178: Indistractable – Four Steps to Overcoming Distraction with Nir Eyal
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Distraction has been the enemy of productivity for thousands of years, long before the invention of cellphones and the internet. What is its real source? And can we ever really overcome it? Nir Eyal is a behavioral designer and the bestselling author of Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, and he joins me on this episode of The TalentGrow Show to share the four steps to become indistractable. Take a deep dive into what distraction is at its root, what factors in human psychology predispose us to it, and the framework, strategies and techniques anyone can use to finally overcome it. Plus, find out what leaders can do to help our teams become indistractable, too! Listen to this episode and be sure to share it with others in your network.
ABOUT NIR EYAL:
Nir Eyal writes, consults, and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. The M.I.T. Technology Review dubbed Nir, “The Prophet of Habit-Forming Technology.” Nir founded two tech companies since 2003 and has taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. He is the author of the bestselling books, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.
In addition to blogging at NirAndFar.com, Nir’s writing has been featured in The Harvard Business Review, TechCrunch, and Psychology Today. Nir attended The Stanford Graduate School of Business and Emory University.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:
· Nir describes the problem he set out to solve in his new book, Indistractable (4:40)
· Distraction isn’t a ‘new’ problem brought about by overuse of technology (6:38)
· What is distraction? Nir begins by describing its opposite, which might surprise you (8:28)
· How distraction tricks us to prioritize the urgent at the expense of the important (9:29)
· Anything can be a distraction, and anything can be traction (10:17)
· What distraction really stems from at its root (11:11)
· Nir outlines the four big steps to becoming indistractable (12:59)
· Nir shares a surprising statistic, and a great technique to prevent yourself from being distracted by others (15:53)
· Reactive work vs reflective work (19:16)
· Another technique you can use in conjunction with what’s called the time box calendar technique (20:45)
· What can leaders do to help their team become more indistractable? (23:37)
· Three traits of an indistractable company (25:03)
· An experiment one company tried that made a huge positive difference in the company culture (27:03)
· Nir shares a story from when he went to Slack headquarters (29:20)
· What’s new and exciting on Nir’s horizon? (30:48)
· One specific action you can take to upgrade your leadership effectiveness and become indistractable (31:22)
RESOURCES:
· Get Nir’s book, Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life
· Check out Nir’s website and get your free 80-page workbook!
· Here’s the schedule maker tool Nir mentioned: https://nirandfar.com/schedule-maker/
· Summary article: https://www.nirandfar.com/skill-of-the-future/
· And distraction guide here: https://www.nirandfar.com/distractions/
· Habits vs routines article here: https://www.nirandfar.com/habits/
Episode 178 Nir Eyal
Soundbite: I kept getting distracted, and it turns out that it’s not the technology, per se. What’s going on is that there are a lot more complicated factors that lead us toward distraction. That began my journey to explore this relationship that we have with distraction and what I learned was there is a deeper psychology around why we get distracted and that distraction turns out is nothing new. That in fact, 2,500 years before the iPhone, Plato talked about distraction. He talked about how distracted people were 2,500 years ago and why is it if you say you’re going to do A, why don’t you do anything but A? That we have this tendency, he called in Greek “akrasia,” a tendency that we have to do things against our better interest. This problem is nothing new. It didn’t start with technology, and it turns out that the deeper psychology of why we get distracted, the root cause of the problem, is where we have to start if we are all going to overcome it.
Intro… Welcome to the TalentGrow Show, where you can get actionable results-oriented insight and advice on how to take your leadership, communication and people skills to the next level and become the kind of leader people want to follow. And now, your host and leadership development strategist, Halelly Azulay.
Hey, hey TalentGrowers. Welcome back to another episode of the TalentGrow Show. I’m Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist here at TalentGrow and this week my guest is Nir Eyal. He is a bestselling author and an expert on how you can help yourself build better habits and control your attention and stop being so distracted. Really grateful that former podcast guest Nicole Jansen introduced us. I’ve been wanting to have Nir on the show for a while now, and I think that this is going to be an episode that you don’t want to miss because it will help you in so many ways. I can’t wait to share it with you, so without further ado let’s listen to my conversation with Nir Eyal.
