Nir Eyal, Author, Speaker and Thought Leader
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 book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.
NirAndFar.com/Indistractable
https://nirandfar.com/schedule-maker/
https://www.nirandfar.com/distractions/
https://www.nirandfar.com/habits/
AUTOMATED EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:01] You're listening to Scaling Up Services where we speak with entrepreneurs authors business experts and thought leaders to give you the knowledge and insights you need to scale your service based business faster and easier. And now here is your host Business Coach Bruce Eckfeldt.
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[00:00:01] You're listening to scaling up services where we speak with entrepreneurs, authors, business experts and thought leaders to give you the knowledge and insights you need to scale your service based business faster and easier. And now here is your host.
[00:00:57] Welcome, everyone. This is Scaling Up Services. I'm Bruce Eckfeldt. I'm your host and our guest today is Nir Eyal. And he is author of Indestructible How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. He's also author of Hooked How to Build Habit Forming Products. We're going to talk a little bit about both of those excited about this. I think one of the key things that leaders in service based businesses need to do is figure out how to create more focus. How do you create more attention to the things that are really generating value not only for them, but for their businesses with that, Nir welcome to the program. Thanks so much. Great to be here. So why don't we talk a little bit about you and your background first and then we can talk about the books and we can talk about some of the takeaways. How did you get into this? What was your passion that got you into writing and choosing these topics? Tell us the story.
[00:01:39] Yeah. So I write when I can't find a book that addresses the topic I'm looking to learn about. I mean, I don't write I'm not one of these authors that writes because they have the answer. I write because I need to know the answer. And so the way I find the answer is by writing these books. I don't like writing books for answers that people already have to tough problems. That's silly. So I look at most the time when I when I have a problem in my life, I'll I'll read what others have written about the particular dilemma. And if they've written an answer that that satisfies me, well, then I'm done. Everything needs that task, right? Yeah, exactly. And that happens most of the time. But every once in awhile. So every five years or so, I come across a problem in my life that I haven't found a satisfactory answer to.
[00:02:20] And so this happened back in 2000 and 12. I had just come off the acquisition of my last company and I had this hypothesis that the future of technological innovation when it comes to SAS businesses as well as as consumer web type products, would really necessitate an understanding of habits that I could see that as the interface was shrinking from desktops to laptops to mobile devices to wearable devices and now, you know, with the Amazon, Alexa and these type devices, there is no visual interface anymore. I could see that that habits would become increasingly important. Meaning if your customer doesn't realize that your product is there, like if they don't have this habit in their mind to remind them to use the product, well, then it might as well not even exist, because the fact is that there isn't the real estate that we previously had to trigger people. These are called external triggers. All the things in our environment that cue us to action. Those were disappearing as the interface shrank. And so I was looking for a box. Okay, if habits were going to become increasingly important. How do you build habit forming products? And I couldn't find a book on how to do that. So I decided to do some research, which eventually led to the book I taught for many years at Stanford and the design school at the business school there as well. And that led to my first book, Hooked How to Build Habit Forming Products.
[00:03:38] And the same thing happened with with my second book with distractable. I found that, you know, some of these products that I understood very intimately in terms of how they're designed to become habit forming. Some of them I use too much. And I would get distracted. It's such a it's funny because, you know, when I wrote Hooked, I had to convince people, you know, I'd attend these workshops with v._c._r.s and startups and I'd convinced them, no, you don't stand that. These companies like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Slack, they're using consumer psychology to make their products engaging. And believe it or not, the sentiment was and now I don't know, they they just seem like, you know, if Zuckerberg got lucky, you guys just got lucky. And it turns out that that's not the case. Right. That these folks really understand what makes you click and what makes you tick better than you understand yourself. And understanding consumer psychology is a huge competitive advantage in all businesses. And so that's really what I wanted to do, was to take the lessons from these companies like Facebook, like the gaming companies like YouTube, and so that everyone can understand in business how to build the kind of products that are just as sticky as some of these consumer web products so that you can keep customers coming back and using your product, not because they feel like they have to, but because they want to.
