I went to Alibaba and I bought myself one of these flip phones from China, like we used to have in the 1990s with no apps, no internet connection. And then I got myself a word processor off of eBay so that I could just sit down and write and do the important stuff. And even when I stopped using all the technology, even when I got rid of all the apps, I would sit down at my desk and I'd say, oh, you know what? There's that book that I've been meaning what to do some research in or let me just clean off my desk real quick or you know what I should take out the trash.
getting distracted because the problem is not our technology. The problem is our inability to deal with discomfort. So what I have adopted for myself and what I advise anyone who finds themselves in this situation is to always identify what is that internal trigger? What is that itch that you are looking to escape?
when you get distracted, because that is the source of 90% of our distractions. It's not the Ping's Dings and Rings. It's the feelings. But to me, that's incredibly empowering, because once you realize, wait a minute, just a feeling. It's all it is. It's just an emotion. Then you can have tools ready to go. You can have arrows in your quiver ready to take out as soon as you feel that discomfort.
Today, my guest is Nir Ayal. Nir is the author of two best-selling books, Hooked, How to Build Habit Forming Products, and Indestractable, How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. Nir spends his time teaching and consulting at the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. His books have sold over 1 million copies in over 30 languages.
In our conversation, we get very tactical about how to become less distractible and how to get better at focusing on doing the work that you know you need to do. NIR shares at least a dozen tools and tricks that you can put into place today to help you stay focused and avoid getting distracted. After this conversation, I've already implemented some of these tactics and they're actually working. If you find these helpful or you want to go deeper, definitely check out NIR's book, Indestractable.
With that, here is near IAL after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Vanta, helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate your growth. Thousands of fast-growing companies like Gusto, Com, Quora, and Modern Treasury trust Vanta to help build, scale, manage, and demonstrate their security compliance programs and get ready for audits in weeks, not months.
By offering the most in-demand security and privacy frameworks such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA, and many more, Vanta helps companies obtain the reports they need to accelerate growth, build efficient compliance processes, mitigate risks to their businesses, and build trust with external stakeholders. Over 5,000 fast-growing companies use Vanta to automate up to 90% of the work involved with SOC 2 and these other frameworks.
For a limited time, Lenny's podcast listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Go to Vanta.com slash Lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash Lenny to learn more and to claim your discounts. Get started today. You fell in love with building products for a reason, but sometimes the day to day reality is a little different than you imagined.
Instead of dreaming up big ideas, talking to customers, and crafting a strategy, you're drowning in spreadsheets and roadmap updates, and you're spending your days basically putting out fires. A better way is possible. Introducing JIRA Product Discovery, the new prioritization and road mapping tool built for product teams by Atlassian. With JIRA Product Discovery, you can gather all your product ideas and insights in one place and prioritize confidently, finally replacing those endless spreadsheets.
Create and share custom product roadmaps with any stakeholder in seconds, and it's all built on JIRA, where your engineering team is already working, so true collaboration is finally possible. Great products are built by great teams, not just engineers, sales, support, leadership, even Greg from Finance.
Anyone that you want can contribute ideas, feedback, and insights in JIRA product discovery for free. No catch. And it's only $10 a month for you. Say goodbye to your spreadsheets and the never-ending alignment efforts. The old way of doing product management is over. Rediscover what's possible with JIRA product discovery. Try for free at Atlassian.com slash Lenny. That's Atlassian.com slash Lenny.
Neer, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much, Lenny. Great to be here. I feel like we have a chance to record the most valuable hour in podcast history because it could give people more time to do the things they want to do. And this is based on a book that you wrote called Indestractable, which is all about helping people become less distracted, become better at focus.
And in my opinion, it might be the most essential skill in the workplace today. And so what I'm hoping to do today in our chat is just basically give people as many tactical skills and pieces of advice and tools to become less distractible and to get better at focus. How does that sound? That sounds great. I love that you're setting the expectations high. I'll try and meet them. Well, now we got to hit them. OK, so here's the question. I'll just start really broad and let's just see where this goes. My question is just how does one become less distractible slash? How do I become less distractible?
Okay, so there's a deeper motivation here. I need help, which is great. That's my favorite thing to do is to actually get concrete with people about what their specific challenges are. But let me back up here. So this is what I spent five years writing a book about, because why did it take me five years to write a book? Because I was so distracted. So I wrote this book for me more than anyone else. The only reason I write books is not because of what I know, but because of what I want to know.
And I discovered there were so many myths and tropes and just flat out harmful things that I was doing to hurt my own productivity. And when I really went down to first principles and looked at the research, I found that there was so many things that I was doing wrong. But since I've changed my ways and adopted what the research literature says about distraction, it's improved my life.
inconceivable ways. I mean, I'm in the best shape of my life at 45 years old. I have a better relationship with my family than ever. I'm more productive at work than ever before. Not because I didn't know what to do. That's what I find is really emblematic of people in today's, is not that we don't know what to do. It used to be maybe okay, our grandparents, they didn't know what to do because the information was scarce. They had to go to the library and look things up. Well, today with the internet, we all basically know what to do. And if you don't know what to do,
Google it, right? You can find the answer out there. But we all basically know common sense stuff like if you want to get in shape, you have to exercise and eat right. Okay, you don't need a diet book to tell you that. If you want to have better relationships with your family, you have to be fully present with people. If you want to do better at work, you have to do the hard work that other people don't want to do. We already know these things.
What we don't know is how to get out of our own way, how to stop getting distracted. And so that was certainly my problem. And so what I wanted to do was really dive into the problem because the conventional solutions didn't work for me. When I have a problem in my life, I'll think about it, I'll write about it, I'll talk to friends, I'll talk to my wife about it. If I still can't figure it out, I'll read books about it and what the conventional wisdom out there written by a lot of college professors
that are all tenured is stop using technology, right? Stop checking email, get off social media, it's melting your brain. But that's not very helpful, right? Like maybe if you have tenured, that's okay, but I can't stop using technology, my career will plummet. I have to use these tools. So I wanted much more practical advice and what I discovered was
that the root cause of distraction is much more interesting and the solution is far more empowering than stop using technology, technology is evil, it's melting your brain. So where do we begin? Maybe the best place to start is by first, before we dive into the tactics around how do we become indestractable, the first place to start is what is distraction, right? Understanding that the term really, really matters and the best way to understand what distraction is
is to understand what distraction is not. What's the opposite of distraction? So if you ask most people, what's the opposite of distraction, they'll tell you focus, right? I don't want to be distracted. I want to be focused.
That's not exactly right. And in fact, the opposite of distraction is not focused. The opposite of distraction is traction. It becomes pretty easy when you look at both words. Traction, distraction, they're opposites. Because both words come from the same Latin root, trachare, which means to pull. And they both end in the same six letters, ACTI when that spells action, reminding us.
That distraction is not something that happens to us. It is an action that we ourselves take. So, traction, by definition, is any action that pulls you towards what you say you were going to do, things you do with intent, things that move you closer to your values and help you become the kind of person you want to become. Those are acts of traction. Now, the opposite of traction, distraction, is any action that pulls you away from what you plan to do, further away from your goals, further away from becoming the kind of person you're going to become.
And what separates traction from distraction is one word. And that one word is intent. I love this Dorothy Parker quote. She said, the time you plan to waste is not waste of time. So I think we need to stop medicalizing and moralizing what people do with their time. Why is it that someone going on Reddit or on social media or watching a YouTube video, that's somehow morally inferior to watching a football game on TV? It's not.
Anything you want to do with your time and attention is fine as long as it's done with intent as long as you're doing it on your schedule.
and not someone else, certainly not the tech company schedule. So anything you do with intent is traction. Anything else is distraction. So what I discovered for me was that I was getting tricked by distraction in that the most pernicious form of distraction I discovered was the kind I didn't even realize was distracting me. So let me know if this sounds familiar to you, Lenny. I would sit down on my desk.
I would look at my to-do list. By the way, we can talk about why to-do lists are one of the worst things you can do for your personal productivity. We can get back to that later. But I would sit down at my desk and I'd say, okay, I've got that big, important project. That's what I'm going to do this morning. I'm not going to get distracted. Nothing's going to get in my way. Here I go. I'm going to get started. But first, let me check some email.
Are you watching me? Because this happens to me every morning. You gotta stop. This is totally autobiographical. This is what I used to do all day. Let me just scroll that slack channel. What's everybody at the office doing? Oh, let me just catch up on industry news. That's important. That's part of my job, right? I'm being productive, right? And what I didn't realize is that distraction was tricking me into prioritizing the urgent and the easy stuff at the expense of the hard and important work I had to do to move my life and career forward. So just because it's a work-related task,
doesn't mean it's not a distraction. In fact, that's the worst kind of distraction, far worse than playing Candy Crush or whatever, because then you know you're pussing around. Then at least it's obvious that you're distracted. But if you're just checking work email, you feel productive, even though that's a distraction because it's not what you said you want to do with your time and attention. So now we have this framework, right? We have traction.