Let’s dive in… Hey there TalentGrowers. This week we have Nir Eyal. He writes, consults and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology and business. The MIT Technology Review dubbed Nir “the prophet of habit-forming technology.” Nir founded two tech companies since 2003 and has taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. He is the author of two bestselling books, the first Hooked, how to build habit forming products and the second, Indistractable, how to control your attention and choose your life. Indistractable received acclaim, winning the 2019 Outstanding Work of Literature aware as well as being named one of the best business and leadership books of the year by Amazon and one of the best personal development books of the year by Audible. He has gotten a lot of other acclaim and I really wanted to bring Nir on ever since I heard about this book because I think that this is something that we all need help with. Nir, welcome to the TalentGrow Show.
Thank you so much. Great to be here.
It’s so great to have you on. I’m glad that we finally are getting a show on and allowing the TalentGrowers to learn from you. Before we start, I always ask my guests to introduce themselves briefly – your professional journey. Where did you start and how did you end up where you are today?
I would call myself a behavioral designer. A behavioral designer, my job is to help companies build the kind of products and services that integrate healthy habits into people’s lives. That’s what my first book was about, called Hooked, how to build habit-forming products. The book was used by companies like Kahoots, the world’s largest educational software uses the hooked model to get kids hooked onto in-classroom learning. Companies like Fitbod use the hooked model to get people hooked to exercising in the gym. I worked with companies like the New York Times to get people hooked to reading the newspaper everyday. That’s kind of where my career, at least in this field, started. I started two tech companies before then because it’s crazy to be a professional writer before you’ve made some money in your life, so I only pursued writing professionally after I’d sold two companies and got on my feet financially, to be perfectly honest. After I’d sold those two tech companies, I wanted to explore this field and I started teaching at Stanford for many years and that’s where my first book came out of.
Before that, actually my very first job out of college, I worked at Boston Consulting Group as a strategy consultant, and the more recently – so fast forward to after I published Hooked – I went to explore the other side of the coin, which is if Hooked is about how to build good habits through technology products, then Indistractable is about how can we break those bad habits? How can we get the best out of technology without letting it get the best of us? We’ve all seen these days how our technology seems like it is a constant source of distraction, whether it’s those emails, the Slack channels, the phone calls, the meetings, the constant interruptions. What I really wanted to solve was this question of why are we so distracted these day? Is it really the technology’s fault or is there something deeper going on?
And what did you find?
There is definitely something deeper going on. I mean, my own story was, when I decided to try and tackle this problem – and by the way, I only write books that I need myself, so many times I’ll have a problem in my life, think about it for a while, read some books on the topic and say, “Oh, you know what? Somebody has done some great research and these techniques are great and I don’t have to write a book about it because somebody already wrote that book.” But every once and a while I’ll have a topic and I research and read other people’s books that have been written about this problem and the solutions don’t work. Today, some people will tell you that the solution is to get rid of your technology. Go on a digital detox, to do a 30-day digital detox plan and that stuff doesn’t work. In fact, I tried it. I got rid of my cell phone, I had no apps anymore. I got a flip phone, like the kind we used to use before the iPhone with no apps, and then I got a word processor with no internet connection. They don’t even make these anymore, I had to find it on eBay, and I thought to myself, “Okay, I got rid of the technology. Now I’ll be able to focus. Now I’ll be able to concentrate. Now I’ll finally be able to do what I say I’m going to do,” and then I would sit at my desk and say, “Oh, there’s that book I’ve been meaning to do some research around or let me just clean up my desk real quick or let me take out the trash,” or my wife or my kid or co-worker would come by my desk for a minute, and I kept getting distracted! It turns out that it’s not the technology, per se.
