a very long time, and in fact, thousands of studies,
no joke, thousands of peer reviewed studies have found this
is one of the most effective techniques for doing what
you said you're going to do. The psychologist we call
it making an implementation intention, which is just a fancy
(31:31):
way of saying planning doing what you plan to do.
When you plan to do it. And that's really what
living with personal integrity is all about. And so that's
a very simple thing. Anyone can do it to some degree.
And if you say, oh my gosh, every minute of
every day that sounds like too much, no problem. You know,
becoming indistractable doesn't mean you never get distracted. Becoming indistractable
means you strive to do what you say you're going
(31:52):
to do. And so the beauty of this methodology is
that anyone, whenever they want, can implement these tactics and
small degrees. So we talked about the first one, mastering
the internal triggers. There's very simple techniques like the ten
minute rule I talk about in the book is a
wonderful way to disarm these internal triggers in order to
help us stay on track and not lead towards distraction
(32:15):
when we feel these uncomfortable emotional states. Anyone can learn
that technique in just a few minutes, making time for traction.
Maybe you're not ready to book you every minute of
every day, seven days a week. How about you start
with one weekend?
Speaker 4 (32:26):
Right?
Speaker 2 (32:27):
And the questioning to ask yourself is how can I
turn my values into time values are attributes of the
person you want to become. So how could you maybe
plan out one weekend and then maybe two weekend days,
and then maybe one weekday. And so what we're doing
is progressively learning to use this muscle of getting better
at time blocking. Because remember, unlike the to do list method,
(32:49):
which tends to reinforce a self image of someone who
is not capable of doing what they said we're going
to do, by time boxing, you're a winner at the
end of every block of time because remember, the goal
of time boxing is not to finish anything. Let me
say that again. I know people are scratching their heads.
What do you mean, not finish anything? How am I
going to get anything done? Here's the goal when you
use a time boxing technique. The only goal is to
(33:12):
work on what you said you will work on for
as long as you said you will work on it
without distraction.
Speaker 4 (33:18):
That's it.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
Whether it's ten minutes, thirty minutes, an hour, two hours,
doesn't matter, irrelevant. The point of this methodology is that
when you finish that time block, you are reinforcing your
identity as someone who follows through you do what you
say you're going to do. That is what becoming indistractable
is all about you strove to do what you said
you were going to do, and you did it. That's
(33:39):
why it's such a powerful technique. So that's what making
time for traction is all about. The third technique is
about hacking back the external triggers. And so the external triggers,
you know, this is what most people tend to blame.
It's the pings, the dings, the rings, all of these
things in our outside environment. And it turns out this
is actually the easiest and most tactical section of the book.
People complain about these technologies being so distracting. I can
(34:01):
teach you in just a few minutes, how to make
your phone indistractable, how to make your computer indistractable. That's
kindergarten stuff. What's a bigger source of distraction are things
like the open floor plan office? Right, eighty percent of
survey respondents in the modern American workplace said the number
one source of distraction wasn't their phone, their computers, their apps,
It was other people. So I teach you how to
(34:24):
hack back distraction in the workplace, how to hack back meetings.
Holy moly, how much time do we spend in meetings
that are just a pointless distraction. I teach you how
to hack back all of these external triggers in all
these various contexts. And then finally, the last step, the
line of last defense, is what we call preventing distraction
with pacts. And this is something we do after we've
(34:45):
implemented the other three tactics. So a pact is what's
called a pre commitment device. We in advance decide what
we will or won't do with some kind of backstop, right,
some kind of firewall that prevents us from getting distracted.
So there's three types of We have what's called an
effort pact, where we put some kind of friction in
between us and the distraction. Then you have a price
(35:07):
packed where there's some kind of monetary disincentive, and then
finally there's an identity pact where who we are helps
us stay on track. And so that's the essence of
these force strategies. Master internal triggers, make time for traction,
hack back external triggers, and prevent.
Speaker 4 (35:22):
Distraction with packs.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
And when you know those force strategies, the strategy is
more important than tactics. Tactics are what we do. Strategies
why we do it, and so understanding those force strategies
is really all you need because you can come up
with your own tactics to best suit you, and over time,
implement more and more of these small tactics so you
know first, you find ways to master internal triggers in
(35:44):
a few small ways, You make time for traction, You
hack back a few of those external triggers, You create
a few pre commitments to make sure that you prevent
distraction with packs, and you add more and more and
more of these over your lifetime. This isn't something you're
ever done doing. It's about constantly reassessing and saying, wait
a minute, now that I know why I got distracted,
will I do something about it? Or will I keep
(36:06):
being a dummy and get distracted again and again and again,
making the decision to become distracted write a mistake repeated
more than once of the decision, Or will I decide
I am indistractable If I get distracted next time, I
will make sure I won't get distracted by the same thing,
because I will know what to do about it when
the time comes.
Speaker 1 (36:44):
Let's spend a couple minutes on mastering the internal triggers,
because I think that's an area we could go a
little bit deeper that would be really helpful. And I
do think that's the biggest challenge of the work that
you're talking about. The rest of the stuff, I agree.
I think a lot of it is is pretty straightforward.
But I think it's learning to work with our uncomfortable
(37:04):
emotions that is the work of a lifetime in a
lot of cases. So maybe let's dive a little deeper
into that particular space.
Speaker 2 (37:11):
Sure, So there's three big pillars on how to master
these internal triggers. It's about reimagining the trigger, reimagining the task,
and reimagining our temperament. And it would take me a
while to describe all three, but let me give you
just one very tactical, practical technique that you can use
that I mentioned earlier, called the ten minute rule. And
this falls under the category of reimagining the internal trigger.
(37:33):
And so this is really about finding new ways to
deal with that discomfort in a way that leads us
towards traction rather than distraction, by disarming and understanding the
source of that distraction. Because again, you know, procrastination distraction,
it's not a character flaw, it's an emotion regulation problem.
But once you learn these techniques, once you have the
(37:56):
arrows in your quiver ready these tools, then you can
apply them. So there's only three reasons we ever get distracted.
Speaker 4 (38:04):
Only three.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
Either it's an internal trigger, an external trigger, or a
planning problem.
Speaker 4 (38:10):
That's it.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
So all we want to do is to make sure
when that distraction arises, do we know how to fix
it for next time. And so let's say it's one
of these internal triggers, which turn out. The reason it's
the first step is because it's a vast majority of distractions.
The vast majority of distractions come about when people feel
bored or lonelier and decisive or fatigued, and so they
use something to try and escape that discomfort. That's what
(38:33):
procrastination distraction always is about. So this ten minute rule
is fantastic. The ten minute rule says, and this is
not something that I made up. This comes from acceptance
to commitment therapy. The ten minute rule says that you
can give in to any distraction, any distraction, in just
ten minutes. Now why is this so effective Because what
(38:55):
we want to do for those ten minutes is one
of two things. If you want to either surf the urge,
meaning to be with that sensation, contemplate what is it
that you are feeling for just ten minutes to ride
out that sensation, because remember, these emotions, they feel like
they're going to last forever in the moment, but it
turns out that emotions are like waves. They crest and
(39:17):
then they subside. So if you can ride that sensation
for just a few minutes, most of the time, it
will subside by the time that ten minutes are up.