[00:04:48] How great would it be? And that's a good this is kind of this question of, you know, is this nefarious or is this, you know, altruistic? And it's how you use these superpowers for your purposes and for everyone listening.
[00:04:59] You know, nobody is getting addicted to SAS software. Wouldn't it be great if people got hooked to an exercise app or to a personal productivity service or to, you know, some kind of enterprise software? I mean, most enterprise software out there sucks. It's horrible.
[00:05:14] And they do everything possible to make you not want to use it for business reasons.
[00:05:20] So that's. AUDIENCE Right. So I took the lessons of the gaming companies, of the companies that people think are big time wasters and thought to myself, what's the same exact psychology we can use that same psychology to make all kinds of things more engaging. And that's really the mission that I'm on.
[00:05:33] Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, there's this idea that I the application and the interface designers, the product designers can use these things to kind of influence the way you interact with them and sort of create more value and make it more intuitive, you know. But there's also this element of, you know, how are you doing that to yourself and using these tools to actually encourage long term behaviors or encourage your behaviours that are going to get you long term outcomes that you're looking for. That may be difficult to implement in the short term because they're just not pleasant or they're not something that you'd want to do if we can make them more kind of habit forming, you know, to get those longer term kind of benefits that you're looking for. As fascinating. All right. So let's talk about the sort of the the distractions side, you know, making in the making, but making yourself indestructible. I mean, I guess. Why why is that important? First of all, like, why does distraction end up becoming an issue for people in terms of their day to day lives?
[00:06:24] Yeah. I mean, just look around or it's funny that we live in a time when products are made to be so good, so engaging that sometimes we overuse them. And whether that's at, you know, at home or, you know, outside of work, whether it's using Instagram too much or watching too many Netflix movies or shows or whatever it might be. You know, there's distraction all around us. And then in particular, when it comes to the workplace environment, I mean, for God's sakes, we are just drowning in distraction, whether it's open floor plan offices, whether it's slack channels, whether it's email, whether it's meetings. I mean, all of these things can be such huge distractions from what we really want to do. So it's important, first of all, to define what I mean by distraction. You know, words are really, really important. So the opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite a distraction is traction. So both words come from the same Latin root Tahari, which means to pull and they both end in the same six letter word SETI when that spells action. So traction is any action that pulls you towards what you want to do in life. Things that you do with intent and the opposite of traction is dis traction. Anything that pulls you away from what you want to do, things that you are not doing with intent. So this is particularly important in the modern workforce where we like distraction. Trick us all day long. I would sit down at my desk and I said, OK, now I'm going to do that writing I've been putting off. Now I'm going to finish that presentation.
[00:07:47] Now I'm going to finish that report, whatever might be right after I check my email, you know, day after day, how many of us do this?
[00:07:54] And it's it's horrible because we are lying to ourselves. You know, we say that, you know, honesty is such a virtue for most people. You would never lie to our friends. We'd never lie to our family. We'd never lie to our employer. And yet we lie to ourselves every day. We say we're gonna work out. We don't. We say we're gonna hang out with our friends and, you know, get together with people we love. We don't. We're not fully present with them. We're checking our phones. We say we're gonna do that hard project that needs us to do focused work. Lido, we keep procrastinating day after day. Why? Why don't we do the things we ourselves know we should do? And so that's really what the book is about. It's not just about tech distraction. It's about the nature and psychology of all distraction.
[00:08:32] Yeah, I like that. And I like the idea that it's almost like a double negative here.
[00:08:34] It's like in distractable it could you could just call it tractable because that's what we're really we're talking about, you know, how to get how to get to the traction that you really want and avoid the things that are removing you from that or getting interrupting that ability to get traction on the on the goals and then the progress.
[00:08:51] So you want to say, to be very clear, I'm not here to tell anybody what their values should be. Right. What I want people to do is to turn their values into time, whatever it is that you think is important to you, that's based on your values. I want to help you do a.. You know, if you want time in your day to meditate, to pray, to paint, whatever it is you want to do with your time, that's your business. Don't let anyone tell you that, you know, going on social media somehow morally inferior to, I don't know, watching football on TV. There's no difference. There's no difference. It's whatever you want to do with intent is what you should do. But I want to help people do the things they know they want to do and somehow don't do it, because in this day and age, you know, the fact is distraction is nothing new. I talk about the book, how Plato talked about a cross-aisle the tendency to do things against our better interests. He was literally complaining about how distracting the world was. Twenty five hundred years ago. So this is not a new problem. You know, distractions been around a very, very long time. And we love to, you know, talk about motivated reasoning. We love to blame our technology.