What’s going on is that there are a lot more complicated factors that lead us toward distraction. That began my journey to explore this relationship that we have with distraction and what I learned was there is a deeper psychology around why we get distracted and that distraction turns out is nothing new. That in fact, 2,500 years before the iPhone, Plato talked about distraction. He talked about how distracted people were 2,500 years ago and why is it if you say you’re going to do A, why don’t you do anything but A? That we have this tendency, called in Greek “akrasia,” a tendency that we have to do things against our better interest. This problem is nothing new. It didn’t start with technology, and it turns out that the deeper psychology of why we get distracted, the root cause of the problem, is where we have to start if we are all going to overcome it.
So I sometimes put on, TalentGrowers know, I put on my devil’s advocate hat and it’s popping out of my pocket right as you said that because it made me think, if we’ve been struggling with it probably all along and forever, it’s almost like is there any way we actually can overcome being distracted?
Well, some people do. Most of us don’t. The question we have to ask ourselves in our life, do we want to be the kind of people whose time and attention and lives are controlled and manipulated by others or do we want to be the kind of people who stand up and say, “I am indistractable. I control my time. I control my attention. I control my life.”
So you’re saying it’s possible?
It’s very much possible. The only way it is possible is if we have a clear-eyed perspective on the root cause of the problem. If we keep blaming the technology, we are blaming the symptom, not the disease. That is what we have to get our heads around. It turns out that the root cause of distraction is much deeper. Let’s dive in here.
Yes, I’d love to.
First, let’s understand, what is distraction? The best way to understand distraction is to understand what is the opposite of distraction? The opposite of distraction, think for a minute – what is the opposite of distraction? Most people will tell you it’s focus.
Focus, that’s what I was going to say.
I disagree. The opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction, if you look at the etymology of the word, the word actually comes from the Latin meaning trahere, which means “to pull.” So the opposite of distraction is traction. Both words come from the same Latin root, trahere which means to pull, and they both end in the same six-letter word: action. So traction is any action that pulls you toward what you want to do. Things that you do with intent. The opposite of traction is distraction, anything that pulls you away from what you plan to do. This dichotomy is important for two reasons. Number one, anything can be a distraction. Let me give an example. Before I wrote this book, I would sit down at my desk and say, “No more procrastination. No more distraction. I’m going to sit down at my desk and I’m going to do that big project that I’ve been delaying on. I’m finally going to sit down and do the hard work. Here I go. I’m going to get started, but let me just check email real quick.” Right? How many times. Or, “let me do that one thing on my to do list that’s really easy to tick off. I’ll just get that done real quick.” Here’s the thing – that is just as much of a distraction, maybe even more so than playing a video game. If you play a video game or you putz around on Facebook, you know what you’re doing. But distraction tricks us. It makes us prioritize the urgent at the expense of the important. So checking email, when you said you would work on a big project, even though it feels work-y, it feels like it’s productive, it’s not. It’s pseudo-work. And so just as anything can be a distraction, anything that takes you away from what you plan to do, if it’s not that, if you plan for it, it can be traction. So anything can be a distraction, and anything can be traction.
What do I mean by that? These days we hear this vilification of technology, that Facebook is melting your brain, that You Tube is bad for you, that it’s all addicting you and hijacking your brain, and we put this moral hierarchy of, “Oh, you playing video games, you checking Facebook, that’s frivolous. But me watching football on TV, that’s okay.” Why? What’s the difference? There is no difference. Anything you plan to do with your time and is according to your values is great. There is nothing wrong with it and we can enjoy it and enjoy it without guilt. As long as we plan for it, as long as we make time for it in our day. So we have traction. We have distraction. Now there’s two more elements that are important to consider. What prompts us to traction or distraction? Things that pull us toward or away from what we really want to do? We have two kinds of triggers. Triggers are things that prompt us to action. We have the external triggers – the pings, the dings, the rings, all of these things in our environment that move us toward traction or distraction – and then we also have what’s called the internal triggers. It turns out the internal triggers, this is the needy stuff. This turns out to be the root cause of the problem, because it turns out while we love to blame the technology, we love to blame the rings and dings and pings and things, turns out most distraction does not start from outside of us, but rather it begins from within. In fact, most distraction begins from the desire to escape an uncomfortable emotional state. When we’re lonely, we check Facebook. When we’re uncertain, we Google. When we’re bored we check stock prices, sports scores, the news, Pinterest, Reddit. We do these things because we are looking to escape an uncomfortable emotional state. Think how many times we check email five minutes after we’ve checked email. Why do we keep going back and back and back? It’s about workplace stress, anxiety, fatigue, uncertainty. It’s these uncomfortable sensations that prompt us toward distraction. If we don’t address those uncomfortable sensations, and learn more effective techniques to cope with them, we will always find one thing or another to distract us as people have throughout recorded history.