We have distraction. Now there's one more thing that's super important, then we'll have the entire picture so that we can stop thinking about the model and actually get to a brass tax of what do we actually do. Now that we have traction and distraction, the other thing we have to consider are triggers. We have two kinds of triggers. We have external triggers. These are things in our outside environment, the usual suspects, the pings, the dings, the rings, all this stuff in our outside environment, which we tend to blame for distraction.
But studies find that's only 10% of the reason we get distracted. 10% of the time is because of something outside of us. What's the other 90%? Turns out 90% of the time that we get distracted. It's not because of what's happening outside of us, but that most distraction begins from within.
boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety. That is the cause of 90% of our distractions. So whether it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, you are always going to get distracted from one thing or another unless you understand the root cause of the problem. So step number one to becoming indestructible.
is to master those internal triggers or they will become your master. Then step number two, now we're working around those four points. Step number two, make time for traction. We can talk about that. Pack back the external triggers and step number four, prevent distraction with PACT. So you asked a big question and gave you a big answer. That's the overall framework. That's a strategy. Tactics are what you do. Strategy is why you do it. So I wanted to explain the strategy before we got into the tactics.
Amazing. I love this word traction because it relates to kind of the other side of this podcast of growth, product market fit, building products people want like getting traction with users. So I really like that there's this additional way of thinking about traction, which is basically not being distracted. Can you just repeat the four steps again for people to have this in mind?
Step number one, master internal triggers. Step number two, make time for traction. So this is where we're turning our values into time. We could talk about how to do that. Step number three is hack back the external triggers. This is where we get into the pings, dings, and rings, not just the obvious stuff like your phone, your computer.
I take about a page and a half to talk about that. That's kind of kindergarten stuff. But what about all the non-obvious external triggers? What about stupid meetings that didn't need to be called? What about emails that didn't need to be sent and received? What about our kids? Our kids are wonderful. I know you're a new dad. They're fantastic to have kids, but they can also be a source of distractions. So how do we deal with all those external triggers?
And then finally, prevent distraction with packs. And packs are this firewall, this last resort against distraction that we can use to keep distraction at bay. And it's really about these four steps in concert in this order that anyone can use to become indestractable.
Awesome. Does this spell something clever, by the way? No, I didn't have an acronym. But I do have a free picture. Awesome. So let's go through this. And I'd love specifically to share it. I think many people ran into this. There's a hard thing I need to do. And I'm just going to go check my email on Twitter instead. I feel like that's a very common distraction. And so sharing, getting into that at some point would be awesome. But otherwise, let's get into these four steps.
Yeah, well, we can absolutely do that. So is that something you encounter? It sounds like 100% every time I have my to-do list. Yeah. Work on next week's post. And then I'm like, oh, let me just go check Twitter, maybe Twitter. Yeah. Do something and that'll be fun. And then totally my email. Oh, inbox zero. Let's get all the way to zero. Oh, that's cool. Okay. Now the day is over.
Exactly, exactly. And by the way, we are cut from the same cloth. This is exactly the pattern I used to get into. And I knew I wasn't doing my best because I wasn't putting in the times and the things that were most important. I was doing just what was easy and what was urgent. And that's not good enough. So the first step, so if we use this model, step number one is master the internal triggers. So for you, Lenny, so when you say, OK, I know I've got to do this big important thing.
But now I'm going to go check email. I would guess that there's some kind of underlying emotion that you're trying to escape. Let's put yourself in the shoes that you were in when you said I was going to do that big important thing, but now I'm going to check email instead. Do you remember the last time that happened, by the way? Every morning. This morning? Yeah, this morning.
Okay, perfect, perfect. Do you recall what you were feeling right before you went to Twitter or checked email or did the thing that you didn't want to do as opposed to the thing you said you were going to do? I don't know if this is an emotion or feeling, but there's just this like, I need to get...
Serious and start using my brain and there's gonna be this like deep work moment where I just get real deep and I It takes a lot of effort to push me into that, you know, not Sometimes easier sometimes harder. So maybe it's like avoiding this like, okay, I'm gonna really have to think it's like I guess it's the fear of the brain starting to really have to work
Yeah, that's hard work, right? So maybe it's a bit of laziness, right? Maybe it's a bit of momentum. There's this uncomfortable feeling of like, I don't, this cold start problem. I don't really want to do it right now. So this is incredibly important. And I appreciate your, your candor here around what you feel because all of us experience it. And we don't want to talk about it. We want to think that it's, Oh, I'll just grayscale my phone or, or I'll just turn off notifications. And that's going to solve the problem. And it never does. And let me tell you, I tried all of it.
I went to Alibaba and I bought myself one of these flip phones from China, like we used to have in the 1990s with no apps, no internet connection. And then I got myself a word processor off of eBay so that I could just sit down and write and do the important stuff. And even when I stopped using all the technology, even when I got rid of all the apps, I would sit down at my desk and I'd say, oh, you know what? There's that book that I've been meaning to do some research in, or let me just clean off my desk real quick, or you know what I should take out the trash.
getting distracted because the problem is not our technology. The problem is our inability to deal with discomfort. So what I have adopted for myself and what I advise anyone who finds themselves in this situation is to always identify what is that internal trigger? What is that itch that you are looking to escape?
when you get distracted, because that is the source of 90% of our distractions. It's not the pings, dings, and rings, it's the feelings. But to me, that's incredibly empowering, because once you realize, wait a minute, just a feeling, it's all it is. It's just an emotion. Then you can have tools ready to go. You can have arrows in your quiver ready to take out as soon as you feel that discomfort. So let me give you one tool that I use every single day. Feel free to use it next time you feel the same problem.
It's called the 10-minute rule. And this is just one of a dozen different techniques that you can use that I put in the book, but this is one that I use almost every single day. So for me, I've been a professional writer now for over a decade, and writing is never easy. I hear people say, oh, just form a writing habit. I think that's ridiculous. I don't know what they're talking about. A habit is defined as a behavior done with little or no conscious thought.
I don't know how to write out of habit. Writing is always hard, frickin' work. I've written two bestsellers, thousands of articles, and let me tell you, it's always difficult. It's hard, and all I wanna do when I write is just Google this one thing, or let me just check the news real quick, or let me just do anything but the actual writing. So here's what I do. By the way, there's a great quote that I'll share real quick about this, that I think I share often on this podcast, that I think it's like falsely attributed to Hemingway, but it's that writing is easy. You just sit down at the keyboard and bleed.
That's severe. Oh my god. That's so true. It's so true. And I've not figured out how to make it suddenly easy. It's always every single word is hard to type out. But I got to do it, right? And I love doing it. I love having done it, right? In the process, it's very difficult. But after I make the discovery, after I create something that I think is useful, then it's a lot of fun. But doing the work is really difficult. So here's what I do. Every time that I am tempted to go do something else, which is all the time,
What I will do is I will take out a timer, right? I'll take out my phone and I'll say set a timer for 10 minutes. I'll put the phone down. And my job is to, for those 10 minutes, whenever I'm ready, get back to the task at hand or do what's called surf the urge, surfing the urge acknowledges.
that these emotions are like waves. They crest and then they subside, but that's not how we think about emotions. Most of us think about emotions as always being there. If I feel bored, I feel like I'm always going to be bored. If I'm frustrated, it feels like I'm always going to be frustrated, but that's never the case. Emotions are like waves. So your job is to set that timer for 10 minutes and realize you can do just about anything for just 10 minutes, right? So the idea is not to say, don't do it. We know that this technique that a lot of people use of abstinence telling yourself, don't do that.
actually can backfire. And we can talk about the psychology, if that's interesting, of why abstinence backfires. But a much healthier technique is not to tell yourself, no, is to tell yourself not yet, right? You're not saying no, you're saying not yet. And so you can do just about anything for 10 minutes. So what I tell myself is, okay, I'm just gonna wait 10 minutes before I check email, before I scroll social media, before I Google something that is just trying to procrastinate doing the work, I can do that.
I'm a grown man. I can do whatever I want. Okay, I can do that in 10 minutes. And so for those 10 minutes, all I have to do is either get back to the task at hand, right? Get back to writing or surf the urge, which is simply experiencing that sensation, acknowledging, you know what? This is hard work. That's okay. That's why I'm feeling frustrated. That's why I'm feeling bored. That's why I'm feeling anxious. That's why I have this cold start around like, I don't really want to do this work because it's difficult. So what I do is I take a deep breath.
And I repeat a mantra that I made up for myself. You can make up your own mantra. My personal mantra whenever I feel this internal trigger is I remind myself this. I say, this is what it feels like to get better. This is what it feels like to get better. And just saying that for as long as I need to, until that emotion crests and subsides and then get back to work, what you will find nine times out of 10 is that by the time those 10 minutes are up,
you will have forgotten about that sensation. You'll be right back at the task at hand. And so that's what's called the 10-minute rule. And of course, what you're doing over time is that the 10-minute rule can become the 12-minute rule, can become the 20-minute rule. And most importantly, you are proving to yourself that you have agency.
that you said you were going to focus on a task and you did. That's the most important part. The flip that we need to change in people's minds is this ridiculous belief that technology is hijacking our brains. There's nothing we can do about distraction that our focus is being stolen. It's not being stolen, we're giving it away. And so what we need to do is to empower ourselves by showing ourselves in practice as well as in theory that we can postpone that distraction when we say we will.