So your choice that you have to make for those
ten minutes, so you can give into that distraction, you
can eat that piece of chocolate cake, You can go
check email when you know you should be writing on
that blog post or whatever it might be in just
ten minutes of surfing the urge. So your choice is
(39:38):
either surf the urge, sit with that sensation without judgment,
right with curiosity, not with contempt. Don't be one of
those blamers and shamers. Instead, what you can do is
either surf the urge or get back to the task
at hand. And what you will find if you set
that timer ten minutes actually is a long time.
Speaker 4 (39:57):
If you set that.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
Timer, you know many times I'll take out my eye phone,
I'll say set a time for ten minutes, I'll put
down my phone and I'll just sit with that sensation.
And what we find is that nine times out of ten,
before that alarm rings, you will be back at that
task at hand by just giving that sensation a little
bit of time, a little bit of space before you
react to escape that discomfort. And that. Of course, you know,
you get better at this technique over time, so it
(40:20):
becomes just as effective when you know you should eat
something or drink something or say something. You can use
this technique with all kinds of impulses that you might have.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
A tremendously useful one. It's it's sort of the twelve
step program, you know, one day at a time, but
shrunk way down, you know, yeah, because that's the origin
really of that, you know what, like just not today,
just not today, delay till tomorrow, right, you know. But
it's but it's shrunk down, and it's it's a remarkably
effective technique.
Speaker 4 (40:47):
Yeah, you know, just delay right exactly.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
You know. I like to say the antidote to impulsiveness
is forethought. The antidote impulsiveness is for that. I think
this is a really important concept, because you know, if
there's one thing that our species does better than any
other animal on the face of the earth, it's that
we can plan ahead. We can see into the future
with greater fidelity than any other creature that has ever
roam the earth. And we can use that ability right
(41:13):
because we know that if you wait till the moment, right,
if the chocolate cake is on its fork, you're gonna
eat it. If the cigarette is lit in your hand,
you're gonna smoke it. If you sleep next to your
cell phone every night, you're gonna pick it up first
thing in the morning. It's too late. They've won, They've
got you. So the antidote to that impulsive reaction is
not willpower, it's not self control.
Speaker 4 (41:35):
The people who I interviewed from.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
My book, these masters of doing what they said they're
going to do, the most indistractable people on earth. They
don't have tremendous amounts of willpower. What they have is
a system so that when the time arises, they don't
need willpower and self control. Willpower and self control don't work,
they collapse over time. Instead, it's about thinking in advance,
what am I going to do? Okay, when I feel
(41:58):
that internal trigger, what comes my habitual response is it
to escape this discomfort, right, to look for a pacifier
like a baby looks for their pacifier, to just take
my mind off of that sensation. Or do I have
a mature response to this that leads me towards traction
rather than distraction?
Speaker 5 (42:14):
Yep?
Speaker 1 (42:14):
Okay, so the ten minute rule, that's a great one.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
What else, and so there's other tactics as well in
the book about reimagining the task itself. This is where
I look at this freaky science around how we can
learn to do what's called play anything. And basically what
we can do is we can learn to make any
task something that is play without necessary looking for enjoyment.
It's interesting that play doesn't necessarily have to be fun,
(42:39):
believe it or not. It just has to focus our attention.
And so we look at this weird science around how
people learn to love all kinds of mundane tasks. Right,
we all know that car buff that works on their car. Now,
of course, you know you'd have to pay me to
be a mechanic, and yet these people love it. Why
the barista who's obsessed with getting just the right You
(43:00):
know you'd have to pay me a lot of money
to work in the Starbucks. I wouldn't do that for free,
and yet they're obsessed with it. I have another friend
who's really into quilting. Oh my god, I can't even
imagine how boring that is, and yet she loves it.
Why how do you make a task something that is
playful and I teach you exactly how to do that.
There's some very simple tactics that we can use to
learn how to play anything. And then, finally, the last
(43:21):
of these three pillars is about reimagining our temperament. That
there's a lot of junk science out there, or overturned science.
I should say that people still believe. One of the
most prevalent myths is this idea of what we call
ego depletion. Ego depletion says that we run out of willpower,
and many, many people believe this, that they run out
(43:42):
of willpower, And even if they don't know the term
ego depletion, they experience something like this. So I used
to come home from work and I would say, boy,
I've had such a tough day. I feel quote unquote spent.
Give me that pin of Ben and Jerry's I have
no willpower left. I'm going to watch some Netflix and
just veg out right. I'm spent, I got nothing left.
(44:02):
And many people have this notion, consciously or subconsciously, that
willpower is something you run out of. And there was
actually some research that showed this was true about a
decade ago. And it turns out that the research that
you know, the press loved it. There was a best
selling book about this. But when other you know, in
the social science, is when a study sounds too good
to be true, we replicate the study, We try and
(44:24):
run it again. And it turns out when other researchers
tried to replicate this study, it turns out that ego
depletion didn't exist. That the studies can't replicate except accept
with one.
Speaker 4 (44:38):
Group of people.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
There is one group of people who really do experience
ego depletion. They really do run out of willpower like
gas in a gas tank.
Speaker 4 (44:47):
Who is this group?
Speaker 2 (44:49):
It's people and only people who believe that willpower is
a limited resource. So if you believe that you are
running out of well power, you were running out of
self control. It becomes true. And so much of our
beliefs these days are self limiting. Principally, this idea that
technology is addicting you, it's hijacking your brains. Your kids
(45:12):
won't stop playing video games because of these algorithms. If
you believe it's true, it leads to what's called learned helplessness.
And that's exactly what the ego depletion study shows. So
what we want to do is to reimagine our temperament,
to realize that we are not a fixed self, that
we can reimagine our capabilities and only keep the identities
that serve us versus the identity that we are serving.
Speaker 1 (45:33):
Such an important piece This idea of I'm the kind
of person who and we are attached to these ideas
that simply aren't true. They're just their patterns of behavior
that we have over identified with. I often say, you know,
it's not you, it's your approach. You know, it's this
idea that we can be different with the proper tools
(45:56):
and techniques and skill sets.
Speaker 4 (45:58):
Absolutely, that's exactly right.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
I'm saying that, you know, having an identity is a
bad thing. In fact, one of the last chapters in
the book is about how you can reshape your identity
to make what's called an identity pact. So I want
people to go from these self limiting beliefs to self
enhancing beliefs.
Speaker 4 (46:14):
Right.
Speaker 2 (46:14):
So, we know, for example, in the psychology of religion,
that when someone calls themselves a devout observer of a
particular faith, they become much more likely to stay in line.
So when someone, for you know, when a devout Muslim says,
you know, they don't ask themselves Ooh, I wonder if
I should have that gen and tonic. No, that's forbidden.
Devout Muslims do not drink alcohol.
Speaker 4 (46:34):
Even a vegetarian.
Speaker 2 (46:35):
You know, if you call yourself a vegetarian, you don't
wake up in the morning and say, h, I wonder
if I should have some bacon for breakfast.
Speaker 4 (46:41):
No, vegetarians don't eat meat.
Speaker 2 (46:43):
So we can use an identity to help us become indestractable.
And that's exactly why I named the book what I did.