So it’s an escape mechanism.
That’s exactly right. Whether it’s your phone, whether it’s too much drink, whether it’s too much work, all kinds of things will take us off track if we don’t understand the root cause of why we are looking to escape some kind of uncomfortable sensation. The first step to becoming indistractable – there are four big steps – the first and most important step is to master the internal triggers. The second step is to make time for traction. It’s amazing how many people don’t realize you can’t call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. So if you have a calendar full of white space, you cannot complain that you’re distracted, because you didn’t plan what you wanted to do with your time. I teach people how to make sure that they know what they want to do – what is traction for every minute of your day – so you can finally know what is distraction. The third step is to hack back those external triggers. Not just the pings and dings that come from your phone or your computer. You know, the number one cause of distraction in the modern American workforce, number one, 80 percent of survey respondents said other people. People tapping on your shoulder and saying, “Hey, did you hear that bit of office gossip, or let me just tell you something real quick for a quick second.” It’s never a quick sec. It always takes more time. That actually turns out to be the number one source of distraction. How do you deal with those external triggers? I’ll show you exactly how. How to hack back email, how to hack back meetings. How much time do we waste in pointless meetings? I tell you exactly how to make sure you can hack back all of those external triggers. Finally the fourth and final step is to prevent distraction with pacts. This is where we can make some kind of promise, some kind of commitment with ourselves or with someone else to make sure that we stay on track. That becomes the failsafe of these four techniques.
Wow. This is why you wrote a book, because there’s so much to say about this and I’m thankful for your book and we will link to it.
After five years there’s a lot here!
We will link to it so people can definitely get a lot deeper into all of it. We have to choose our directions. I want to talk more about a couple of things, like what leaders can do to help their team members. As you were describing that 80 percent of distraction is other people, I keep thinking about what we’re seeing now, it’s publicized that open office space plans are the biggest joke and it actually really backfires in terms of productivity, and in terms of encouraging more collaboration because people are avoiding each other because they’re avoiding the other people being a distraction to them!
Talk about unintended consequences, right? But the thing is, part of it is, they’re not going away. Companies saved way too much money. It’s interesting, companies say they do it because they want to facilitate collaboration – come on, that’s such a crock. They do it because they save a ton of money in real estate costs. It’s not going anywhere. But, it turns out you can hack back. There are some very simple techniques I talk about in the book that you can send a very clear signal to your colleagues. I’ll give away one of the techniques in the book. There is this really interesting study I found of nurses, and I’ll tell you why this is relevant to the office worker in just a second! It turns out, if it was a disease, the third leading cause of death in the United States of America would be prescription mistakes. Nurses giving patients, in hospitals, the wrong medication or the wrong doses of medication. 200,000 people every year are harmed by this completely preventable human error. Most hospitals in America say, “What are you going to do? Cost of doing business. What are we going to do?” Until this group of nurses decided to figure out what was going on and why were nurses making so many mistakes? It turned out that the culprit was distraction. That when these nurses were dosing out medication, they were interrupted on average 10 times per dosing round, and they would mess up! Now, the tragedy here, and the reason I tell this story to people who are not nurses, is because these nurses didn’t realize they were making these mistakes until it was too late. After their shift, maybe the next day, they’d hear, “Did you know what you did to Mr. Jones? He almost died because you messed up.” Now, they didn’t realize they were making these mistakes, very similarly to how we as knowledge workers, we think we’re doing a great job. We think we’re en pointe, and we don’t realize how many mistakes we are making in our day-to-day job because we are distracted. Because of all these things that can take us off track.