What I like about this is one, it's kind of like the Pomodoro technique, but it's shorter. The 10 minutes, I think, is a really clever tweak versus 20 minutes, which a lot of people recommend. And then I guess a couple of follow-up questions. Do you do this one time in the morning and then not come back to it? Is this like a jump start for the day? And then you start like, I find out if I start a thing like this, it won't be 10 minutes. It'll be like an hour because I'm like, okay, did the hard thing. I'm into it.
I'm just gonna keep working. So is this like a jump star for the morning or do you come back to this throughout the day? So you can do it whenever you find yourself slipping off track. And so the the the Pomodoro is a version of this. I don't think it's complete enough because Pomodoro just said the time or do it. Okay, fine. And that's great. If it works for you, by the way, anything I'm saying right now,
If the thing is working for you, if your life is awesome and you're doing what you said you're going to do, maybe this isn't the podcast, maybe my book isn't the book for you. I'm talking to the people who, for whatever reason, you know you're capable of more, you know you're drifting off track, maybe like me, you said you were going to exercise, but you didn't, or you said you're going to eat right, but you don't, you said you were going to work on that big task, but you procrastinate, that's really who I was, and that's who I wrote this book for.
And so you can use that technique whenever you get distracted. It's not the whole picture, okay? So it's super important. Remember, we talked about those four steps. This is just step number one. There's about a dozen different things you can do. Maybe this particular 10 minute rule doesn't work for you, doesn't work for everyone. There might be other techniques you use. So there's dozens of different techniques just about this step around mastering internal triggers. But the next step to answer your question of, well, how long do I go for? Do I do it for an hour? If now I'm in the zone,
And my answer is emphatically no. You don't go as long as you think you can. What you want to do, and this is step number two, is you're making time for traction by turning your values into time, which means you are going to make a time box schedule because you cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. I'll say that again. You can't call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from.
For me, at least, when I would succumb to, oh, let me just check email for a quick minute. Let me just see what's happening on Twitter for a quick minute. Part of that was because I would justify to myself, well, this is a work-related task. I gotta do it sometime, and there wasn't a specific time to do it on my calendar. So I would keep thinking, well, I gotta do it sometime, might as well just do it now.
And that's a huge mistake. Because if you can't look at your calendar and say, oh, that's traction, okay, check email, write the blog post, post the podcast, go on social media. If that's not what's written in your calendar, if it's not there, it's a distraction.
And so it's not just work related stuff. Like I literally have time in my calendar, spend time with my daughter, go on social media, watch Netflix. It's in my calendar. So now I took what was previously distraction and I turned it into traction by putting it on my schedule. So you actually do this through the day you have, I'm going to check to Twitter during this time of the day. I'm going to hang out with my daughter during this time of the day.
Exactly. And so, and you're, you're adjusting it never in the day. So you never want to do that. You always want to make sure you're doing it the day before. And so what I do once a week, Sunday evenings, it takes me maybe 10 minutes a week, 8 p.m. I sit down and I look at my schedule for the week ahead and I ask myself, does this schedule reflect my values? What are values? Values are attributes of the person you want to become.
I'll say it again, values are attributes of the person you want to become. So there's three life domains, you, your relationships, and finally your work. So what you gotta do is you look at your calendar for the week ahead and you ask yourself, how would the person I want to become spend time taking care of themselves? That's the you domain. If you can't take care of yourself, you can't take care of others, you can't make the world a better place. So then you put in your calendar how you want to take care of yourself. What might that include? Well, time for rest. We all know how important sleep is.
But I used to yell at my daughter and say, oh, you know, it's your bedtime. You got to get to bed. And then one day she said to me, Daddy, do you have a bedtime? She was absolutely right. I was a hypocrite because I know how important sleep is and I didn't have a bedtime. Now I have a bedtime. It's in my schedule. Then put in time for whatever else is important to you is reading important to you is prayer important to you is meditation is exercise is video games. Is that important to you? Great. Whatever is important to you according to your values, put it in your schedule.
Then you're going to put your relationships in, right? So don't let the relationships in your life, get whatever scraps of time are left over. Put time in your schedule for your significant other, for your kids, for your buddies, right? How many of us are trapped in this loneliness epidemic because we don't make time for our closest relationships, including adult friendships. Don't let those wither away. Put time in your schedule for those as well. We know that most friendships, they don't die in some big blowout. Relationships starve to death because we don't invest in them.
put time in your schedule for those relationships. We can talk about how to do that as well. Then finally, the work domain involves two kinds of work. We have what's called reactive work and reflective work, reactive work, reacting to notifications, reacting to emails, reacting to taps on the shoulder from your colleagues. That's going to be time, that's going to be part of everybody's day. I get that. But don't let that be your entire day. Because what most people do, they habituate into not wanting to think.
They don't want to think what's important. So just let me look at my email inbox. My email inbox will tell me what to do. What's really important for my business? That's really hard. I don't really want to think about that. I'll just look at my to-do list and I'll start ticking off easy tasks to do that make me feel productive. That's terrible. What you want to do instead is to book time in your schedule.
for this reflective work time, which is where you do the kind of work that requires you to work without distraction. Planning, strategizing, thinking for God's sakes can only be done without distraction. So that fills up your calendar as well. And what you're going to find that there's never enough time for everything, which is good. Because what this forces you to do, and this is one of the main reasons why to-do lists suck, is because to-do lists have no constraints.
You can always add more to a to-do list. You can always add more. But here's what happens. This is what happened to me. I would get home from work and have a very busy day. And I'd look at my to-do list and it's 100 items long. And I think, wow, I've been working real hard all day. And look at all this stuff I still didn't do. Loser.
And so day after day, week after week, month after month, I was reinforcing this self-image as someone who doesn't know how to manage their time. And then I started saying stupid stuff like, oh, maybe I'm no good at time management. Maybe I have undiagnosed ADHD. Maybe there's something wrong with me. There's nothing wrong with me. There's something wrong with this very stupid to-do list method.
which doesn't force you to understand that there are trade-offs that you have to prioritize properly, and that can only be done with constraints. And that constraints come from your calendar. So you're turning your values into time by making time for traction and having this calendar. And then, only then, you can look at your calendar and say, ah, whatever it is I plan to do, that's traction, everything else is distraction.
I want to share a couple things that worked for me that are very much along these lines. One is booking a, I call it a deep work time within the day. This was like the only thing I had in the calendar. So I didn't, I didn't do the other things, which I think would have been really helpful, but I had a, I called it deep work time. I will slap you if you book anything over this meeting. I love it. And I did that every Monday morning, Wednesday morning and Friday sometime. And I found that. Thank you.
I would be slapping the person that book time over that slot and nobody got it. And I don't know if that's allowed these days. I don't know how this depends who you're booking with, I guess. Yeah, make it a little less aggressive maybe. But that worked a ton, just like it was like a two or three hour block of deep work time. And that made a big dent in my ability to have time focused because people weren't booking me as a PM. Yeah.
I love it. And by the way, just I want to hear more of these, but that illustrates a really good point that when the stakes are high enough, right? I hear people a lot of times saying, I just can't find the time to focus and I can't get this done and it's impossible these days. And then I say, well, let's make a little wager here, right? Let's say people, I get this around physical fitness a lot or somebody says, oh, I want to be an author. How do I do that? How do I write the book? I can't seem to find the time. And they constantly say why they can't, they can't, they can't. There's this constraint. My boss wants this. My kids want that. They have every kind of excuse. And then I say, okay, let's say that,
If you don't work out, you know, 8 a.m. Monday morning, if you don't work out, you're gonna have to pay me $10,000.
Are you gonna do it? Are you gonna work out? Well, of course I'm gonna work out, right? Usually, yes, of course. Okay, so we've established you can. Now we're just negotiating the price. So this has to do with step four around making packs, making what's called a pre commitment. And one of them is a price pack. This is how I got in shape. I used to be clinically obese. Today I'm in the best shape of my life, partially because I use these packs. Now, the important thing is you have to do this last.
If you don't figure out the internal triggers, most importantly, if you don't make time for traction in your schedule, if you don't hack back the external triggers, this fourth step won't work. But as the last line of defense, it's incredibly impactful and we can talk about how to do that as well.
I heard the all-in guys did this to lose weight. I think Sax and Jason had the impact too. I think it was like a lot of money, like $100,000 or something while for... Oh, that's also... Actually, that's what I used to finish this book as well. Maybe they read my book, I wonder, because I talk about this exact situation. And you hit it, it sounds like.
I did. Another trick I'll share that I found really full around the to-do list. I used to do list, but I've learned that I can't just let them grow is when I had a regular job, I wrote it down in a notebook. Every morning, I rewrote the to-do list so that it reminded me like, okay, I've copied this thing 10 times now. I'm not going to do it. I'm just going to push it up.