Indestractable sounds like indestructible, and we can use that, Moniker.
We can use that identity and teach others about this
practice to help stay in line, to help us do
what we know we are capable of, to live the
(47:03):
kind of life we know we deserve.
Speaker 1 (47:05):
That's a that's a great way to say it, and
that idea of letting identity be something that serves you
because they're not as fixed as we think we are.
So if we're putting one on, if in essence, in
some ways it's like a costume. We ought to choose
to put on the costumes that lead us in the
direction of what matters. If we're making it up, we
ought to make up stories that are useful and life
(47:27):
supporting and and you know, being indistractable is a good
one to.
Speaker 4 (47:32):
Carry absolutely, yep, could agree more.
Speaker 1 (47:35):
All right, Well, you and I are at the end
of our time here, so thank you so much for
taking the time to come on. You and I are
going to talk for just a couple of minutes in
the post show conversation about some way, some simple techniques
to hack back distractions from our phones and computers. So
we'll do that in the post show conversation listeners. If
(47:56):
you'd like access to that, as well as a mini
episode each week and supporting the show, you can go
to oneufeed dot net, slash join new yor thank you
so much for taking the time to come on. I've
really enjoyed this conversation.
Speaker 4 (48:09):
Oh my pleasure. Thank you so much.
Speaker 5 (48:10):
All right, take care.
Speaker 3 (48:28):
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Do you ever feel like life is just one problem
after another. You finally feel like maybe there's a break,
and then bam, another problem. This is how it is
for many of us. But there is a better way
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(00:20):
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(00:41):
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Speaker 2 (01:13):
Time management is pain management. Everything we do is about
a desire to escape discomfort.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Welcome to the one you feed throughout time. Great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
think ring true, and yet for many of us, our
thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
(01:51):
have instead of what we do. We think things that
hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. We
(02:25):
hope you'll enjoy this episode from the archive. Thanks for
joining us. Our guest on this episode is near Al,
author and previous lecture at Stanford Graduate School of Business
and Hasso Platner Institute of Design. His writing on technology, psychology,
and business appears in the Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic,
Psychology Today, and others. His new book is Indistractable, How
(02:49):
to Control Your attention and Choose your Life.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Hi, Near, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 4 (02:53):
Thanks great to be here.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
I am excited to have you on. We're going to
talk about your book, Indistractable, How to Control your Tension
and Choose your Life here in a moment. But let's
start the way we always do, with a parable. There
is a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says,
in life, there are two wolves inside of us that
are always a battle. One is a good wolf, which
represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the
(03:18):
other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed
and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he
thinks about it for a second. He looks up at
his grandfather. He's his grandfather. Which one wins? And the
grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to
start off by asking you what that parable means to
you in your life and in the work that you do.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
I think the parable is really about the power of habits,
that we are a sum of our behaviors. I don't
believe that people have fixed personalities. I don't believe that
there's an identity that we are stuck with from birth.
That we are able to in fact change ourselves anyway
we wish, and we are a sum product of our behaviors.
(04:00):
We can change those behaviors if we are diligent about
understanding why we do what we do and then take
the steps to alter our path so that we can
be the kind of people we want to be. And
that's to me, what feeding one wolf or the other
is all about. It's about which behaviors do you repeat
versus which behaviors do you starve?
Speaker 1 (04:21):
As a wonderful way to start off and a good
summary for why we do what we do here on
this show. So your book is about being indistractable, how
to control our attention and choose our lives. And I
love this idea that where our attention goes really controls,
to a large extent, the quality of our life. What
(04:43):
we pay attention to really directs our experience. And so
I've got a spiritual habits course that I lead, and
one of the key principles we talk about in the
very beginning is the idea of what's my intention, and
then what am I doing with my attention? And if
you've got those two things sort of locked in, you
can do so much.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
That's absolutely right. I mean, there's a reason we call
it paying attention. There is a value there, there's a cost,
and for most of us, we just give it away, right,
And how crazy is that? Right? If we think about
our stuff, our physical possessions. We put our you know,
we put our money behind vaults inside banks, we put
security systems in our homes, alarms in our cars to
(05:23):
protect our stuff. But when it comes to the one
thing that everyone on earth has the same amount of
our time, Well, I don't care if you're Warren Buffett
or Bill Gates or anyone. You have the same twenty
four hours every day. And yet so many of us, unfortunately,
just give it away anybody.
Speaker 4 (05:41):
Who wants it.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Whatever's in the news, whatever happened on Twitter, whatever our kids,
our spouse, our boss, whoever wants it, Come on.
Speaker 4 (05:48):
Over, take as much as you want.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
And I think what's going to happen, especially in this
day and age, where you know, distraction is so easy
to find because it's so accessible in our pockets at
all times, with ourselves, phones, and other technologies that if
you are looking for a distraction, you will certainly find it.
And so I think what's going to happen, It's already happening.
Is a real bifurcation between people who say to themselves, look,
(06:10):
my time, my attention, my life is mine, and I
will choose how I allocate my time and attention, or
the people who say, okay, you know whatever, I'll give
it away to whoever wants it. And I think the
people who can proudly proclaim that no, they are going
to be in control of their time and attention and
their life, those are the people who'll be able to say,
I am indistractable. And that's what this book and hopefully
(06:33):
this movement is really all about. It's about creating this
identity of people who say I am indistractable. I decide
how I will spend my time and attention in my life.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
And that is the most important thing I often say
with coaching clients. You know, the fundamental life skill is
to be able to decide what's important and then give
it your attention and your devotion. So you start off
by saying that one of the things that we really
need to realize is that we tend to blame our
distractability on the things that distract us. And you know,
(07:07):
we live in a world, as you said, it's very
easy to be distracted. It's never been easier to be distracted.
But you say that, you know where most people are
blaming the devices, the technology, all of that, that the
root cause of this is a lot deeper than that.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Absolutely, yeah, that's absolutely right. So you know, there's two
types of approaches that I think most people take. We
have what we call the blamers and the shamers. The
blamers say, oh, you see, I got distracted because of
my iPhone, because of the email, because of what's happening
in the news, because of oh I hear this all
the time. This is my favorite the modern world these days.
Speaker 4 (07:41):
Right, Well, here's the thing.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
Blaming those kind of things outside of yourself is futile.
You can't change that stuff. Right, These technologies aren't going away,
and frankly, we don't want them to. These are wonderful technologies, right,
We use these companies make so much money because we
like to use these products and services.
Speaker 4 (07:58):
So it's not going away.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
And frankly, there's this myth of you know, the good
old days, that somehow there was a day when the
world was without trouble and wasn't distracting. And that's ridiculous.
I mean, twenty five hundred years before the iPhone complained
about how distracting the world was, and the Greek he
called it acrasia, the tendency that we have to do
things against our better interest twenty five hundred years ago.
So this is clearly not a new problem. So being
(08:22):
a blamer isn't very useful, It doesn't accomplish much. Being
a shamer is the other extreme. A shamer, they don't
blame things outside of themselves. They shame themselves. So a
lot of people do this, right, They have a self
image that says, oh, you see, I'm so lazy. Here
I go again getting distracted. That's so like me, I
(08:43):
can't I have a short attention span. They shame themselves.