Thankfully most of our mistakes are not life or death mistakes.
Thank God, yes. What did these nurses do? They came up with an ingenious solution that eliminated this problem by 88 percent. They almost eliminated this problem of prescription mistakes. Here’s what they did. It was not some multi-million dollar technology, it was not some employee re-education program. All they did was have nurses start wearing plastic vests that said, “Drug round in progress. Do not disturb.” These bright red vests that told their colleagues, “Leave me alone. I’m doing something that requires concentration.” So, the solution is, I’m not going to tell you to wear a bright vest that says, “Do not disturb.” What I’m going to do is advise, when you get a copy of Indistractable, every copy of it comes with what I call a screen sign. It’s a piece of cardstock that is right in the middle of the book. You tear out this piece of cardstock. It’s bright red. You fold it into thirds and you put it on your computer monitor. It says, “I’m indistractable, please come back later.” It sends this very clear signal to your colleagues that right now, for the next 45 minutes or an hour, for a little bit of time, I need to concentrate. I need to think. Please come back later. It’s an incredibly effective, very useful, very easy-to-implement tool that sends this signal to your colleagues, just as these nurses did to their colleagues as well.
This is cool, because I’ve been teaching people – I didn’t realize we were doing the same thing – I’ve been teaching people to do something like that and I would say in addition to it, and probably it’s described in the book, I don’t remember the specific page, that you should be very careful not to keep it on all the time because then it’s kind of like the boy who cried wolf. People will ignore it because you’re always unavailable.
That depends on your job. Every job has some fraction of what I call reactive work or reflective work. Reactive work is, for some jobs, it’s 100 percent reactive. Picking up that phone call. If you work in a call center, all you do is react to that call coming in. But most people have some kind of valance between reactive work and reflective work. They need time to think. They need time to focus. If you’re a computer engineer, your time is almost all reflective work. You need that time to focus. Some people will put on headphones so that’s how they send the signal to their colleagues. I argue that putting on headphones is not very effective because it sends this weird signal that nobody knows what you’re actually listening to. Are you listening to a podcast? Are you watching a You Tube video? What are you doing? It’s much more effective to say, “For this amount of time, I need focus work. I need that time to concentrate.” What I advise most people to do, if you don’t carve out that time and protect the focus work time, the reflective work time, you’re entire day will be reactive. Reactive work fills the gap. It’s the checking email, the Slack channels, the meetings, the phone calls. Reacting to stuff all day long. If you do not carve out and protect that time for reflective work, it just won’t happen. Or, where it does happen, you know where it happens. It happens after work, and our kids, our families and our health, that’s who pay the price.
That makes sense. I talk to so many people who say they come to work and they actually do their work at home later. It’s so sad.
Exactly. That’s a real tragedy. Another technique, by the way, that is really powerful and I talk about in the book, that comes as a dividend of making these time box calendars, how we talked earlier about how if you don’t plan your day somebody else will and you can’t call something a distraction unless you know what it is distracting you from. When you make what is called a time box calendar – which has been shown in hundreds of studies to be a very effective technique, the dividend of that is once you have a time box calendar, you can share that calendar with your manager. This will change your work life. Here’s the thing – you sit down, make that calendar once a week for how you plan to spend your time. You show that calendar to your manager in a 15-minute meeting once a week. You sit down with them and say, “Here’s how I plan to spend my week. Here’s all the priorities I have. Here is how I plan to spend my time. Now look at this other sheet of paper. This is where I listed all the other stuff I won’t have time for this week.” Now, we’ve all heard this horrible trope that if you want to make sure that you stay focused, you have to learn how to say no. What a crock, okay? That is terrible advice. You’re going to look at your boss, the person who pays your paycheck, and say no? People can’t do that. Stop it. Instead, what you want to do is get your boss to say no. How do you do that? You show them how you intend to spend your time, and when you show them your time box calendar, along with this list of things you just don’t have time for – we all get the same 24 hours in a day – and you say, “Look, boss, help me prioritize. Tell me what is more important for this week and I’ll switch it out.” Therefore it’s not you saying not to your boss. It’s your boss saying no to low-priority tasks.