So that act of just rethinking about it every day was really impactful, but that works for people that are okay with an analog to do list. If it's digital, that doesn't go away. There's nothing wrong with taking things out of your brain and putting them on a piece of paper. That's wonderful.
But that's step one. And so the big mistake that people make is they put stuff on their to-do list, and then they wake up in the morning, and what are they supposed to do? Well, I'll do whatever's on my to-do list. And so what they tend to do is the easy stuff, right? I've known people, I hate to tell you I used to do this myself too. I would do a task and then forget to put on my to-do list. So I would go back in and write on my to-do list just so I could check off the box, right? How messed up is that?
It's ridiculous. And this, I think this something that I think really does need to change is that we have this culture where checking stuff off your list is like our little emotional reward, right? But that's ridiculous. We need to stop measuring ourselves by how many cute little boxes we check off. And rather, a much more important metric is not, did I finish the task? I don't want you to track, did I finish? That's not the important part, okay? But people are probably scratching their heads. What do you mean? Isn't it all about finishing what I have to do?
The important part is figuring out your productivity, figuring out how efficient you are at using your time. So, a much more beneficial metric to track is not, did I check off the box that I finished? Rather, it's, did I do what I said I was going to do?
for as long as I said I would without distraction. I'll say it again, did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction? Because that is the only way to understand how long things take you. The problem with to-do lists is that there is no feedback loop. There's no feedback mechanism. How long do things take you? So this is why you have what's called a planning fallacy with people who use to-do lists, which says that on average studies have found
that tasks take people three times longer to finish than they estimate. Why does that happen? Because when you say, okay, here's that thing on the to-do list, I'm gonna work on that and see how long it takes me to get it done. So you work on it for five minutes, and then you get an email, then you get a notification, then you start talking to one of your colleagues, and you never actually track how long that thing took you to finish. As opposed to, when you say, look, I'm gonna work on that task,
For as long as I said, I would, but without distraction. That's it. That's all I'm going to do. What you now have is a metric of how far you got. So I worked on that presentation. It needs to be 30 slides long and I worked on it for 30 minutes and I finished two slides. Okay, great. Well, now I know that I need 10 more of those time boxes to finish the entire task.
And this is why it turns out that people who measure themselves the way I espouse of people who say, I'm just going to measure myself based on, did I do what I said I was going to do? For as long as I said I will without distraction, regardless of whether I finished, the kicker here is they actually finish more. They get more done than the to-do list people.
because now they understand how long things take them to finish and they can appropriately time that as opposed to what most of us did what I used to do before I wrote indestructible was procrastinate procrastinate procrastinate. Oh crap, I got to get this done. The deadline's here. So I'm going to work all night to finish it. And of course, that's not when you do your best work. And it's very stressful.
Since you mentioned deadlines, do you have any advice lessons on that as a tool to get things done? What we find is that people who are very deadline motivated, they do finish what they say they're going to do. But of course, the quality is crap.
They're typically getting by by the skin of their teeth. And I did this all the time. And this is like my entire college career and my MBA at Stanford career was waiting, waiting, waiting, and then finishing at the last moment. And I could do well enough. But of course, I could do so much better if I worked with that distraction. And so it wasn't until, and we all know this basically, right? We know that putting in a little bit of diligent effort, a little bit at a time with plenty of lead time is gonna give us a much better result than cramming at the last minute.
But the reason people don't do this is because they don't understand how important it is, one, to manage those internal triggers. Like if you're constantly thinking, ugh, that project is going to suck. I don't really want to work on it. I don't want to make those sales calls. I don't want to make that presentation. I don't want to do that thing that feels uncomfortable. And you don't have the tools to deal with that discomfort. You're always going to procrastinate because fundamentally procrastination is an emotion regulation problem.
It's not a character flaw. There's nothing wrong with you. You're not broken. It's just that you don't have the tools to deal with emotional discomfort. And that's the part that every skips over is that we don't want to talk about these uncomfortable feelings, but that's where it has to start. And then the part that people don't do is actually planning out not the task itself, but the time to work on the task without distraction. That's the part that if you can implement that step two that I talked about, making time for traction, that becomes a game changer.
So I've tried things like this where it's here, throughout the day, I'm going to try this. I'm going to do this and this and this and I just don't end up doing it. Things come up or I just get distracted and I'm like, yeah, whatever. I guess one question is how often do you find yourself doing the things you set up in your calendar and then to any other advice for actually staying on track and doing things you've set out to.
Okay, so what number one did you have tools in place to deal with the discomfort? What did you do when you didn't feel I did not I did not have that like surfing the wave and the 10 minute trick and I'm curious if there's other tricks in that bucket actually but no I did not.
Absolutely, yeah. So that's the most important thing, right? And that is the most important section. That's why I put it at the front of the book, because again, procrastination is an emotion regulation problem. And I think this is fascinating. Personally, you know, I really wanted to dive deep and not only understand why do we not do what we say we're going to do, but why do we do anything and everything? What is the seat of human motivation? And I think I didn't understand it properly. I think most people don't understand motivation properly, right? It doesn't not blow your mind if you think about it. I know what to do.
I agree. This is what needs to get done.
I just don't do it. Isn't that ridiculous? And by the way, this is not a new problem. Plato, 2,500 years ago, the Greek philosopher talked about this very same problem. 2,500 years before the internet, before social media, before all these things that we think are so distracting online, the Greek philosophers had the same exact problem. This is part of the human condition. It is part of our DNA that we constantly get distracted. But to me, that's a fascinating mystery. Why is that? Well, if you look at the deeper question of why do we do anything and everything,
The seat of human motivation most people think is about carrots and sticks, right? If you ask people, why do we do what we do? It's about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Jeremy Bentham said something similar to this, Sigmund Freud called it the pleasure principle. Neurologically speaking, it's not true.
It's not true. It's not about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. It's not about carrots and sticks, but in fact, the carrot is the stick. Okay, this is where I want to give you that like matrix like moment that's seen the matrix where there's that kid with a spoon and the spoon starts bending and the kid says, imagine there is no spoon, right? Absolutely. Well, the carrot is the stick. What do I mean by that?
We know that the only reason we do everything in anything from a neurological perspective is not about the pursuit of pleasure. It is all about the desire to escape discomfort. Everything you do, even the pursuit of pleasurable sensations, the carrot, is the stick because even wanting to feel good
craving, lusting, desire, hunger, that desire for something that feels good is itself psychologically destabilizing. The carrot is the stick. So what that means, I think that's incredibly empowering because what that means is that whenever we don't do something, whenever we procrastinate,
It's just a feeling. That's all it is. It's just a feeling. And so when we learn those tools, it doesn't mean where I think people start, you know, intellectualizing it and thinking, Oh, there must be something broken with me. Maybe you need a pill. Maybe you need a treatment. Chances are there's 99% chance. There's nothing wrong with you. It's simply that you don't have these tools. So that's where we have to start is absolutely.
understanding and applying these techniques so that when you feel that discomfort, you use that discovery. What I found in my research writing this book is that high performers in every industry, business, the arts, sports, high performers, they feel the same internal triggers. They also feel lonely. They also feel bored. They also feel stressed. They also feel anxious.
But they use that discomfort like rocket fuel to propel them towards traction. Whereas what distractable people do, as soon as they feel uncomfortable, as soon as they feel bored, as soon as they feel lonesome, as soon as they feel indecisive or stressed, boom, they're escaping it with a drink, with a click, with something to take their mind off of that discomfort. So that has to be step number one.
That is fascinating. Basically, distraction is an emotional regulation problem is the way you put it. What else works in helping you manage that discomfort? We've talked about this 10-minute trick, the timer, the surfing of the urge. What else is in that bucket of things I could try when I'm just like, nah, I'm just going to go check to it or I need to work on this thing right now. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a bunch of different techniques you can use there in terms of the internal triggers. We can get into some of the more nitty-gritty techniques. There's lots and lots of them.
The most important thing here, though, is that once you have some in your toolkit that you want to try, let's say it's a 10-minute rule, it's surfing the urge, there's reimagining the task, the temperament, all kinds of things that you can do. The next thing is to put it on your calendar, which we talked about briefly. So let's say you say, okay, I've got that time when I... What did you say that you wanted to do that you checked emails? Well, we'll start on my newsletter post for the next week, or just continue. To write it? Yeah, write it.
Okay. And did you have that in your calendar? You said that was part of the time. Punch me in the face if I don't do it kind of thing. That was back when I was at, I had a regular job at these days. It's just, what I used to do is my first half of the day until three o'clock is just deep work time. I called it, uh, it's time to build time. And, uh, and then three, it'd be on as meetings. So it was actually a block of time of focus time, but it was not subdivided by the things I wanted to do throughout the day.
I see. So, okay, so step two would be putting on your calendar. I am going to work on writing this newsletter for 30 minutes, 45 minutes, whatever amount of time. Make it whatever is reasonable for you based on how long you think you can do it. Put that on your schedule, okay? Step number three is hack back the external triggers. So did you find that when you said I was going to work on writing this newsletter, was there anything in your external environment that was pinging, dinging, kids, pets, spouse, anything like that?