And ironically, what we find is that shame is a
negative emotion. Shame feels bad, And it turns out that
the root cause of distraction is in fact unco comfortable
sensations that when we really look at why people do
(09:04):
things against their better interest. To answer Plato's twenty five
hundred year old question of why we do things we
know we shouldn't do, or don't do the things we
know we should. It's not a character flaw. It's that
we just don't know how to regulate our emotions. You see,
time management is pain management. That everything we do is
about a desire to escape discomfort. That most people have
(09:28):
this notion that motivation is about the pursuit of pleasure
and the avoidance of pain. Freud called this the pleasure principle.
But in fact it's not true. Like a lot of
things with Freud, it's not true that, in fact, everything
we do is not about the pursuit of pleasure and
the avoidance of pain. Neurologically speaking, it's only about the
desire to escape discomfort. Everything you do, whether it's physiologically,
(09:50):
if you feel cold, the brain says, ooh, this is uncomfortable.
Put on a coat. If you feel hunger payings, the
brain says, this doesn't feel good, you should eat something.
So everything we do physiologically is about the desire to
escape discomfort, and the same holds true for our psychological sensations.
So if we are feeling lonely, we check Facebook. If
we're uncertain. We google if we're bored, We watch the news,
(10:13):
We check stock prices, sports scores, pinterest, Twitter, or read it.
All of these tools cater to these uncomfortable sensations. So
we have to address this fact that everything we do
is about the desire to escape discomfort.
Speaker 4 (10:27):
So it's about which wolf you feed? Right?
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Do you feed this wolf by escaping that discomfort? Do
you look for psychological escape from reality so that you
don't have to deal with whatever it is is around
you with too much booze, too much news, too much Facebook,
too much football, too much whatever to take your mind
off of those uncomfortable sensations. Or do you build the
(10:52):
habit of harnessing those internal triggers to lead you towards
traction rather than distraction. And so this is why we
don't want to be blamers. We don't want to be shamers.
We want to be what's called claimers. Claimers acknowledge that
you cannot control your emotions. Okay, your urges are not
(11:14):
in your control. Many people don't understand this fact that
controlling your emotion is like trying to hold in a
sneeze or a cough. You cannot stop that urge. You
can only act in response to it. So when you
feel the urge to sneeze, do you sneeze all over
everyone and get them sick. No, you take out a
handkerchief and you sneeze into a tissue, as opposed to
(11:36):
getting everyone else sick. And so the same thing happens
with our emotional sensations. How do we respond to those
internal triggers is incredibly important, and so you know, the
word responsibility is about how we respond to these these
uncomfortable sensations, and so that's the really the first step
to becoming indestractable.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
I don't want to go down this rabbit hole too far,
but I read the book and I've heard you talk
a couple of times about this idea that everything is
a response to pain, right, that it's not seeking pleasure
and avoiding pain, it's just a response to pain. And
I just wanted to understand a little bit more about
where you're pulling that idea and that research from. It's
(12:16):
an interesting idea. I'm not sure I agree with it,
but before I go disagreeing with something, i'd want to
know how to learn more about it. Buddhism has been
a big part of my life. And right we talk
about greed and aversion. Right, it's wanting, and it's wanting
good things and not wanting bad things. But so I'm
kind of curious that the neurological piece of that that
you talk about.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Yeah, it comes down to the neural wiring of the
brain that, in fact, pleasure is an abstraction from what
is happening neurologically. You said it yourself, it's wanting, craving, desire, lusting.
There's a reason we say love hurts because even the
desire for good things, wanting to do something, even if
(12:58):
it's the pursuit of pleasure is what you want, the
wanting itself is psychologically destabilizing. That the way the brain
gets us to act and do anything, even to pursue pleasure,
is not about what feels good. It's about what felt good.
That's a very important point. How does that work? The
(13:19):
way the dope allergic system works in the brain, The
way our reward system works is by having a memory
of a past experience that felt good, and then what
the brain does is cause us this itch, this desire,
this craving to feel that again. And that doesn't mean
(13:39):
that the way we should incentivize and motivate people is
by punishing them and with pain. That's not what I'm
saying at all. That absolutely that we know that the
best motivators are these intrinsic motivations, these intrinsic rewards for
something that is pleasurable. But that doesn't mean that the
desire to go pursue that pleasurable sensation is itself a
(14:00):
desire to escape the discomfort of wanting.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
That makes sense to me. That piece totally makes sense.
That wanting is an unpleasant sensation that we then seek
to relieve, totally makes sense. So I love this idea
of time management. Is pain management, right? And what you're
talking about here, essentially there's lots of different words for it.
A term we've used on the show a lot is
it's emotional regulation.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
Right.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
It's this ability, as you said, to be able to Okay,
I feel an unpleasant emotion and instead of letting that
spin me off in a variety of directions, I'm going
to allow that to be there. I'm going to cope
with it, and then I'm going to act according to
what I value or what's important to me. So let's
break down from your perspective. How do we do that?
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Yeah, So becoming indistractable is really about these four key steps.
And the first we talked about, which is about mastering
these internal triggers. And that's the most important step because
you know, whether it's some technology today. You know it's
Facebook today or iPhone today, Tomorrow, it's going to be
something else. Fifty years ago it was the radio or
television or comic books. Every generation has these successive technologies
(15:12):
that everybody has a moral panic around and says, it's
melting our brain, it's super distracting. It's the same story
every single generation. But the real cause is always what
is going on inside of us. It's always about the
desire to escape discomfort. And so there's some tactics I
talk about three big tactics in the book about what
you can do to reimagine the trigger, reimagine the task,
and reimagine your temperament. So that's the first most important step.
(15:35):
The next step involves differentiating between traction and distraction. And
so this is a really important point to talk about
just a bit, because in order to understand what is distraction,
we have to understand what is the opposite of distraction. Right,
and so most people will say it's focus. The opposite
of distraction is focused, But that's not exactly right. The
(15:56):
opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction
is track. That In fact, both words come from the
same Latin root trahare, which means to pull, and they
both end in the same six letters action that spells action.
So traction is any action that pulls you towards what
you want to do, things that you do with intent.
(16:18):
The opposite of traction is distraction, anything that pulls you
away from what you plan to do, any actions that
you are doing without intent. So this is really important
for two reasons. Number one, anything can become a distraction. Okay,
so this used to happen to me all the time
before I wrote this book. You know, I would sit
down at my desk and I'd say, Okay, now I'm
(16:40):
going to focus. I'm going to finally get to work.
I'm going to stop procrastinating. I'm going to do what
I said I'm going to do. Here I go, I'm
gonna work on this big project. I'm gonna get so
much done today. But first, let me check some email, right,
let me do that one thing on my to do list.
That's kind of an easy thing to do to get
some momentum, right, And what I didn't understand is that
(17:00):
I was allowing distraction to trick me, to full fool me,
to pull the wool over my eyes, and that I
didn't realize that when I did that other thing, I
was getting distracted. And so that's a much more pernicious
form of distraction. Because look, if you're playing candy Crush
or watching YouTube video, or you know, putting around at
your desk playing candy Crush at work, you know that
(17:23):
that's not what you're supposed to be doing.