For them to have awareness and then they are able to make more conscious decisions about what to ask for.
Exactly. That’s exactly it. Most managers just lob over tasks. They have no idea how long stuff takes. And if they knew, if you showed them in the week ahead and said, “Here is how much time I plan to spend on it,” they’ll say, “That’s not anywhere near as important as this other thing that you have on the list of things you won’t have time for. Let’s go ahead and swap those things out.”
Or they might negotiate with you and say, “Actually I think you can do that in less time. Why is it taking you so long?” And you can have an opportunity to learn to do it differently or maybe they can help you do some of it, have someone else help you.
Clear obstacles out of your way. It’s an iterative approach. By 15 minutes every week, you’re saying, “Boss, I tried this and it took me longer than expected. Do you have any ideas for how we can reduce that time?” And in the week ahead you implement some of those tactics and it becomes an experiment week to week to week with that time box calendar. It’s never set in stone. You revise it. You want to think of yourself as a scientist running experiments week to week to week to make sure you get better at how you allocate your time.
Nice. So this is a good suggestion for how to be proactive with the people that delegate to you, so now as the leader that the TalentGrowers are, or are planning to be, what could they do it help their team members be more indistractable?
Half the book is about things that you can do yourself. Half of my book Indistractable is about these different environments we operate under. There’s a whole section on how to build an indistractable workplace, how to raise indistractable kids, how to have indistractable relationships, and the first rule of course is to lead by example. A leader doesn’t say, “charge,” a leader says, “follow me.” What you want to do is exemplify what it means to be indistractable. That’s the best thing you can do, by adopting some of these practices I talk about in the book like using a time box calendar, like doing a schedule sync, like using this weird screen sign that tells people I need some time for focused work and that’s fine if you want to do the same. All of these things help change the company culture. That being said, the section in the book about how to build an indistractable workplace is titled “Why Distraction at Work is a Symptom of Cultural Dysfunction.” What I revealed in my five years of research is that distraction in the workplace is not about whatever technology we think is distracting us. There’s no relationship between companies that use a lot of technology versus those that don’t use a lot of personal technology, and any kind of correlation with distraction, it’s all about the kind of company culture that people work in.
It’s very important that people understand that there are three traits of an indistractable company. Those three traits are, number one, that they allow people to have psychological safety. Psychological safety is a very important trait. It is this attribute of companies that allow people to voice concerns without fear of getting fired. That is very, very important. That’s a cultural imperative. It has nothing to do with how technology makes us distracted. It turns out the real problem around distraction at work is the fact that we can’t talk about the problem of distraction at work. That’s the real problem, that people don’t feel like they can raise their hand and say, “Hey, you know what? This isn’t working for me. Can we find a better solution? Is it really necessary that I take calls and emails at 9 p.m. every night? Maybe we could find another way to cover our bases here.” Turns out when companies have adopted this practice – I profile Slack and BCG and how they became indistractable companies by giving people psychological safety – and when they did that, people could come up with these solutions for themselves and it turned out to not actually be a very difficult problem to find a solution for. What doesn’t work is companies will say, “Our competitor is doing X so let’s do that, or I read in the news that some company has email-free Fridays or no-meeting Wednesdays. Let’s copy that.” That never works. Because that’s not the real source of the problem. The real source of the problem is that people can’t feel comfortable talking about the problem, so that’s number one.