[00:09:46] We say, oh, lack is doing it is doing in my iPhone and everything is doing its good. It's everything else. Everything else. And it's not true. Those are what's called proximate cause is not the root cause.
[00:09:59] And so I like and I like that idea that it's not this is not about a value or a judgment. It's really about sort of this integrity of what are you doing, things you really want to do. And if you're not and if you're not doing the things that you really want to do, then you're in you're in a distracted state like you're. You're engaging. You're spending time, energy, focus on something that is really not the kind of in your heart of hearts, the thing that you.
[00:10:20] You want to make progress on it. It's something that is ticking you off that path. Right. You know it, too. So why is it so I guess psychologically, why do we get distracted as this the ah ah lizard brain that's looking out for lions jumping out at us, some from the bush or something? What's the what's the underlying psychology that causes us to actually be distracted in the first place?
[00:10:39] Yeah. So the underlying psychology, the root cause of the problem is a misunderstanding of human motivation, that if you ask most people what motivates us, not just what motivates us to get distracted, what motivates everything we do. Let's really start from first principles here. What what causes people to do what they do every day? And most people will give you some version of carrots and sticks. Right. That everything this is called Freud's pleasure principle, that everything we do is about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Not true. Neurologically speaking, that is not what is going on at all. What is happening, in fact, is all pain. Everything we do every single day, every action, every behavior is motivated by one thing. And that is the desire to escape discomfort. It's pain all the way down. This is called the homeostatic response that when we we know this to be true physically. Right. If you feel cold, you put on a jacket. If you're hot. You take it off. If you feel hunger pangs, you eat when you eat too much. All that doesn't feel good. You stop eating.
[00:11:33] So, of course, we see this happening every day with our bodies. It happens, of course, with our brains that when you feel lonely. Check Facebook. Yeah. When you're uncertain, you Google. When you're bored. Well, you check stock prices, sports scores, the news, Pinterest, Reddit, all of these products and services fundamentally cater to these uncomfortable human sensations. And so that means so here's the big insight. That means if all behavior is a desire to escape discomfort, that therefore must mean that time management is pain management. And we don't talk about this enough. You talk about the tactics. We talk about, okay, here's how to shave off five minutes and become more efficient. Here's how to do this. You know, life hack. Here's what this latest guru says. Get up every morning and shower at 3:00 a.m. whatever. Silly. If we don't think about the real cause of why we do everything we do, which is to escape discomfort. We missed the point. The point is that everything we do is about a desire to escape pain. And so we cannot manage our time unless we manage that pain.
[00:12:32] Yeah, that's good. I was worried you were gonna tell us. We all need to be masochist and just start to love the pain and then we'll be more productive.
[00:12:38] Well, you know, the funny enough.
[00:12:41] It's not about you is not about necessarily loving the pain, although that is a huge competitive vantage. I mean, if you can become the kind of person we see them every day. Right. You know that car buff that just loves working on their car. To me, my God, I can't stand that stuff. You know, I gladly pay a mechanic to fix it, you know, to repair my car. You know, the barista who is obsessed with getting that cup of coffee or the the person who you know that the person who makes quilts or what, you know, crafts.
[00:13:07] And they just love, you know, working on that project. It seems masochistic in a way. But that's in fact, if you can do that, if you can learn to just love the discomfort or at least reimagine the discomfort, that is actually a huge competitive advantage. And that is one of the three techniques. I talk about the book around what's called reimagining the task and seeing it differently. And there are some techniques. Now, this is not extrinsic motivation. Some people say, well, do what Mary Poppins said, pull, but a spoonful of sugar on stuff doesn't work. That's an extrinsic motivator. And actually, she has been shown to backfire. Well, you have to do is to learn to see the task differently. There's some techniques there that allow you to do that.