It's interesting that now that you say that just that fact that only 10% of distractions are from that. So it makes me, on the one hand, I recognize that most of the time there's not like a thing pulling me to Twitter, LinkedIn or whatever. Most of the time it's just like, nah, it's probably something interesting going on. But there's definitely times when I see a little badge or my little phone gets a little push or yeah, my wife's with a kid in the distance. I'm like, oh, let's go check out what's happening there.
Yeah, yeah. So that's where we want to hack back. So the reason I use the term hack to hack something is to gain unauthorized access, right? So someone hacks into your bank account or hacks into your database. So we know that these technologies are gaining unauthorized access to our attention span when they're constantly pinging and dinging.
So there's some very simple things you can do, right? Setting a schedule in advance so that your device turns off as it goes to do not disturb during certain times of the day, right? Or before you begin this task, before you start writing, you make sure to turn on do not disturb so that there's nothing in your way. On my desktop, I have do not disturb set from midnight to 11.59 all the time. It's constantly on do not disturb because I don't want these constant notifications disturbing me when I'm doing
when I'm doing focus work, so making sure that that's on. When it comes to many of us work from home today, so making sure that your family knows when the time is that you are indestractable. I'll give you one tip. I know you have a baby at home, but soon that baby is going to be a toddler. And so one thing that we did in my household is that my wife went to Amazon and she got what we call the concentration crown.
And the concentration crown is just this little wreath thing that she wears. It looks like a little princess thing. It has little LED lights. It lights up. There's a picture of it in the book. And when my daughter was only six years old, we told her, we said, look, whenever mommy is wearing the concentration crown, that means that she can't be interrupted and she will be with you within 30 minutes. So her time block was always in no more than 30 minutes. So we said, we will be with you within 30 minutes. Please don't interrupt unless you're bleeding.
Okay, if you're bleeding, you can interrupt us. But unless you're bleeding, this is when my daughter was only six years old, she could find something to do. It's okay for kids to be bored time to time. But as long as mommy was wearing the concentration crown, that told her, and by the way, me, as her significant other, as her husband, worked really, really well, because I would always interrupt her and say, hey, Julie, can I ask you this one thing? And she was working on her computer, but I didn't know whether she was listening to a podcast or a video or doing work that needed concentration.
hacking back those external triggers, making sure they don't gain unauthorized access by interrupting the interruption, whether it's with your kids, your colleagues, so every copy of Indestractable has this little pull out piece of paper, this piece of card stock, that you fold into thirds and you put on your computer monitor. It's this big red sign on your computer monitor that says, I'm indestractable at the moment, please come back later.
Now you can say, well, why don't I just put on headphones? And my colleagues will know I'm not to be interrupted. Yeah, but then they think you're, you know, you're, you're pussing around playing video games or something on your machine. As opposed to if you say, no, I'm doing focus work right now, please come back later, you're making it acceptable to not constantly be interrupted. You're making it okay, culturally appropriate to work without distractions. So those are just some ways that you can hack back those external triggers.
I love that crown idea. I think a lot of people are going to use that. This time of year is prime for career reflection and setting goals for professional growth. I always like to spend this time reflecting on what I accomplished the previous year, what I hope to accomplish the next year, and whether this is the year I look for a new opportunity. That's where today's sponsor, Teal, comes in. Teal provides you with the tools to run an amazing job search.
with an AI-powered resume builder, job tracker, cover letter generator, and Chrome extension that integrates with over 40 job boards, Teal is the all-in-one platform you need to run a more streamlined and efficient job search and stand out in this competitive market. There's a reason nearly one million people have trusted Teal to run their job search. If you're thinking of making a change in the new year, leverage Teal to grow your career on your own terms.
Get started for free at TLHQ.com slash Lenny. That's TLHQ.com slash Lenny.
four avoiding distractions, triggers, pushes, all that stuff. Is there any tools you recommend? I imagine this is a lot of people are thinking, is there like a weighted block footer? Yeah, absolutely. So that's a perfect lead into step number four. So we talked about step one, master internal triggers, make time for traction, hack back the external triggers. We just talked about step number three. Step number four is preventing distraction with packs.
And so with packs, there's three kinds of packs. We have a price pack where there's some kind of financial disincentive to go off track. So this is where we talked about earlier, you're making some kind of bet. We could talk about how I got in the shape for the first time in my life using something like this, how I finished the book using something like this. That's a price pack.
uh... there's an identity packed which is very very impactful which is what what you're doing is you're forming a personal identity so uh... this comes out of psychology of religion where we know that people who call themselves a certain moniker uh... for example if you say you're a devout muslim you're not debating whether you should have a gin and tonic because devout muslims don't drink if you say i'm a vegan or vegetarian uh... vegetarian doesn't wake up in the morning and say i wonder if i should have a bacon sandwich for breakfast now they are vegetarian that is who they are
So that's why the book is called Indestractable. Indestractable is meant to sound like indestructible. It is your identity. It is who you are. And so is it any different for someone to say, you know what, I'm sorry, I don't check every ping and ding, every 30 seconds, I'm indestractable. Or you know what, if we're going to have a meal together, if we're going to sit down and have lunch together, I want to have that lunch free of distractions. So can we put away our phones? Is that any different from someone who says, I have particular dietary preferences or I have a particular religious garb?
No, maybe it's not the norm, maybe it's the minority people who do that, but that's what I think it's going to take for the world to become indestructible, is that more of us show how great of a life we can have when we have some of these principles and make it part of our identity. And then the third pact is what's called an effort pact. And this gets into your question around what kind of tools we can use. An effort pact
is where there's some kind of friction, some kind of effort that you need to take in order to get distracted. So as the last line of defense, that's why this is the fourth step. The last line of defense, the firewall against distraction is making sure that you keep yourself in just as much as we keep distractions out. So I'll give you a personal story here. Is it okay if, I don't know if this is a family show. Is it okay if I talk about my sex life a little bit? Absolutely. I'll get into it.
It's not as exciting as it might sound. I've been married for 22 years now and we found that my wife and I found that we weren't being as intimate as we used to be. And this was when I first started writing the book. And part of the problem was that every night we would go to bed.
And she would be fondling her iPhone and I would be caressing my iPad and we weren't being intimate because we were busy playing with our devices as opposed to each other. And so I started doing this research around around and distractible and I learned about.
this technique around making an effort pact. And so what we did, I went to the hardware store and I bought us this $10 outlet timer. And this outlet timer, anything you plug into it will turn on or off at a particular time of day or night, whatever you set. And so in my household, until this very day, every night at 10 p.m.,
My internet router shuts off. So what does that do? We know that every night, 10 p.m., the internet router is going to shut off. So my daughter knows, my wife knows, I know, I got to get everything done that I need to do online because the internet's going to shut off. Now, could I turn the internet back on? Of course I could. I could tether. I could go pull out the router and re-plug it in, but that takes effort.
And so what I've done is if all else fails, if the internal triggers, the making time for traction, hacking back, if all else fails, I've inserted a bit of mindfulness in something that I used to be mindless about. Now I have to ask myself, wait a minute, do I really need to go all that trouble of re-plugging and unplugging my router? Or should I do what I said I was going to do, which is get to bed on time and maybe be intimate with my wife? It's made a world of difference. And I'll tell you honestly now, Lenny, now after a few years of doing this,
It's become part of our routine. We all know, at times, at 10 PM, that's when we need to start getting ready for bed. The internet router is going to shut off. We actually don't even need this anymore because it's become part of our routine. So that's one very cheap tool anyone can use as part of this effort pact. Another thing that I use almost every day, my daughter uses it as well, is this wonderful app called Forest. Do you know Forest?
No, it's awesome. So here's the way forest works. So it's this cute little app here. I can show it to you. I'll pull it up. And the way forest works is when you say you're going to do focused work time, you plug in how much work time you want. So let's say I'm going to do 40 minutes of focused work time. There's that cute little virtual tree that's planted on my screen as soon as I hit go. And if I pick up my phone and I do anything with it, that cute little virtual tree gets cut down.
Right? It's just a small reminder to say, oh, that's not what you said you were going to do right now. You said you were going to work with that distraction. Here you are picking up your phone. It reminds you this is not what you said you were going to do. So it inserts that bit of friction, that bit of effort. Another US for more tools. Another product I love is called Focus Mate. Have you tried Focus Mate?
Is that the one where they match you with somebody and you're kind of working watching it? Yes, exactly. It's like chat roulette with all without the dirty bits. So I love this company so much. I actually invested in it. So basically what you do is you go online, you look at this calendar and you pick a time when you want to do focused work. So one of my issues used to be getting started. Once I got started, I was good, but getting started at eight a.m. I kind of like what you were saying with this cold start problem. So what it does is it gives you this pact.
Again, this pre-commitment you're making with another person. Okay, 8 a.m., I'm going to be there, and if you don't show up, you're going to get a bad review. So it binds you to another person to build this effort pact to say, I will be here at that time. You say, okay, what are you working on? What am I working on? All right, go. And for the next, for that entire time box, you work without distraction. And just seeing that other person who's also working without distraction is a wonderful way to bind you into what you said you were going to do. So those are just a few tools. There's many, many others.