Number two is that companies give people a forum to talk about their concerns. So at Boston consulting group, they instituted these weekly meetings to talk about PTO – Predictable Time Off – and when they had that forum, not only could they quickly solve this problem of distraction at work, they actually figured out there were all these other skeletons in the closet. When they could talk about those things as well in a regular forum, they improved customer service, they decreased employee turnover, all of these other great things started to happen when there was a forum to talk about these problems.
Before you move forward, can you just maybe define further what you mean by having a forum? I mean, just give us kind of the markers. What does that look like? Who is there?
At BCG, they did it within each case team. Eight people, once a week, would get together to have a few minutes to talk about their top concerns. You know you could save up your concerns about how the customer could be better served, how your schedule was or wasn’t working out, whatever you might want to talk about. These weekly meetings gave people a forum. Now, the original mission for the meeting was a very simple charge. The mission was what would it take to give everyone in this case team one predictable night off per week? I used to work at BCG back when it was a very terrible work culture, and I’ve seen the change since then. It’s really reformed. It used to be a place with very high employee turnover. Now it’s actually consistently rated by the employees that work there as one of the best places to work in America because of, it started with one case team of eight people, and today it’s done companywide. This regular time for people to voice their concerns. They did it with the weekly meeting. At Slack, it’s interesting, they don’t do the weekly meeting. They actually have Slack channel over this group chat app, they have one channel called Beef Tweets, where all it is about voicing your beefs with the company. All the things you don’t like about the company. It doesn’t actually matter what the form is. The important thing is people feel like they have agency and control to effect change in the company. It’s fascinating, management helps people understand that their concerns are being heard by using, of all things, emoji. How do they use emoji? Management will see people’s concerns and then instead of a big long reply, they’ll just reply with the eyes emoji, to let people know that it’s been seen, or the checkmark emoji to let people know that problem has been taken care of. That provides the forum for people to voice their concern. It doesn’t matter if it’s a meeting, if it’s Slack channels, people have to feel like they have a place to have agency over their work environment and that they can effect change in their workplace culture.
Thank you.
The third trait is that management exemplifies what it means to become indistractable and we talked about this a little bit earlier. It’s about really showing people how to be indistractable by example. My favorite example of this, when I went to Slack, I went to Slack headquarters and it’s interesting. I went to Slack because Slack was the number two most distracting technology that people told me about. Number one was email. Number two was Slack. Everybody complained that Slack distracts them or if it wasn’t Slack it was some other group chat app. So I went to Slack, expecting to see a bunch of distracted people, because nobody uses Slack more than Slack! If it’s the technology causing distraction, they should be the most distracted people on earth. But that’s not what I saw. Because they give people psychological safety, they give people a form to talk about their concerns, but interestingly, the company ethos, the culture, is one that values giving people time to think without distraction. Here’s a really great example of this. When you walk into Slack headquarters, you will see in bright pink neon letters a sign – it’s blaring, you can’t miss it – and it says, “Work hard and go home.” It says this on the company walls. Because everybody from Stewart Butterfield the CEO and on down, appreciates the value of giving people to work without distraction. It is part of the company culture, as exemplified by company management.
Nice. I love it. Great stories, thank you so much. And we will link to the book of course in the show notes so that people can read all the other stories. You have a lot of really actionable suggestions and advice and we’re going to share one specific action tip, but what’s new and exciting on your horizon Nir? What is energizing you these days?
I am really trying to preach the gospel of helping people become in distractible. It took me five years to write this book and I really do think it changed corporate America and I think it can change our lives in many positive ways. I’m doing a lot of speaking and consulting and webinars and workshops to help people adopt these tactics. That’s my life right now. I’m on a mission.
And book launch and book tour. I love it. It’s a good mission and people need your help so thank you for that. What is one specific action that TalentGrowers can take today, tomorrow, this week, that can help them upgrade their own indistractiblity?