[00:13:43] It's interesting, because I think that's one thing that I picked up from sports, you know, at a young age just doing, you know, extended distance kind of work and triathlons and Ironman and stuff like that was just you develop a muscle for reframing the physical pain and being able to push through on those things. It is certainly a competitive advantage. I mean, it's knowing that you can do something like that gives you a huge ability to undertake new tasks that that may be quite painful for a while, but knowing you can push through a movement, bringing it to the other side is adamantly absolute and people could do it like if people can can enjoy.
[00:14:14] I mean, think of something that, you know, you really don't like doing and you'll probably find someone who has learned to like that work. And that's interesting. That happened. Yeah, there's there's nothing inherently, you know, objective about something being, you know, unlovable. It's completely subjective. It's in our heads. Well, we can learn to actually like those that maybe not like those things, but make them suck less.
[00:14:35] Yeah, well, even something like, you know, going on stage, you know, it's like, you know, for some people it can be crippling like that. The the feeling, the anxiety that the physical sensation of getting ready to go on stage in front of a big audience from one person can be debilitating. Another person. It's energizing. It's like a it it it gets them going and drives them to the performance. It's the exact same physiological things that they're going through. It's just how they frame it and how they kind of respond to it from kind of an emotional and frame point of view can be quite different.
[00:15:04] Yeah, that's exactly right. So that's one of the three techniques for how we we master these internal triggers. We can also re-imagine the trigger itself. We can also re-imagine our temperament. And that's probably out of the three, probably the most important. And what I mean by temperament, you know, temperament is a timeless. Underlying traits of of a person or an animal. You know that it's the way of being and it turns out that we carry around with us so many of these self limiting beliefs around who we are. Our temperament. One of the most pervasive myths that I really wanted to debunk is this idea that willpower is a limited resource. And we've heard this in some form or another many, many times. The psychological name for this is ego depletion. And there were actually studies that that found that people run out of willpower, like they run out of gas in a gas tank. Right. We've seen this in some form. Another you come I used to come home from work everyday.
00:15:55] Oh, yeah. So is that like at the end of the day, like your physical exhaustion beat, being physically tired ends up taking away your willpower, your your ability to push through. Yes. Yeah.
[00:16:04] You run out of it. There's oh, I'm spent. You know, I deserve I have no more willpower left. Like, how can I say no to that? Ben and Jerry's in watching some Netflix on the couch. I actually showed, you know, when people would do a hard task that they run out of willpower.
[00:16:17] They can't keep denying themselves something. Unfortunately, the studies that got a lot of press could not replicate part of this. We see in social psychology this huge replication crisis with many phenomenon that you might you might have been following lately.
[00:16:30] And this is one of the things that could not replicate except except the work of Carol Dweck found over at Stanford. She did a study that found that there is such a thing as ego depletion, but only for one group of people that the only people who do actually run out of willpower, just like you might run out of gas in a gas tank. The only people are people who believe that willpower is a limited resource.
[00:16:56] Ok, so this is so important.
00:16:58] This is so important because this self limiting belief of, oh, you see, I'm spent is completely in our heads, as is the belief that technology is hijacking our brains, that it's manipulating all of us, that we're all becoming addicted to. And that's irresistible. It's nonsense. And yet spreading it is making it, too.
[00:17:17] We're just going to see it. That's the tragedy of this, is that actually the reporting on the research or reporting research that says it's limiting actually causes it to be so.
[00:17:26] That's exactly right. And of course, you know, the media loves this because the media is in the same exact business as Facebook. They're all attention merchants. They all make money the same way Facebook makes money the same way as The New York Times. They sell your attention and there's nothing wrong with that business model. What I think is funny is when the pot calling the kettle black and we have all this criticism towards these tech companies when they're in the exact same business model to suck up as much as of your time. And so if you want to be on Facebook, go for it. If you want to read The New York Times, go for it. But let's not trick ourselves here. They're both monetizing your time and attention. And if you do, if you use them with intent, they're wonderful. It's when we use them without intent, when we use them as not traction, but distraction. That's the problem.
[00:18:05] Interesting. So tell us. So so what are the three again? Two. It's the give us the three components that you can cover for mastering the internal.