Amazing. OK, so let me actually try to just list out all the things you've shared so far. And it's going to be across all the four steps. And then I'm going to follow up on a couple of things here. So here's the mine outs. One is this idea of just set a 10 minute timer. And just tell yourself, I am going to work on something that I really want to work on right now for 10 minutes. And that's all I'm going to do. And while you're doing that, surf the urge, you're going to feel like you don't. But just like surf it and feel it and be aware that this is difficult.
Like the calendaring of your day, that feels like a fundamental part of your approach is just figure out what you want to do during the day ahead of time. Put it on the calendar so you're to-do list as your calendar, essentially.
There's this whole idea of packs. You shared a bunch of different packed ideas. There's like, I will pay you a lot of money if I don't do this. There's this Wi-Fi. Okay. And then I guess that translates into some of these other things, the Wi-Fi killer device, the forest app, the focus mate app and product.
And then there's a few other things you share. Just do not disturb like set a timer so that during the day you have do not disturb on during set times for you. It's all the time, which I try to do too. And then obviously let your like wife through important contexts and then make your family aware of when you're going to be working so that they know not to bother you. Maybe this crown concentration crown.
Yeah. Okay. Before we move on to a different topic, I'd love to spend a little more time in that first bucket because it feels like your point is so important that most of our distraction is this emotional regulation that we just don't like discomfort. And so I'm curious what else you could teach me and teach people about getting better at managing that emotion. Is there any other tactics in that bucket that might be useful?
Absolutely. So there's three big buckets in terms of mastering these internal triggers. We can reimagine the task, reimagine the trigger, and reimagine our temperament. And so maybe I can give you one big tip I think that I discovered when it came to reimaging our temperament. If we think about our temperament as these immutable qualities, as the attributes of our personality,
We have to be very careful about what kind of identity and what kind of limitations we let in to our psyche. And I'll give you a good example of this. So a few years ago, there was this line of research around what's called ego depletion. Ego depletion is this idea that willpower is a depletable resource. And you saw some researchers doing studies that seem to suggest that willpower was something that you run out of, right? That you're not for me.
I would come home after a long day of work and I'd say, oh, I'm out of willpower. I'm, quote, spent. There's nothing else I can do. Give me that pint of Ben and Jerry's. I'm going to sit in front of the TV because I'm spent. There's no more willpower left. And some of these studies seem to suggest there was this phenomenon except the problem became that, you know, in the social sciences, when something sounds a little fishy, when it sounds too good to be true, the scientific process dictates that we should rerun those studies.
And it turns out that these studies around ego depletion could not replicate. We couldn't find the effect. And so there was one exception to this. And that exception was in the study done by Carol Dweck. She's one of my research heroes. She wrote the book Mindset you're probably familiar with. And she did a fascinating study where she found that that ego depletion does actually exist.
But only for one group of people who was that group of people. It turns out that the only people who really did run out of willpower the way you would run out of charge and a battery were people who believed that willpower was a limited resource.
And so this is super, super important to not let ourselves be influenced by these ridiculous notions, these beliefs that somehow we are impaired, that we are limited, that we're addicted. That's a really popular one that we're all addicted. We're all, you know, unable to control these, these behaviors. That is not true. And in fact, it's only true if you believe it
is true. So it should be part of our practice to tell ourselves we are indestructible. Indestructible is meant to sound like indestructible. It's meant to sound like a superpower. So repeating to yourself that you're not limited. It's just about your actions. It's not a moral failing. It's not something wrong with you. It's not that technologies are doing it to you. It's simply a series of behaviors that we have to practice.
I really like that. That's a theme that comes up a lot. On the podcast is people that feel like they're responsible for their situation, like they didn't cause it, but they're still responsible. Like it is their responsibility to deal with it, end up being more successful. And there's this idea of just being high agency.
So one of the things that I think is important to remember here is that there's a lot of things that the individual can do. I think there's a lot of things that we can do within a company or an organization as well that we can make our workplace indestructible. Then I think there's some things that we can do on a societal level. And these are called social antibodies that social antibodies are when society spreads norms or manners that help us overcome otherwise antisocial or destructive behaviors. And so the good news is
that we have been here before with something far more harmful and far more addictive than social media or technology distractions. If you think back to the 1980s, I was a child of the 80s, I remember the 80s very well, and I remember,
When I was growing up, we had ashtrays in our living room. In fact, everyone I knew had ashtrays in their living room. And today, that sounds crazy, right? You couldn't imagine walking into someone's home and lighting up a cigarette. If someone did that to you, that would be crazy, right? No one would do that today. Well, why? Why did that happen? Why would it be so incredibly rude to just walk into someone's home and light up a cigarette? Well, because there wasn't a law that said that that was illegal, right? Someone's private residence.
What changed was that we have new norms, new manners around how to behave when it comes to these destructive behaviors. I remember when my mom took away those ashtrays in our living room and she threw them away, and one day one of her friends came over and took out a pack of cigarettes and was about to light a cigarette.
My mom said, no, no, no. I'm sorry. We are non-smokers. You see, she had this now and that she used to describe herself. She described herself as a non-smoker. If you'd like to smoke, if you'd kindly go outside, and of course that's the norm today, but it took brave people like my mom to go against the trend for these anti-social behaviors. So I think the same thing is going to happen when it comes to becoming indestractable. Frankly, with or without my book, my book was intended to accelerate this process, but we're going to do this naturally, right?
What humans do throughout history when it comes to figuring out how to use a technology well is that we adapt and we adopt. We adapt to the technology by forming new behaviors, new norms. So just like my mom said, hey, we are non-smokers. That's my identity. I'm a non-smoker. If you'd like to smoke, you're gonna have to go outside. We need to be comfortable with saying, hey, we are indestractable.
If someone sits down with you across the table and you're having a nice conversation, they take out their funds. Hey, hey, if we're going to have a conversation, let's be here both in body and mind. That means putting these devices outside of meetings. If we're going to have a business meeting or a personal meeting, we're going to declare these no-phone zones, because that's who we are. We want to be indestractable.
So we adopt these new behaviors and we see that happening already. And then we adapt to these behaviors, I should say, with these new norms. And then we adopt new technologies that help us fight the bad aspects of the last generation of technology. And that's what we have always done. In fact,
Right now there's an explosion of tech companies that are making a lot of money. A lot of these apps and startups are making money with tools to help fix the last generation of technology. And so there's all kinds of tools listed in my book from Forest and Focus made all kinds of tools that can help us put technology in its place, ironically enough, with new and better technology.
You've touched on this point that I want to come back to around how you're not as confident that we're as addicted to technology and apps as we think. And I think that's really important. I'm excited to chat about it before we get there. I wanted to chat and follow this threat, essentially, of becoming indestructible at work and building a company, essentially, that helps your teammates become less distractible. What advice would you give to leaders at companies to help employees at the company have better focus, essentially?
A lot of folks that I've worked with in the past have said, look, I can become indestructible. I'll follow these four steps. Fantastic. I'm indestructible. What if my company is not indestructible? How do I help other people become indestructible? Or what if my boss is not indestructible and they're constantly asking me and pinging and dinging me for stuff and I'm not able to do my best work? So what do I do about that?
So there's a whole section in the book on how to build an indestructible workplace. And what I discovered was in the research in writing this book is that indestructible companies have three traits. And so the first trait is that indestructible companies provide employees with what's called psychological safety. This comes out of the research from Amy Edmondson at the Harvard Business School. And what she discovered was that
Truly, that companies have to provide employees with psychological safety, meaning if you can't talk about a problem, if you can't raise your hand and say, hey, you know what? I'm just not able to do my best work when I'm constantly expected to reply to every email, to every notification, every 30 seconds. I can't do my best work. If you can't talk about this problem,
challenge. The second trait is employees need a forum to talk about this problem. So in researching this book, I ask people what's the most distracting technology? What technology in the workplace do you find to be most distracting? Most distracting. The number two was some kind of group messaging service and Slack was mentioned the most number of times. By the way, number one was email. Number two was some kind of group messaging platform.
Slack was mentioned the most often, and so I went to visit Slack headquarters. I went to go see my friend Amir, who used to work there at the time, and I knocked on the door, and I expected to see a company that was incredibly distracted, because if it was the technology that was the source of the problem, nobody uses Slack more than Slack. They should be the most distracted company on Earth, but that's not what I found at all.
Because Slack, in fact, embodied these three attributes. They gave people psychological safety. They gave people a forum to talk about these problems. How did they do that? They actually created Slack channels at Slack. They had one Slack channel called Beef Tweets. Beef Tweets was a channel where people could talk about their beef with a company.
And it wasn't that necessarily management had to fix every problem. That's not the point is that they had to acknowledge that employees' voices were being heard. And how did they do that? Surprisingly enough, they did it with emoji. So when a problem that an employee mentioned was fixed, they sent the green check mark emoji. But if it was a problem that maybe couldn't be fixed, but what they wanted to acknowledge that management had seen it, they would send the eyes emoji.