Speaker 4 (17:25):
You know that's a distraction.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
But if you check email, oh that feels productive, right,
that's kind of worky.
Speaker 4 (17:32):
But we don't.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Realize that when that happens, distraction has tricked you into
prioritizing the urgent at the expense of the important, and
that is toxic for your productivity and for your well being.
So anything can become a distraction, and conversely, anything can
be traction. So I am not one of these chicken
(17:53):
little anti tech people that say the sky is falling
and this tech is so horrible and it's melting our brain.
I know too much history to believe that stuff in
too much research that says that that is not true.
It's not hijacking your brain, it's not addicting everyone. That's
an excuse. That's what the blamers say, because look, the
fact of the matter is there is nothing wrong with
using Facebook or YouTube, or watching the news or playing
(18:15):
a video game, as long as you do it on
your schedule, not on some media company schedule.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
It's that idea of time that you enjoy.
Speaker 4 (18:26):
Wasting is not wasted time.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
Time you plan to waste is not wasted time. It's
exactly right if you plan that time. It's traction.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
That's such an important point. It's why when I'm doing
coaching work with people like we don't start with emotional regulation.
We start with a plan because until you have the plan,
you don't know, as you say so eloquently, you don't
know are you being distracted or not. If you don't
know what you plan to be doing, what you want
to be doing in this moment, then you don't know
if you're procrastinating or not. It's when you go, all right,
(18:55):
I should be doing this, and then you don't do it.
Now we know we've got a very clear example.
Speaker 5 (19:01):
Okay, distraction, right exactly.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
And so this is one of the key mantras of
the book is that you can't call something a distraction
unless you know what you are distracted from. You can't
call something a distraction unless you know what you are
distracted from. Meaning if you don't plan out your day,
you have no right to complain about getting distracted, because.
Speaker 4 (19:21):
What did you get distracted from?
Speaker 3 (19:23):
You?
Speaker 2 (19:23):
You know, if you have a bunch of white space
in your day, everything is a distraction.
Speaker 4 (19:28):
So what are you complaining about? And it's amazing to me.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
You know, two thirds of Americans don't keep any sort
of a calendar, and I've always kept a calendar, but
I was actually the one third of people who do
keep a calendar. But I didn't realize until I wrote
this book that I was doing it wrong because I
would interview people. I interviewed hundreds of people for this
book over the past five years, and the people who
were most distracted, you know, I talked to them and
they say, oh, you know, I'm so distracted these days.
(19:51):
I can't seem to get what I want to do done.
And you know, did you hear what's happening? In the
news and Donald Trump said this, and Kim Kardashian that,
and all this stuff that they get distracted with. And
then I would say, well, what did you plan to
do with your time today? And they say, oh, let
me show you. Look at my to do list. Look
at all this stuff I didn't get done today that
I planned to do. And I said, no, no, you
didn't hear the question. I said, what did you plan
(20:12):
to do with your time today? Show me your calendar?
Because what most people don't realize that the to do
list is evil.
Speaker 3 (20:20):
Right yeap?
Speaker 2 (20:21):
The to do list keeps most people as slaves. And
people don't realize this. This is a really important point.
I call this the tyranny of the to do list
because here's how most people use the to do list.
They use it as a device to reinforce their identity
of not.
Speaker 4 (20:39):
Being able to do what they say.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
They are using a method that reinforces their inability to
do what they say.
Speaker 4 (20:46):
And here's how it works.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
If you're anything like I was, I would keep it
to do list because you know that's what the productivity
guruz tells you. To get things done right, you have
to keep it to do list and day after day,
about half of my to do list I wouldn't get done.
I would just recycle that stuff from one day to
the next the next, and it just wouldn't get done.
And so what I was doing to myself is reinforcing
a self image. You know, when you see day after day,
(21:10):
week after week, month after month, year after year, Yep,
another day went by and you didn't do what you
said you were going to do.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
Loser.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
You start to believe that over time you don't even
realize the subconscious effects that it has on you. And
so instead of keeping it to do list, which is
fine if it is a temporary repository of tasks, what
most people do is they have a big, long to
do list and then they do whatever they want, whenever
they want, and they get very little done as opposed
to the right way is to keep a timebox calendar
(21:42):
where immediately, if something is important enough to make it
into your to do list, you put it on your schedule,
because that is the only way we can live out
our values. If you want to see my values, look
at my calendar. Why because I consciously sit down for
fifteen minutes. It's all It takes fifteen minutes and I
ask myself, how will I turn my values into time
(22:07):
this week? The values that I have around taking care
of myself, which include physical exercise, rest, education, meditation, prayer,
whatever it is that are your values. I'm not telling
you what to do, by the way, I'm telling you
that whatever it is you want to do, you have
to make time for it, even if it's video games.
Speaker 4 (22:25):
Right. Here's the thing, here's the amazing thing.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
This is why the tyranny of the to do list
is so evil because even when a productive person wants
time to relax.
Speaker 4 (22:35):
Okay, I used to get home from work and say,
I just want to watch some Netflix.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
Right, even when I was watching Netflix, or worse, even worse,
playing with my daughter in the back of my mind, Oh,
there's all those things on my to do list, I
didn't get done yet. And let me tell you, a
tiny percentage of people in the world have ever experienced
the bliss that is watching a movie, playing with your kid,
(23:00):
going out to dinner with your spouse, or whatever it is,
without the guilt of thinking in the back of your head, oh,
I should be doing something else. That's such a beautiful
feeling and it's so ironic that by keeping a to
do list and not finishing what you said you would do,
you're actually not even enjoying the leisure time you do
give to yourself, And so that's why that technique really
does backfire.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
I would say it slightly differently, but I agree one
hundred percent. I mean, for me, the to do list
stands like you said, it's a place to hold things
until I can marry them to my calendar.
Speaker 4 (23:32):
Right as quickly as possible.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
I start each day by sort of just writing out
thirty minute intervals all day long, and then I look
at what's actually already on the calendar, so okay, that
covers the things that I've already prioritized enough to put on.
And then I look at the to do list, and
I go, okay, what's getting plugged into those rest of those?
And like you say, now I kind of know all
day long, at any given moment what I'm doing and
(24:15):
prioritized in there are all the things that are also important,
like exercise and meditation and spending time with friends and
all of that. And so I agree one hundred percent.
And I think that like Friday nights for me is
I know Friday nights with unless something else comes up.
Friday nights are like pizza and Netflix night. And I
do it and I love it because I know it's
(24:35):
exactly what I'm supposed to be doing. It's so freeing
right in my calendar. I have time for social.
Speaker 4 (24:41):
Media every night.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
I have time on my calendar to puts around on
Facebook and YouTube. And it's great. I love it and
there's nothing wrong with it. And I took something that
used to distract me all the time and I turned
it into traction simply by deciding with intent when I.
Speaker 4 (24:58):
Will do it.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
This process is life changing in large part. I think
a second order benefit is that when you have a
physical manifestation, I don't tell people to do this every day.
I advise most people can do it once a week
and it literally takes.
Speaker 4 (25:10):
Their team minutes.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
In fact, I'll give you a link for the show
notes where I built this online tool to make it
super easy. You don't have to buy anything or even
give me your email. It totally totally free. Anybody can
use it. It's just basically a calendar template for the week.