[00:18:13] Yes. Okay. So the mastering internal triggers is step 1 of 4. And in step 1 there's three sub steps and those steps are reimagined. Your triggers reimagine the task and reimagine your temperament.
[00:18:24] Got it. Okay. So. So once I figured once I figure out those three things that step one. Where do we go from there?
[00:18:29] Step two is to make time for traction. So traction. So the opposite of a distraction is traction. And so what we want to do is to make more time in our day for the things we really want to do. And so here's the rule. The big insight here is that you have no right to call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. So I talked to so many people in my interviews that would say, oh, my gosh, you know, the world is so distracted these days, I can't get anything done. My boss wants this. My kids want that to hear what happened on Twitter yesterday. I can get the thing done. And then I said, you know, wow, that's that's really tough. Can I see what it was you plan to do today? What did you want to do with your time? Exactly. And they take out their calendar. And it turns out that two thirds of Americans don't keep a calendar at all. It's like putting a hundred dollar bill on the sidewalk in a busy city street. That's a hundred dollar bill is not going to be there unless you protect it and once you watch it. And so that's exactly what we do with our time foolishly, is that we don't plan it well in this day and age with so many potential distractions.
[00:19:27] If you don't plan your day, somebody else will. And so have fun. Not only do we need to plan our time and I mean, down to the minute, we need to do what's called a time boxing practice of not having an ideal template. I'll give you a link to this in the show notes where I built a tool to make this very, very easy to do. Taking about 30 minutes. This will change your life. Not only will it change your work life, right, when you have this schedule that you can see. Okay. Here's what my ideal workweek looks like. Nahlah, will it change your work life? It also change your home life. Absolutely. I mean, I used to have so many fights with my wife about domestic responsibilities. And, you know, there's a lot of data that shows that in heterosexual dual income households, women still take on a disproportionate share of household admin. I hate to admit it is true. And I was part of the problem. And I would always ask my wife, I would say, you know, honey, if if I don't do something, just tell me and I'll do it. And what I didn't realize. That asking her to do that was actually a lot of work.
[00:20:23] Yes, outsourcing the actual responsibility over there. That's right. So that doesn't happen anymore.
00:20:28] Why? Because today we have a time box schedule and every week we actually just did it today. We'd sit down together and we do what's called a schedule sync. And that's schedule sync has completely changed our life because now we know when everything is going to get done. And so all those contingencies like, oh, I got to prepare dinner for the week so that she can put it on the table when it when when the time comes or whatever it might be is synchronized. The same goes at work. You know, so many managers I don't know how this happens, but so many managers, we just lob work over to our employees. OK, I want to do this. I want to do this. I want you to. That's all output. OK, we added to the backlog. We say get all this stuff done and we never consider the input. The input is time. Right. And so what we have to do is this weekly schedule sync only takes about 15 minutes where we align what needs to get done with the time we have to do it. It and it is an unbelievably helpful practice to to have that very quick 15 minute check in to do that quick schedule sync to help us prioritize with our with our colleagues, with our employees. What really needs to get done with that time in a given week?
[00:21:30] I like that. So I do I do this exercise with the with the leaders that I work with and peculiar leadership teams that I'm working with where I call it the defensible calendar. Like we we figure out what is your ideal work week look like? And we've kind of figure out the time boxes, the key time boxes. And we do it as individuals. And, you know, we talk about, you know, go out three months of your calendar because everything for the next three months is probably screwed anyway, because you've got too many commitments and you put in those boxes. You say now your job is to protect these boxes with your life and and you can do anything else outside these boxes. You can have little meetings and things like that. But these are your core high productivity, high value. And then what we do is we do it as a team. When we look at everyone's schedules and we actually come up with for the leadership team, what are those time boxes? Because a lot of times what I find is that you get you get individuals that will do their time boxes. But if those time boxes aren't synched up across the leadership team, at some level, you will end up running. You know, they'll be in conflict. You'll get collisions between them because someone's trying to focus time. Well, that's another person's meeting time, you know. So if you can actually get the leadership team and even to the company level, like if you can get companies to say, hey, like, you know what? Tuesday and Thursday afternoons are focused time and we're not going to have any meetings. We're not going to do these other things. You know, everyone's that's going to be when we also don't really get our our valuable work done. Yeah, that's right. This organizational level stuff becomes really interesting and really important.