The simplest thing you can do, perhaps is the most important, is to reassess your beliefs around distraction. I think many of us have been told in the popular press, there’s nothing we can do about this problem. That it’s email’s fault, that it’s Facebook’s fault, that it’s the iPhone’s fault. That actually has been known to lead to what we call learned helplessness. When we think there’s nothing we can do about the problem, we don’t even try and fix it. And so if there’s one mantra I want people to remember, it’s the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. That distraction, at the end of the day, is about an impulse control problem. So when we do something right now – we eat that piece of chocolate cake, we check that email when we really should be doing something else, that impulsiveness is what distracts us. But the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. One of the things that we as human beings can do that no other animal on the face of the earth can do is we can see into the future. We can predict what is going to happen with greater fidelity than any other animal on the face of the earth. And that means, therefore, that we can prevent getting distracted. There is no distraction more powerful than we are, if we plan ahead. If you leave it to the last minute, if the chocolate cake is on the fork on its way to your mouth, you’re going to eat it. If the cigarette is lit and in your hand, you’re going to smoke it. If you sleep next to your cell phone every morning and it is closer to you than your lover is, you’re going to pick up the cell phone first thing. You’ve already lost. They’re going to get you. But if you plan ahead, if you take steps today to make sure you don’t even need any will power, you don’t need self control, those things don’t work. What you need, in fact, is a system to become indistractable.
So a system, that’s definitely not like a one-action thing. So, recognizing that it is within you and that it’s the system that you build, that’s the one thing you can do? And what’s one actionable system building thing you could do?
A lot of people want the tactics. What do I do? But more important than tactics is strategy. Tactics is what you do. Strategy is why you do it. So the four basic steps are master the internal triggers – and there are 100 tactics around how do I cope with those internal triggers? That’s all there and they’re very accessible. But it’s more important to remember the four basic strategies, not the nitty gritty tactics. Turn off notifications, anybody can do that, that’s kindergarten stuff. What you need to understand is why do you have to do those things? Where do they fit into the larger picture? It’s those four basic steps of master the internal triggers, make time for traction, hack back the external triggers and prevent distraction with pacts. Even if you don’t read the book, that’s fine. If you understand the strategies you’ll be able to come up with your own tactics. I’ll give you plenty of tactics in the book, but let me tell you, the strategy is more important than the tactic.
Loud and clear. I love it. Nir, thank you so much. Thank you for sharing your insights with the TalentGrowers. I know people are going to want to learn more from you and about you. Where should they check you out online, on social, where are the best places to go?
On my website it’s NirandFar.com. If you go to NirandFar, there’s actually a complementary 80-page workbook. It’s completely free. It guides you on the journey to becoming indistractable. If you do end up getting the book, do yourself a favor and keep the order number if you buy it from Amazon or your local bookstore. Go to Indistractable.com, enter in that order number, and you’ll get access to a free video course. It’s a multimedia course that helps compliment the book that will help you on this path as well. That’s all at Indistractable.com.
I love it. That’s great. I think people are going to go clamoring for that. Thank you. I appreciate your time, thank you so much Nir.
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Wrapping up… Okay TalentGrowers. There you have it. You need to change your strategy and become indistractable by changing how you think about distraction. I hope that you enjoyed this episode with Nir Eyal and I would love to know what you thought about it. I definitely encourage you to take action and then tell me about it so I can know how this podcast had a positive effect on you. I bring it to you every Tuesday so that it can improve your life and your leadership skills, most importantly. Thanks for listening. That’s it for this week’s show. I’m Halelly Azulay, your leadership development strategist here at TalentGrow, and TalentGrow is my leadership development company that I founded in 2006 to develop leaders that people actually want to follow. TalentGrow sponsors this show so that you can have it every Tuesday for free. I hope you enjoyed it. I want to know what you thought of it and I want to hear from you about what you’d like to have me cover in the future. Either in interviews with experts or on solo episodes. Thanks for listening and until the next time, make today great.
Thanks for listening to the TalentGrow Show, where we help you develop your talent to become the kind of leader that people want to follow. For more information, visit TalentGrow.com.
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Intro/outro music: "Why-Y" by Esta