And what it does is when you do this, you
have a physical manifestation of what your week will look like.
Speaker 4 (25:32):
And this is.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Really powerful for a few reasons. One, you can know
for every minute of your day what is traction. What
is on your calendar is traction. Anything else is a distraction.
So that's really important. Now you can at least identify
the enemy right Toila Coilo has this great quote where
he says a mistake repeated more than once is a decision.
And in many people, including myself, before I wrote this book,
(25:56):
I made the decision essentially effectively, to be distracted all
the time time. Well, we can make the decision to
be indistractable, but that starts by identifying, Wait a minute,
where did I get distracted?
Speaker 4 (26:06):
People feel distracted, but.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
They don't actually identify what did they get distracted from
in order to understand the distraction. So that's a really
important point. The second point is that when you have
this artifact of yep, this is my schedule for every
minute of the day for the entire week, it sounds
like a lot of work. Believe me, it's not right.
It's actually and it sounds like it's stifling people's Oh,
I want to have spontaneity. You can plan spontaneity, as
(26:29):
oxymoronic as that sounds. You can plan time for that
as well. You can reserve that time to you know,
go hang out with your kid. You know, every Saturday,
I hang out with my kid for three hours. We
don't know what we're going to do. We might go
to the park, we might go get some ice cream,
we might go to the museum.
Speaker 4 (26:43):
We don't know. But what I do know is that
I will not be on email.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
I will not be checking social media. I will not
be doing something that's a distraction. That time is reserved
for her. But the spontaneity is still there because the
time is reserved. But the other point I wanted to
make here is that when you have that artifact, you
can take it to the important stakeholders in your life,
like your boss. So when you go to your boss,
you know, we've heard this, this ridiculous trope that gets
(27:09):
repeated in every single productivity article I read. If you
want to be more productive, you have to learn how
to say no, give me a break. You're gonna go
to your boss, the person who cuts your checks, and
you're gonna say no, you're.
Speaker 4 (27:23):
Not gonna be in business for very long. You're gonna have.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Fired, right, right, You can't say that to your boss.
That's stupid advice. Instead of saying no, what you want
to do is to get your boss to say no,
how do you do that? You show them your schedule.
You say, hey, look, boss, I made my schedule for
the week. Here's how I will do all the things
you asked me to do this week. Now you see
this other piece of paper, You see this other thing
over here. I wrote down all the things you asked
(27:46):
me to do that I don't seem to find time
for because look at the week ahead, I don't you
know there's no extra time left over. Can you help
me reprioritize what's more important?
Speaker 4 (27:57):
Okay? Is it the task here that's on my calendar?
Speaker 2 (27:59):
Or should I rearrange the calendar in some way to
make time for another task you think.
Speaker 4 (28:03):
Is more important.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
First of all, your boss will worship the ground you
walk on because most employers have no idea how you
spend your time, and most of them assume you're slacking
off in one way or the other. So when you
show them here is how I plan to spend my time.
Speaker 4 (28:18):
They crave that visibility.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
Let me tell you, as a boss, a founder of
two companies, I'm telling you from personal experience. They want
to know, but they don't want to ask you to
do this because they don't want you to feel like
you're being micromanaged. But when you voluntarily show them, hey,
here's how I plan to spend my time, help me
reprioritize that visibility is a game changer. The same tool
of that timebox calendar can help you in your home
(28:42):
life as well. You know, I used to fight with
my wife all the time about domestic responsibilities that you know.
She would say, why why aren't you know, Look, the
laundry needs to be done, or our daughter needs to
be fed, or the house needs to be cleaned up,
why aren't you doing it? And my response was always.
Speaker 4 (28:57):
Honey, if you want me to do something, don't you
just ask? Right.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
What I didn't realize is that when I said crap
like that, I was giving her yet another job to do,
which is to be my babysitter essentially. And so now
we never have those fights anymore. By the way, this
is a statistic that across the board, in dual income
heterosexual relationships, women still take on an outside share of
(29:24):
household responsibilities even when they have a job outside the
home as well. So we are really slacking here, guys,
And let me tell you a lot of it is
not maliciousness. It's just ignorance. Right, I didn't know what
I was supposed to be doing.
Speaker 4 (29:36):
So what do we do? We sat down, we said, Okay,
here's all the.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
Stuff that needs to get done, and now that stuff
has time in my calendar. It's not just part of
my to do list. I know every Saturday, these are
my responsibilities to do today and when they get done.
Because many household responsibilities have contingencies. Right, you know she
can't cook lunch if I haven't cut the vegetables, things
like that, and so I know when I will do
those things. So by having this weekly schedule, sink, Okay,
(30:02):
where are you going to be this day?
Speaker 4 (30:03):
Do you need the car? Who's taking our daughter? Things
like that.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
It takes ten minutes, ten fifteen minutes a week. We
do it every Sunday night. Life changing. We never have
those fights anymore because of this simple practice.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
It is a really powerful way to live, to be
that intentional about your time and like you said, to
make it visible, because I love that idea too, of
taking it to your boss. Because you're right, you can't
be like no I'm not going to do that. But
the great question is always like, help me understand how
to prioritize all this if I can't fit it all in,
(30:36):
you know, instead of just not fitting it in or.
Speaker 4 (30:39):
That's a distraction.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
Boss, no thanks, I'm learning how to say no break.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
So an important point here is, like you said, this
sounds like it's overwhelming to do, like the amount of effort,
and it sounds like it's control freaky. But I found
that it's really not that much time and effort, and
that you know, there's a lot of productivity systems out
there that because way too much, and there's all this
endless categorization and all this stuff. But this time boxing
(31:07):
method is actually pretty straightforward and simple.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
It is it is, and most importantly, it's backed by
really good research. I didn't invent timeboxing. It's been around
for a very long time, and in fact, thousands of studies,
no joke, thousands of peer reviewed studies have found this
is one of the most effective techniques for doing what
you said you're going to do. The psychologist we call
it making an implementation intention, which is just a fancy
(31:31):
way of saying planning doing what you plan to do.
When you plan to do it. And that's really what
living with personal integrity is all about. And so that's
a very simple thing. Anyone can do it to some degree.
And if you say, oh my gosh, every minute of
every day that sounds like too much, no problem. You know,
becoming indistractable doesn't mean you never get distracted. Becoming indistractable
means you strive to do what you say you're going
(31:52):
to do. And so the beauty of this methodology is
that anyone, whenever they want, can implement these tactics and
small degrees. So we talked about the first one, mastering
the internal triggers. There's very simple techniques like the ten
minute rule I talk about in the book is a
wonderful way to disarm these internal triggers in order to
help us stay on track and not lead towards distraction
(32:15):
when we feel these uncomfortable emotional states. Anyone can learn
that technique in just a few minutes, making time for traction.
Maybe you're not ready to book you every minute of
every day, seven days a week. How about you start
with one weekend?
Speaker 4 (32:26):
Right?