00:22:45] Yeah. I mean, the idea here isn't to focus on the tactics. I've seen a lot of companies get stuck when they say, oh, you know what? We saw that our competitor was doing, you know, email free Fridays or no no email Wednesdays or whatever the case might be. And it actually doesn't doesn't work when you just copy the tactics. It's much more important to understand the strategy. So there's actually a a whole section. The book, half the book is about things that you can do as an individual. But let's get real here that, you know, the individual only has so much power. Know that in an organization, if I teach you how to be in distractable, right, the four steps of mastering the internal triggers make time for traction. The third step that we didn't cover yet is about hacking back the external triggers in the fourth step is about preventing distraction with pacts which we can get to later. If you do those four things and yet your boss calls you at 7 p.m. on a Friday night and says, hey, check your email because I need you to do something. It's not the e-mails fault. It it's not the phone's fault. It's not the technology. It's your crappy boss. And so we have to talk about company culture. And it turns out that distraction in the workplace is a symptom of cultural dysfunction and a lot of Comey's own. Don't admit this fact, by the way. This does. I'm not one of these people who says, oh, everybody should work a 40 hour week. Right. In France. They make this a law that you have.
[00:23:55] You can only work. That's silly.
[00:23:56] I don't I don't believe that. If you want to work sixty eight hours a week, do it. If that's consistent with your values, go for it. Nobody should tell you otherwise. You know, I've I've worked in a startup. That's what that's what it takes many times to work as many hours. And if you know what you're getting yourself into, do it. What I'm against is the bait and switch. The bait and switch is when we get a job with an employer and the employer says, oh, yeah, yeah, this is a 40 hour workweek. But then we realized, wait a minute, no, that's 40 hours in the office. But all the other real work gets done after work. And that's not what we bank for. The primary base level trust between the employee and the employer is. I will give you my knowledge work and you will give me money for my time. But if that time bleeds into every area of our life, our health pays the price. Our kids pay the price, our friends pay the price. We don't have time for anything else. And that's not fair. And so that's why this schedule sinking is so important. And understanding that we in order to fight distraction the workplace, we have to have a conversation. Right. That what you know, it's interesting. I heard from a lot of folks that I interviewed over the past five years writing this this book, probably the number one most distracting technology was email.
[00:25:04] And number two was some kind of group chat, whether it's slack or hip chat or some kind of other group chat. People just think it's super distracting. So I went to Paiste lack of visit and I went to company headquarters. And I was amazed because you would think, look, if it's the technology that's doing it to us. Right? Ethnology supposedly is distracting us and is addicting us, whatever you would think that the company making the product right, they they should be the most distracted people on Earth because nobody uses slack more than slack. But that's not the case when I went to Slack headquarters at 6 o'clock. Everything's gone. Nobody's in the office. And in fact, if you use slack on nights and weekends, you are reprimanded. You know, they don't do that there and they don't do that there because they have the properties of a healthy company culture and they have three properties. Number one, they give employees psychological safety, a place where people can raise their hands and say, hey, this isn't working out for me, because the real problem with distraction is that people can't talk about their problems with distraction. That's the underlying rate that when we have a company with what's called the unmentionables. Right. Talk about that here, because there people are scared that they're going to get fired. That's where you have a company culture without psychological safety.
[00:26:14] So that's number one. Number two is you have to have a forum for people to talk about these problems. And then number three, you have to have a company culture where management exemplifies what it means to be in distractable. So culture flows downhill. And I was amazed when I walked into Slack Company headquarters, I saw this sign written on the side of the wall. It literally says this on the wall in pink letters. It says, work hard and go home. They wrote it on the wall. I like it because it is part of company culture that this is what we do here. And so what we don't want to do is just, you know, adopt somebody else's solution. What we want to do is come up with our own solution, because the real problem is that people can't talk about their problems. That's the problem. It's like a, you know, an unhealthy family, you know? Right. Nobody can talk about the fact that dad has a drinking problem. That's the real problem. We can't talk about the problem. And it's the same thing that happens in an organization when people can't talk about their problems. That's where you get disasters like what happened recently at Boeing with the 787 bags and Enrons. People knew something was going on, but they couldn't talk about the problem because they were scared of getting fired.