And so the important thing here is to give employees some kind of form. Could be a Slack channel, could be another case study in the book is the Boston Consulting Group, which I used to work at. They've gone from one of the most distractible companies to today. They're ranked as one of the best places to work in America. They have these meetings where they talk about PTO, predictable time off. And so they completely change that organizational culture by following these steps as well. The last, the third attribute, which is the most important of the three,
is that management must exemplify what it means to be indestructible, because culture is like water. It flows downhill. And so people will look to management to see how they behave, and they will act in accordance with those expectations. So at Slack company headquarters, in the company canteen, it says in bright pink letters, it says, work hard and go home.
Work hard and go home. That is not something you would expect to see at a hard-charging Silicon Valley startup, but that's what you see there because everybody in the company, this was before the acquisition. I don't know what it's like now, but when I wrote the book, this was certainly the case that everybody from Stewart Butterfield on down, the CEO on down, believed that to do people's best work, they had to work without distractions. So if you use Slack on nights and weekends,
You were told that's not what we do here. You were reprimanded because that was not part of the company culture. So it's really those three traits, psychological safety, a form to talk about these problems and management has to exemplify what it means to be indestructible.
I want to move to a different topic, but before we do, is there one thing or maybe two things that a listener can do, say today or tomorrow or this week that would make it significant dent on their ability to focus and avoid distraction? I would say understanding these four steps of master the internal triggers, make time for traction, hack back the external triggers and preventing distraction with packs. If you can do one small thing in each of those four strategies, one small thing,
That's a wonderful, wonderful first step. It doesn't, you have to do everything in the book. I'm giving you many of different options, but one small thing in each of those categories is huge. Now, when it comes to the workplace,
One of the benefits of making a time box calendar is that you have a physical artifact, right? You have something that you can print out and show to other people. And so I hear this a lot when it comes to people who say, okay, I'm indestructible, but my boss isn't. What do I do, right? I have, I'm constantly pinged and ding for my boss. How do I get control over my time? Here's what you do. This is called schedule sinking or managing your manager. Here's what happens.
You print out your calendar or you show it to them on your screen and you say, hey, boss, I need 10 minutes with you Monday morning. Is that okay? Can I get 10 minutes with you? And now what you're going to do is you're going to show them your time box calendar for your working hours. You're going to say, okay, boss, you see, here's my time for email. Here's my time for that meeting. You asked me to go to here's time for that big project I'm working on. Now, you see this other piece of paper? Okay. You see this other list here? This is a list of things you've asked me to do that I'm having trouble fitting into my calendar.
So what I'm helping you do here is avoiding the worst piece of personal productivity advice. The worst piece of personal productivity advice is if you want to be better at time management, you need to learn how to say no.
What kind of stupid advice is that only a tenured professor who can't get fired would give you that kind of stupid advice. If you tell your boss, no, you're going to get fired. That's dumb. You don't tell your boss, no. You ask your boss to help you prioritize. That is your boss's most important job, is to prioritize.
So you're not saying no. You're saying, here's my calendar. Here's this list of stuff you've asked me to do. Help me prioritize. And here's what's going to happen. Your boss is going to look at your calendar and say, you know what? That meeting, you really don't need to be at that meeting. But that thing on that piece of paper that you listed over here, that's way more important. Can you swap that out?
And let me tell you, I've started three companies, I've sold two so far, and bosses, your manager will worship the ground you walk on, because we're all wondering, what is it that you're doing? And I know we have to trust our employees, et cetera, et cetera, yes, but we're still wondering, hey, that thing that you said was gonna be done isn't done, why not? How are you spending your time? So if you can proactively,
Sit down with your boss so that they understand how you are spending your time. And again, this takes maybe 10 minutes. You do this schedule sync process that not only works really well in the workplace, it's life changing. It also works really well at home. So my wife and I used to have conflicts over, you know, did you, you know, who's going to pick up our daughter and why didn't you take out the trash and we would have these conflicts because we didn't synchronize our schedules.
Well, now we take maybe five minutes a week. Sunday evening, we sit down together. Let me look at your schedule. Let me look at my schedule. Okay. Now we're synchronized. It's amazing. We prevent so many conflicts just by doing this simple schedule sync process. I love that advice. I recommend a very similar approach to people to align with their managers. Basically, I call it managing up and the way I describe it, manager taught me this is I call it prioritizing and communicating. You could prioritize and not communicate.
and your manager would be like, what the hell? Why didn't you do this thing? Oh, I prioritized. I never told you here is where I put it on my list, or you could just communicate like no. And that doesn't work. As you said, the best combination is just like, here's what I'm doing. Here's why I will prioritize this. And let me know what you think. Would you agree? You want to move it up? You want to move it down? Exactly. And how much input, right? We always talk about like one of the reasons I hate to do this is because to do lists are just a register of output.
It's the stuff you want to have done. But you can't have output without input. If you go to a baker, let's say it's your kid's birthday party and say, hey, I want two dozen cupcakes. Well, the baker's going to say, OK, I need flour. I need sugar. I need butter. I need all these inputs in order to make the output.
But somehow when it comes to knowledge work, we just add more and more outputs without considering the input. What is the input for knowledge work? It's only two things. It's your time and your attention. That's it. Your time and your attention. So in order to get the output, we have to think about the input, which is why the schedule sinking and time boxing is so important. And again, that's something that a to-do list can never give you.
Awesome. Okay. For our last topic, I wanted to spend some time on Hooked, which I think could be its own podcast. That could be a whole other episode of your first book that did really well. And essentially, this book Hooked is about teaching people how to get people hooked on their product. I know that you have this very contrarian perspective on
Are we actually addicted to technology? Is it hurting mental health? All these things. So this is contrarian corner. I'd love to hear your kind of perspective on just why is it that we're not as hooked on social media and technology as people think.
Yeah, okay, so there's a lot there. So let me explain what Hook was for compared to Indestructible. So Hooked is about how do we build habit-forming products for good? And so the idea there was that, you know, I think we need to use more of these techniques when it comes to healthy behaviors, right? We want people to get Hooked to a language learning app, Duolingo, one of my former clients, right? That's a great thing that they found ways to get people Hooked to learning a new language compared to the way we used to learn languages.
Getting people hooked to exercise. One of the case studies in Hooked is Fitbot, which is an app that helps people form these habits around exercise. Getting hooked to a personal finance app to help you save money. Getting hooked to enterprise software. That's all great, right? If it helps you become more productive, helps you live a happier, healthier life, that's wonderful. So, you know, nobody's worried about people getting addicted to enterprise SaaS.
That's not an issue. So the vast majority of products out there, they're not worried about addicting anyone. The real problem the vast majority of businesses out there have is that nobody cares, right? They have a wonderful product that could really improve people's lives, but people aren't using it. And so it's really about how do you get people to keep coming back to your product or service, not because they have to, but because they want to. And so what essentially I do and hooked is steal the secrets of these Silicon Valley giants. I literally, you know,
ripped out their psychology to understand what makes their products work so well, so that everybody in every conceivable industry that is devoted to improving people's lives can use those habits for good. So that's what Hooked is for. So if Hooked is about good habits, indestructible is about how do we break bad habits, but for different products, right? We want to build a good habit with the exercise app, with the SaaS app, with the good habits, and we also want to break the bad habits. So that's the two sides of the same coin. They're not negations, they're compliments.
And I think, you know, I am uniquely qualified to write these books, both these books, because I know these techniques work and I know where they don't work. And I can tell you, having written hooked, these techniques are very good. They're very effective. They're not that good.
They're not, this isn't mind control, this isn't, you know, we're not hijacking people's brains. And there's a lot of people out there, a lot of tech critics have made a lot of money and gotten a lot of speaking gigs over scaring the crap out of people because people love that stuff, right? I was a journalism co-major in college and the first rule of journalism is if it leads, it leads.
So you can get a lot more attention and a lot more press, a lot more invites to TED Talks. If you tell people technology is melting your brain, it's super evil. Let's shut it all down. You know, this is the classic chicken little story. People love that stuff. The truth is much more nuanced, but nobody likes nuance. Nobody likes the answer to every complex question, which is always the same. It depends.
It depends, right? For some people, uh, overusing technology is a real problem. So for people who are pathologically addicted, that can be very harmful, right? Because what is the definition of addiction? An addiction is a persistent compulsive dependency on a behavior or substance that harms the user. Now that's about three to 5% of the population is pathologically addicted, but we toss out this word addiction.
All the time, everything's addictive. My wife ordered a shoes from DSW. And on the box, it says, danger, addictive contents inside. It's shoes, people, shoes. And so what we have done by pathologizing, by medicalizing this behavior, is that now everything's an addiction. Oh, you like playing Candy Crush? It's addictive. You like social media? It's addictive. No, it's not addictive to everyone.