Speaker 2 (32:27):
And the questioning to ask yourself is how can I
turn my values into time values are attributes of the
person you want to become. So how could you maybe
plan out one weekend and then maybe two weekend days,
and then maybe one weekday. And so what we're doing
is progressively learning to use this muscle of getting better
at time blocking. Because remember, unlike the to do list method,
(32:49):
which tends to reinforce a self image of someone who
is not capable of doing what they said we're going
to do, by time boxing, you're a winner at the
end of every block of time because remember, the goal
of time boxing is not to finish anything. Let me
say that again. I know people are scratching their heads.
What do you mean, not finish anything? How am I
going to get anything done? Here's the goal when you
use a time boxing technique. The only goal is to
(33:12):
work on what you said you will work on for
as long as you said you will work on it
without distraction.
Speaker 4 (33:18):
That's it.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
Whether it's ten minutes, thirty minutes, an hour, two hours,
doesn't matter, irrelevant. The point of this methodology is that
when you finish that time block, you are reinforcing your
identity as someone who follows through you do what you
say you're going to do. That is what becoming indistractable
is all about you strove to do what you said
you were going to do, and you did it. That's
(33:39):
why it's such a powerful technique. So that's what making
time for traction is all about. The third technique is
about hacking back the external triggers. And so the external triggers,
you know, this is what most people tend to blame.
It's the pings, the dings, the rings, all of these
things in our outside environment. And it turns out this
is actually the easiest and most tactical section of the book.
People complain about these technologies being so distracting. I can
(34:01):
teach you in just a few minutes, how to make
your phone indistractable, how to make your computer indistractable. That's
kindergarten stuff. What's a bigger source of distraction are things
like the open floor plan office? Right, eighty percent of
survey respondents in the modern American workplace said the number
one source of distraction wasn't their phone, their computers, their apps,
It was other people. So I teach you how to
(34:24):
hack back distraction in the workplace, how to hack back meetings.
Holy moly, how much time do we spend in meetings
that are just a pointless distraction. I teach you how
to hack back all of these external triggers in all
these various contexts. And then finally, the last step, the
line of last defense, is what we call preventing distraction
with pacts. And this is something we do after we've
(34:45):
implemented the other three tactics. So a pact is what's
called a pre commitment device. We in advance decide what
we will or won't do with some kind of backstop, right,
some kind of firewall that prevents us from getting distracted.
So there's three types of We have what's called an
effort pact, where we put some kind of friction in
between us and the distraction. Then you have a price
(35:07):
packed where there's some kind of monetary disincentive, and then
finally there's an identity pact where who we are helps
us stay on track. And so that's the essence of
these force strategies. Master internal triggers, make time for traction,
hack back external triggers, and prevent.
Speaker 4 (35:22):
Distraction with packs.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
And when you know those force strategies, the strategy is
more important than tactics. Tactics are what we do. Strategies
why we do it, and so understanding those force strategies
is really all you need because you can come up
with your own tactics to best suit you, and over time,
implement more and more of these small tactics so you
know first, you find ways to master internal triggers in
(35:44):
a few small ways, You make time for traction, You
hack back a few of those external triggers, You create
a few pre commitments to make sure that you prevent
distraction with packs, and you add more and more and
more of these over your lifetime. This isn't something you're
ever done doing. It's about constantly reassessing and saying, wait
a minute, now that I know why I got distracted,
will I do something about it? Or will I keep
(36:06):
being a dummy and get distracted again and again and again,
making the decision to become distracted write a mistake repeated
more than once of the decision, Or will I decide
I am indistractable If I get distracted next time, I
will make sure I won't get distracted by the same thing,
because I will know what to do about it when
the time comes.
Speaker 1 (36:44):
Let's spend a couple minutes on mastering the internal triggers,
because I think that's an area we could go a
little bit deeper that would be really helpful. And I
do think that's the biggest challenge of the work that
you're talking about. The rest of the stuff, I agree.
I think a lot of it is is pretty straightforward.
But I think it's learning to work with our uncomfortable
(37:04):
emotions that is the work of a lifetime in a
lot of cases. So maybe let's dive a little deeper
into that particular space.
Speaker 2 (37:11):
Sure, So there's three big pillars on how to master
these internal triggers. It's about reimagining the trigger, reimagining the task,
and reimagining our temperament. And it would take me a
while to describe all three, but let me give you
just one very tactical, practical technique that you can use
that I mentioned earlier, called the ten minute rule. And
this falls under the category of reimagining the internal trigger.
(37:33):
And so this is really about finding new ways to
deal with that discomfort in a way that leads us
towards traction rather than distraction, by disarming and understanding the
source of that distraction. Because again, you know, procrastination distraction,
it's not a character flaw, it's an emotion regulation problem.
But once you learn these techniques, once you have the
(37:56):
arrows in your quiver ready these tools, then you can
apply them. So there's only three reasons we ever get distracted.
Speaker 4 (38:04):
Only three.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
Either it's an internal trigger, an external trigger, or a
planning problem.
Speaker 4 (38:10):
That's it.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
So all we want to do is to make sure
when that distraction arises, do we know how to fix
it for next time. And so let's say it's one
of these internal triggers, which turn out. The reason it's
the first step is because it's a vast majority of distractions.
The vast majority of distractions come about when people feel
bored or lonelier and decisive or fatigued, and so they
use something to try and escape that discomfort. That's what
(38:33):
procrastination distraction always is about. So this ten minute rule
is fantastic. The ten minute rule says, and this is
not something that I made up. This comes from acceptance
to commitment therapy. The ten minute rule says that you
can give in to any distraction, any distraction, in just
ten minutes. Now why is this so effective Because what
(38:55):
we want to do for those ten minutes is one
of two things. If you want to either surf the urge,
meaning to be with that sensation, contemplate what is it
that you are feeling for just ten minutes to ride
out that sensation, because remember, these emotions, they feel like
they're going to last forever in the moment, but it
turns out that emotions are like waves. They crest and
(39:17):
then they subside. So if you can ride that sensation
for just a few minutes, most of the time, it
will subside by the time that ten minutes are up.
So your choice that you have to make for those
ten minutes, so you can give into that distraction, you
can eat that piece of chocolate cake, You can go
check email when you know you should be writing on
that blog post or whatever it might be in just
ten minutes of surfing the urge. So your choice is
(39:38):
either surf the urge, sit with that sensation without judgment,
right with curiosity, not with contempt. Don't be one of
those blamers and shamers. Instead, what you can do is
either surf the urge or get back to the task
at hand. And what you will find if you set
that timer ten minutes actually is a long time.
Speaker 4 (39:57):
If you set that.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
Timer, you know many times I'll take out my eye phone,
I'll say set a time for ten minutes, I'll put
down my phone and I'll just sit with that sensation.
And what we find is that nine times out of ten,
before that alarm rings, you will be back at that
task at hand by just giving that sensation a little
bit of time, a little bit of space before you
react to escape that discomfort. And that. Of course, you know,
you get better at this technique over time, so it
(40:20):
becomes just as effective when you know you should eat
something or drink something or say something. You can use
this technique with all kinds of impulses that you might have.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
A tremendously useful one. It's it's sort of the twelve
step program, you know, one day at a time, but
shrunk way down, you know, yeah, because that's the origin
really of that, you know what, like just not today,
just not today, delay till tomorrow, right, you know. But
it's but it's shrunk down, and it's it's a remarkably
effective technique.