[00:27:15] So let's cover a number three. Number three.
[00:27:17] Oh, yeah. So the third step is about hacking back external triggers. So external triggers, you know, these are the things that we typically think about, the pains, the dings, the rings, all of the things in our outside environment that can either lead us to traction or distraction. So this is where we hack back our email, where we hack back meetings, we hack back our phones, our desktops, group chat, all of these environments that we can do just a few things to make sure that these external triggers don't lead us astray. And, you know, it's not this is probably a most tactical, practical part of the book, but it is important. It's a third step and there's one more step. The fourth step is about preventing distraction with pacts. And so this is where we make some kind of pre-commitment. It's an ancient technique, goes back twenty five hundred years where we make some kind of contract with ourselves, with somebody else to make sure that we keep ourselves in. So in step three, we hack back those external triggers. We keep the distractions out. You know, in step four, we keep ourselves in. And so much of this this technique is about using technology, ironically enough, to keep out the technology that are to keep ourselves in, I should say, to prevent us from using the technologies that may otherwise distract us. So there is all kinds of concern. So a tool I use almost every day is called Forest Forces, this great little app, super simple to use.
00:28:31] And every time you want to do focused work, you open the app and you dial in how much time you want to do focused work for. OK, so that's like, oh people, I've seen that a million times. Pomodoro, I'm ready. Whatever. That's not what I'm talking about. The real key to this is that when you set how much time you want to do focused work for, when you push go, a little virtual tree is planted. And if you pick up the phone and do anything with it, the virtual tree dies, withers away. And you don't want to be a virtual tree murderer. I love it. Right. So that little bit of a reminder to tell you, you know, you made a promise to yourself. It keeps you out of the things you don't want to be doing. That's what's called the precommitment. Now, this is what you want to do last, OK? A lot of people jump to this first, and that's a big no no, because it can backfire. So we want to make sure first we do. We master the internal triggers, then we make time for traction. Then we hack back the external triggers. And last as a safety net, we're using these precommitment to make sure that we don't do something we don't want to do. I love it.
[00:29:29] Is there anything you found in terms of kind of social things you can do?
[00:29:33] Like I used to do these like hackathon days where I get together with other folks for a day of focused work. And the idea is you're you're working on your own thing. But there's this kind of public accountability to, you know, are you still doing your thing? And are you are you taking a break when you take a break?
[00:29:48] What else have you seen that's that other than the technology stuff that will help you kind of stay within your agreement or stay within your focus work?
[00:29:55] Yeah. Know, this is this is absolutely there's great techniques here. So, you know what what you're hinting at here is the loss of that social proof that we used to have. You know, our parents generation, if you walked in the office and you started reading Sports Illustrated or Vogue at your desk, you know, everybody would know that you're slacking off. Well, today you could be on ESPN, but everybody thinks you're, you know, following up on sales leads on your computer or something. So that that part of it is. Now, we don't have that kind of social proof. But the good news is we can bring it back so we can find what I call a focused friend. We can just ask somebody from work, hey, you know, let's let's sit next to each other. Used to do this with a with a writing buddy. I still do this from time to time where we sit down together and we say, OK, you know, for two hours, we're going to do focus work. We'll take a break in the middle. And that that buddy, that that focused friend can keep you on task. I have to mention real quick, a company I like so much I invested in this is a company called Focus Mate. And Focus Mate is kind of like member chat roulette back in the day. Oh, yeah. So chat roulette, you know, it's like that. But without all the nasty bits and the way it works, you log in, you book a time when you want to do focused work for and you're matched with somebody, somewhere in the world that also wants to do focused work at that time. So this is great if you're the kind of person who has trouble getting started. Right. So you say, OK, I'm def. going to work on that big project at 9:00 a.m., but then 9:15, 9:30 rolls along 9:45. And you still haven't started. You're still checking e-mail or whatever it might be. So if you don't show up at 9:00 a.m. when you said you would in this online forum, you're going to get a bad review.