No more than saying, hey, a lot of people have a glass of wine with dinner, but not everyone's an alcoholic. So why do we think everyone who uses social media is addicted? They're not. But we love that terminology, right? We love it. Why? Because even the word addiction comes from the Latin addictio, which means slave. So it's much easier to tell ourselves, I'm enslaved. My brain is being hijacked. My focus is being stolen. It's all Silicon Valley's fault, as opposed to saying, wait a minute.
This isn't really a distraction. I'm sorry. It's not really an addiction. It's a distraction because then now I have personal responsibility. Now I have to do something about it. That's no fun. Can't I just blame somebody? But for the vast majority of people, save the people who are actually pathologically addicted, which by the way, I do think we need special protections for. If you're not a child who I do think we need special protections for and you're not pathologically addicted, this is a personal responsibility issue that thankfully all of us can overcome if we have the right tools.
Wow, this is quite the contrarian juicy quarter. I wish we had more time to dig into all this stuff. So you're saying, basically, I checked Twitter a lot. I checked my phone a lot. You're saying that essentially don't call an addiction. I'm just finding more things to get distracted by to push away from all these uncomfortable emotions that I'm feeling doing hard work.
That's exactly right. Again, it doesn't mean it's your fault, but it is your responsibility, as we talked about earlier, because who else's responsibility is it? We love these simple narratives. We love these simple stories of something bad is happening, so this is the bad guy.
Sometimes the bad guys also us, or at least we have a role to play in taking responsibility for this stuff. And so if it was something that is insurmountable, if something you can't do anything about, for example, children. I think children are a protected class, right? My 15-year-old can't walk into a barn or a gin and tonic. She can't walk into a casino and start playing blackjack. She's not ready for that. So I do think we need regulations to protect children.
I think we also need protections around people who are actually pathologically addicted. If you know people are getting addicted to your product, you do have an ethical responsibility. And I've written about this for the past 10 years now about specific legislation that I think we need around what's called a use and abuse policy for people who are pathologically addicted. But for 95% of us, it's not an addiction. It's something we can absolutely take control over if we want to and if we have the right tools.
Very interesting food for thought. Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else you want to share or leave listeners with? There's a wonderful quote that I really love from Poila Coela who said that a mistake repeated more than once is a decision. A mistake repeated more than once is a decision. Such a great quote.
And I think it's time that we realize that if we are not doing something about this problem, we are deciding to be distractible. The difference between an indestructible person and a distractible person is that an indestructible person says, ah, OK, I see what you did to me there. I see I got distracted. I'm not going to let it happen again.
How many times can we get distracted by social media, by whatever, before we say, OK, I'm going to take steps today to prevent getting distracted tomorrow. That's what defines an indestructible person. So I think if you really want to summarize my work in indestructible into one mantra, it's that the antidote for impulsiveness is forethought.
The antidote for impulsiveness is forethought. Fundamentally, distraction is an impulse control issue. That's all it is. And it's a skill like any other, right? We learn skills. Why do we expect that we should just be born with this innate skill to fight distraction? It's a skill like any other. And so the antidote for impulsiveness is forethought. If we plan ahead, if we know that we're going to take steps today to prevent getting distracted tomorrow, there's no distraction. We can't overcome.
I love it. I love the message of empowerment and agency. I feel like that's so applicable to product management and a lot of the people listen to this podcast and just another example of that. Even though the world is making life more difficult for us potentially, you can still do something about it. I really like just the general message that you can do something about it. With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?
I am ready. All right. What are two or three books you've recommended most to other people? There's this book called Alchemy by Rory Sutherland that I love. It's a fantastic book. It delves into the psychology of various experiences. So highly recommend that. And I'm reading a book right now. Actually, it's all myself right here called The Experience Machine by Andy Clark, which I'm really enjoying.
What is the favorite recent movie or TV show they really enjoyed? Okay, so it's not very recent, but it's one of my all time favorite movies that nobody's seen, which is Empire of the Sun. Have you ever seen Empire of the Sun? Nope.
Okay, you got to see it. So one of my favorite movies, it has Christian Bale in it when he was only, I think 12 or 13 years old. Steven Spielberg was the director, John Malkovich stars in it, unbelievable movie that for some reason nobody saw. So if you're a Christian Bale fan, which I am, I think is a fantastic actor, Empire of the Sun, classic, awesome movie. Do you have a favorite interview question that you like to ask people when you're hiring them for a job?
I'm not a big fan of interviews in general. I'm a huge fan of small projects. What I'll oftentimes do is pay people to do a small project, and then I can see their work output. I find that that works much, much better than any question I can come up with. Awesome. A few other people have mentioned that exact idea, especially at a company.
I think about linear where they pay people to do a little project within their company. They're kind of like contractors for the company for a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Is there a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love, whether it's an app or something physical? I went to Japan a few months ago and I just became obsessed with all things Japanese. And so I bought like a hundred different little gadgets that helped me make Japanese food at home. So like I had this little sesame grinder thing. The Japanese are so good at making devices for everything. So I would just put this under the general bucket of
everything Japanese. I use Muji pens, which is an amazing Japanese brand. They're just like, yes, we have Muji. Yes, exactly. We have some of those as well. They're great. Go Japan. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to or share with friends, either work your life that you find really useful?
So I do have several mantras that I repeat to myself daily. One of those is my life purpose and my life purpose. My purpose in life is to explain the world so that it can be made better. Now that might not apply to everyone, right? That's my personal life motto. It kind of just helps me re-center and refocus my purpose for living, which is to serve others, to make the world a better place. And the way I do that is to explain the world so that it can be made better.
So, of course, that's not gonna apply to everyone, but I do think there is something very useful about sitting down and saying, wait, what is the purpose of my life? And so for me, like having that mantra, which I literally repeat every single day, is like a little prayer. I'm very secular, I don't believe in anything supernatural, but I think there's a lot of wisdom to be adopted from the practices of organized religion. And one of those is kind of this secular prayer reminding me of my purpose. I love that. Final question, you're at a book about building habits. What's your best and worst habit these days?
Uh, I think, I think, you know, I still, okay. So the reason I'm struggling answering this is because, uh, there's a difference between habits and routines and a lot of things that people think are habits are not really habits. Uh, so like I was going to say, you know, exercise, I used to be clinically obese and now I exercise, but that's not technically a habit because it's not done with little or no conscious thought. It's a routine. Um, but I think that's probably one of my best routines is that I've, I've finally, for the first time in my life, really gotten into physical fitness. Uh, I have, maybe not quite a six pack, but maybe like a
4 pack at 45 years old. I'm pretty proud of that. And I'm not saying that to brag. I'm saying it as a testimony to the fact that when you say you're going to do something and actually do it, how wonderful that feels to just live your life with intent. I'm not athletic. I never was athletic. I still don't really like exercise, but I do it and I eat right because I say I will. So I think that's probably my best routine. And probably my worst habit is that I still feel these impulses.
You know the definition of a habit is an impulse to do a behavior with little or no conscious thought You better well damn believe that I feel the impulse to check Instagram for a quick minute or to look at this or like I still feel that I think the difference is that now I know I'm gonna feel those I know that's part of of of my daily experience and I have those those practice in place so that they don't get the best of me
Just long as lying, something I was gonna ask, but I forgot, is how often do you not do the things you had in your calendar? Like what percentage of the things don't get done the way you planned? So when things change dramatically, then I tend to fall off track. So the first time, if I make a big change in my calendar, I'm much more likely to fall off track.
So the more I can go from week to week with small parts of my calendar changing, the more I'll get to 100% doing what I say I'm going to do. But I would say, on average, once I have, I pretty much have my more or less calendar set for the week, I would say maybe 10% of the tasks I'll go a little too late on or I'll start. But then, of course, the idea is to make sure that doesn't happen again next time.
But there is, of course, some wiggle room. So when that might happen, let's say it's 10% of the time I go off track. Well, then I'll say, you know what? I put in too much time for writing. An hour of writing is too much. Maybe I should just start with 45 minutes. Let's see if I can do that block. I'll adjust it a little bit, because I got other stuff that I want to take care of. So it's those small adjustments within day to day. Whereas before I wrote Indestractable, it was all kinds of stuff. It was half the day that I would go off track. Amazing. I was going to ask what it was like beforehand.
Near, I think we delivered on our promise. There's at least a dozen very tactical things you can do to become more indestructible and to focus better. Thank you so much for being here. Two final questions. Working folks learn more about the stuff you're doing. Where do they buy your book?
where they learn more about the things you can do for them. And then finally, how can listeners be sold to you? I appreciate it. Thanks. So my website is nearanfar.com. That's about like my first name, niranfar.com. And my two books hooked how to build habit-forming products and indestractable how to control your attention and choose your life. And they're available wherever books are sold and what you can do for me.
Become indestractable. That's honestly, I don't care if you buy the book. If you can adopt some of these practices and help change this mindset that we're all victims, that we're being hijacked because of the tech companies, if you can start putting the word out there, that this is something that is improved your life in some small way until others about it, this is how we start spreading those social antibodies. Just like my mom did around smoking, I think we should all do the same.
I am going to be working on that as soon as we get off. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Bye everyone.
Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