Speaker 4 (40:47):
Yeah, you know, just delay right exactly.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
You know. I like to say the antidote to impulsiveness
is forethought. The antidote impulsiveness is for that. I think
this is a really important concept, because you know, if
there's one thing that our species does better than any
other animal on the face of the earth, it's that
we can plan ahead. We can see into the future
with greater fidelity than any other creature that has ever
roam the earth. And we can use that ability right
(41:13):
because we know that if you wait till the moment, right,
if the chocolate cake is on its fork, you're gonna
eat it. If the cigarette is lit in your hand,
you're gonna smoke it. If you sleep next to your
cell phone every night, you're gonna pick it up first
thing in the morning. It's too late. They've won, They've
got you. So the antidote to that impulsive reaction is
not willpower, it's not self control.
Speaker 4 (41:35):
The people who I interviewed from.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
My book, these masters of doing what they said they're
going to do, the most indistractable people on earth. They
don't have tremendous amounts of willpower. What they have is
a system so that when the time arises, they don't
need willpower and self control. Willpower and self control don't work,
they collapse over time. Instead, it's about thinking in advance,
what am I going to do? Okay, when I feel
(41:58):
that internal trigger, what comes my habitual response is it
to escape this discomfort, right, to look for a pacifier
like a baby looks for their pacifier, to just take
my mind off of that sensation. Or do I have
a mature response to this that leads me towards traction
rather than distraction?
Speaker 5 (42:14):
Yep?
Speaker 1 (42:14):
Okay, so the ten minute rule, that's a great one.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
What else, and so there's other tactics as well in
the book about reimagining the task itself. This is where
I look at this freaky science around how we can
learn to do what's called play anything. And basically what
we can do is we can learn to make any
task something that is play without necessary looking for enjoyment.
It's interesting that play doesn't necessarily have to be fun,
(42:39):
believe it or not. It just has to focus our attention.
And so we look at this weird science around how
people learn to love all kinds of mundane tasks. Right,
we all know that car buff that works on their car. Now,
of course, you know you'd have to pay me to
be a mechanic, and yet these people love it. Why
the barista who's obsessed with getting just the right You
(43:00):
know you'd have to pay me a lot of money
to work in the Starbucks. I wouldn't do that for free,
and yet they're obsessed with it. I have another friend
who's really into quilting. Oh my god, I can't even
imagine how boring that is, and yet she loves it.
Why how do you make a task something that is
playful and I teach you exactly how to do that.
There's some very simple tactics that we can use to
learn how to play anything. And then, finally, the last
(43:21):
of these three pillars is about reimagining our temperament. That
there's a lot of junk science out there, or overturned science.
I should say that people still believe. One of the
most prevalent myths is this idea of what we call
ego depletion. Ego depletion says that we run out of willpower,
and many, many people believe this, that they run out
(43:42):
of willpower, And even if they don't know the term
ego depletion, they experience something like this. So I used
to come home from work and I would say, boy,
I've had such a tough day. I feel quote unquote spent.
Give me that pin of Ben and Jerry's I have
no willpower left. I'm going to watch some Netflix and
just veg out right. I'm spent, I got nothing left.
(44:02):
And many people have this notion, consciously or subconsciously, that
willpower is something you run out of. And there was
actually some research that showed this was true about a
decade ago. And it turns out that the research that
you know, the press loved it. There was a best
selling book about this. But when other you know, in
the social science, is when a study sounds too good
to be true, we replicate the study, We try and
(44:24):
run it again. And it turns out when other researchers
tried to replicate this study, it turns out that ego
depletion didn't exist. That the studies can't replicate except accept
with one.
Speaker 4 (44:38):
Group of people.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
There is one group of people who really do experience
ego depletion. They really do run out of willpower like
gas in a gas tank.
Speaker 4 (44:47):
Who is this group?
Speaker 2 (44:49):
It's people and only people who believe that willpower is
a limited resource. So if you believe that you are
running out of well power, you were running out of
self control. It becomes true. And so much of our
beliefs these days are self limiting. Principally, this idea that
technology is addicting you, it's hijacking your brains. Your kids
(45:12):
won't stop playing video games because of these algorithms. If
you believe it's true, it leads to what's called learned helplessness.
And that's exactly what the ego depletion study shows. So
what we want to do is to reimagine our temperament,
to realize that we are not a fixed self, that
we can reimagine our capabilities and only keep the identities
that serve us versus the identity that we are serving.
Speaker 1 (45:33):
Such an important piece This idea of I'm the kind
of person who and we are attached to these ideas
that simply aren't true. They're just their patterns of behavior
that we have over identified with. I often say, you know,
it's not you, it's your approach. You know, it's this
idea that we can be different with the proper tools
(45:56):
and techniques and skill sets.
Speaker 4 (45:58):
Absolutely, that's exactly right.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
I'm saying that, you know, having an identity is a
bad thing. In fact, one of the last chapters in
the book is about how you can reshape your identity
to make what's called an identity pact. So I want
people to go from these self limiting beliefs to self
enhancing beliefs.
Speaker 4 (46:14):
Right.
Speaker 2 (46:14):
So, we know, for example, in the psychology of religion,
that when someone calls themselves a devout observer of a
particular faith, they become much more likely to stay in line.
So when someone, for you know, when a devout Muslim says,
you know, they don't ask themselves Ooh, I wonder if
I should have that gen and tonic. No, that's forbidden.
Devout Muslims do not drink alcohol.
Speaker 4 (46:34):
Even a vegetarian.
Speaker 2 (46:35):
You know, if you call yourself a vegetarian, you don't
wake up in the morning and say, h, I wonder
if I should have some bacon for breakfast.
Speaker 4 (46:41):
No, vegetarians don't eat meat.
Speaker 2 (46:43):
So we can use an identity to help us become indestractable.
And that's exactly why I named the book what I did.
Indestractable sounds like indestructible, and we can use that, Moniker.
We can use that identity and teach others about this
practice to help stay in line, to help us do
what we know we are capable of, to live the
(47:03):
kind of life we know we deserve.
Speaker 1 (47:05):
That's a that's a great way to say it, and
that idea of letting identity be something that serves you
because they're not as fixed as we think we are.
So if we're putting one on, if in essence, in
some ways it's like a costume. We ought to choose
to put on the costumes that lead us in the
direction of what matters. If we're making it up, we
ought to make up stories that are useful and life
(47:27):
supporting and and you know, being indistractable is a good
one to.
Speaker 4 (47:32):
Carry absolutely, yep, could agree more.
Speaker 1 (47:35):
All right, Well, you and I are at the end
of our time here, so thank you so much for
taking the time to come on. You and I are
going to talk for just a couple of minutes in
the post show conversation about some way, some simple techniques
to hack back distractions from our phones and computers. So
we'll do that in the post show conversation listeners. If
(47:56):
you'd like access to that, as well as a mini
episode each week and supporting the show, you can go
to oneufeed dot net, slash join new yor thank you
so much for taking the time to come on. I've
really enjoyed this conversation.
Speaker 4 (48:09):
Oh my pleasure. Thank you so much.
Speaker 5 (48:10):
All right, take care.
Speaker 3 (48:28):
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(48:49):
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