[00:31:21] You don't want that. And so that social it's going to be pain. Exactly. Exactly.
00:31:26] So that that's social commitment of, hey, if you don't show up, you know, Meirs going to be there and he's waiting for you. Gets you to start and just having you know, it's a little video screen where you see the other person and seeing them working and you're working. It's amazing how impactful this can be in keeping you on task.
[00:31:41] Yeah. You know, I love it. It's kind of using the whole kind of social pressure to to a benefit. Yeah, absolutely. But again, we had to do this stuff last.
[00:31:52] Ok. If you jump if you jump the gun and do this before you do the other three first steps that we talked about, mastering the internal triggers, other it will fail. So this is only the last resort.
[00:32:01] So so where do people start? So give us give us a couple of good hands if people want to start working on this. Where would you begin? What what advice would you give them?
[00:32:09] What's kind of a way to get going on this? Yeah. So there's a great book called In distractable on how to Control Your Intention and Choose Your Life, which I recommend.
[00:32:17] And that's available wherever books are sold. I also have a Web site at indistractable.com. We we had an 80 page quiz, that inadequate workbook, I should call it, that helps you, you know, work through some of these techniques for yourself. I really didn't want it to be one of these books that, you know, you read, then you put back on the shelf. Yeah. I really wanted to be practical. I really wanted to create an identity. So one of the things we didn't talk about when it comes to these precommitment is the power of making what's called an identity pact. And this comes out of the research from religion. You know, this is not a book about willpower. I hate willpower and self-control because I don't have it.
[00:32:51] And it turns out nobody does a lot of debate in the philosophy and psychology community, whether wheel of Freewill even exists. Yeah. And in many ways, it's it's it's true. I mean, look, you know, if if the chocolate cake is on the fork on its way to your mouth and you're on a diet, it's too late. Right. Exactly. If the cigarette is lit and you're about to take a puff, it's too late. Right. If the cell phone is on your nightstand and you sleep with your phone every night, of course, the first thing you're going to do is check it in the morning. You know, they've got you. And so here's the thing. We don't want to rely on on willpower. We don't want to rely on self-control. We want to rely on systems. And that system, because here's the thing. If there's one message I want people to remember from my work, it's that the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. We may or may not have freewill. We don't know. What we do know is that we have free choice. There is nothing that these tech companies can throw at you that with a little bit of forethought planning ahead. You can't do to defeat them. And so that's what we have to do. We have to decide today who we want to become tomorrow and take steps right now to make sure that we do what we say we're going to do in the future. And it's actually not that tough once you know what you're doing. I mean, this completely changed my life. I've always struggled with self-control and self-discipline. I've never been all that good at it. And now over the past five years, I mean, I'm in the best shape of my life physically. I work out for the phrase to be clinically obese. I work out for consistently for the first time in my life. I spend more quality time with my daughter, with my wife, and I'm more productive at work than I've ever been.
[00:34:18] I love it. It's like the exercise of laying out your clothes for the next day as doing your future self a favor. And just like if you take that approach and take that attitude, know create the systems that are gonna make it easier for your future self, then then you don't have to have the free will. You know, you don't want to spend all the energy because it's just happening because of the system we put in place.
[00:34:36] Exactly that relying on willpower and self-discipline, self-control very, very hard for most people.
[00:34:42] I know this about pleasure. I'm going to make sure that the your ls in the book, information on the book or in the show notes so people can click through and get those.
[00:34:49] There's been a great conversation, some really interesting ideas, I think really helpful for folks here that are looking to accomplish more, looking to grow their businesses, looking to create more value in their personal work and in their professional work, something that's been really helpful.
00:35:00] I really appreciate the time.
[00:35:01] My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
[00:35:04] You've been listening to Scaling up Services with Business Coach, Bruce Eckfeldt. To find a full list of podcast episodes, download the tools and worksheets and access other great content, visit the website at scalingupservices.com and don’t forget to sign up for the free newsletter at scalingupservices.com/newsletter.