VATSALA DEORA: Hi, everyone. My name is Vatsala Deora. And I work in GBO in
our ads policy team, and I'm based in Sydney. I am so excited to moderate this
discussion with Nir Eyal today. Nir Eyal writes,
consults, and teaches about the intersection of
psychology, technology, and business. He's known as "the
habits guy" and invests in companies that build
habit-forming products that improve users' lives. Some of his investments
are crowd favorites amongst Googlers, including
Kahoot!, Canva, and Eventbrite. Nir has previously taught
as a lecturer in marketing at the Stanford Graduate
School of Business and the Hasso Plattner
Institute of Design at Stanford. Nir is the author of two
incredible behavioral science-focused
best-selling books, Hooked-- How to Build Habit-Forming
Products, and his latest book, Indistractable-- How to Control Your Attention
and Choose Your Life. I find these topics fascinating,
as we live in a world where so much technology and
otherwise but just so much is constantly vying
for our attention. And we're often
giving it all away-- giving our attention
away without intention. So, Nir, thank you
for your time today. Welcome to Google. We're so happy to
have you join us. We'd love if you could
share a little bit about these books and
your work, and then we can dive into questions. NIR EYAL: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. Can you just confirm for me
that you can see my slide? Is that on screen yet? VATSALA DEORA: No, I can't
see your slide just yet. Here we go. It's coming up. Thank you. NIR EYAL: All right, terrific. Great. Wonderful. So welcome, everyone. It's so great to
be with you today. So what I wanted to do
is to kind of give you an overview of my past
decade of research into this topic of distraction
and how we can finally control what I think is going
to be the skill of the century. And then we're going to
leave plenty of time for Q&A. So let me tell you about
how I got into this field and when I really had to
reassess my relationship with distraction. I was with my daughter
a few years ago when she was much younger
than she is today. And I remember we
were sitting together, and we had this perfect
afternoon planned, just some daddy/daughter
quality time. And we had this activity book
of all these various things that dads and daughters
could do together-- make a paper
airplane-throwing contest, do a Sudoku puzzle together. And one of the
questions in this book was, if you could have any
superpower, what superpower would you want? And I remember that
question verbatim. But I can't tell you
what my daughter said because in that moment,
for whatever reason, I thought it was a good time to
just check my phone real quick. And by the time I
put my phone down, I realized that she was gone-- that she'd left
the room to go play with some toy outside
because I was sending her a very clear message that
whatever was on my phone was more important than she was. And so if you ask me today what
superpower I would most want, I would tell you it is the
power to be indistractable. Becoming indistractable is
the skill of the century. There is no facet of your life-- your mental health, your
physical health, your career, your relationships, all of
these facets of your life require you to be
able to control your attention because this is
truly how we choose our life. Unfortunately, I think there's a
very simple narrative out there that the reason
we're all distracted is because of our
technology, right? You all are in this
industry, and you hear people probably every day blaming our
devices, blaming the internet, blaming YouTube, blaming
whatever it is out there for our distraction. And, to be honest, that was
my knee-jerk reaction as well. But what I discovered in my
past 10 years of research is that this problem
of distraction is actually much deeper than
just whatever technologies we happen to be using. And the narrative of
what's really going on is actually way more empowering
than this Chicken Little critique that we hear
about technology today, that the sky is falling,
and our brains are melting. That is just not true. Let me go back to
the very beginning. It turns out that this
problem of distraction is at least 2,500 years old. How do I know that? Because we know that the
Greek philosopher Plato talked about this
very same problem. He called it in
the Greek akrasia-- the tendency to do things
against our better interests. And so we know if people
have been struggling with distraction for at
least the past 2,500 years before the internet, it
can't be that our technology is the ultimate source of
our distraction problems. So let me offer a new, fresh
perspective on how we can all manage distraction
and ultimately become indistractable, starting
with truly understanding, what does this word
distraction even mean? If you ask most people, what
is the opposite of distraction, they will tell you the opposite
of distraction is focus, right? I don't want to be distracted. I want to be focused. Those are opposites, right? Wrong. It turns out if you look at
the etymology of that word distraction, the opposite
of distraction is not focus. The opposite of
distraction is traction. Of course it is. Traction and dis-traction. Both words come from
the same Latin root trahere, which means to pull. And you'll notice that
both words, traction and distraction, end
in the same letters. They end in the
word A-C-T-I-O-N, which spells action, reminding
us that distraction is not something that happens to us. But rather it is an action
that we ourselves take. So traction, by
definition, is any action that pulls you
towards what you said you were going to do-- things
that you do with intent, things that move you closer
to your values and help you become the kind
of person you want to become. Those are acts of traction. Conversely, anything
that pulls you away from what you said you
were going to do, away from your values, away from
becoming the kind of person you want to become, those
are acts of distraction. So let me make this clear. Just because something
is a fun task, something that you plan to do, something
that maybe is enjoyable, it doesn't mean that
it's a distraction. In fact, I think we need to
stop moralizing and medicalizing behaviors like watching YouTube
videos or going on social media or enjoying a video game. There's nothing wrong
with those behaviors as long as you're doing them on
your schedule and with intent. That is the difference between
traction and distraction is this one word, intent. As Dorothy Parker said,
the time you plan to waste is not wasted time. So if you've made time
on your schedule to go enjoy these things, great. Do them. Right? We need to stop moralizing
and medicalizing and somehow saying, oh, playing video games,
that's morally reprehensible, but watching football
on TV, that's OK. Why? Anything that you plan to do
with your time and attention in advance is traction. Enjoy. Conversely, just
because something is a work-related task doesn't
mean it's not a distraction. Let me see if this
sounds familiar to you. For years, when I was
distracted-- versus today when I'm indistractable--
when I was distractible, I would get into
work, and I'd say, OK. I've got this big, long to-do
list that I have to finish. Here I go. I've got that big,
important task. By the way, we're going to talk
about later why to-do lists are one of the worst
things you can do for your personal productivity. Remind me to get
to that in the Q&A. But I would sit down
on my desk, and I'd say, OK, I've got this
big, important project. I've been procrastinating on it. I'm not going to
delay any longer. Here I go. I'm going to get
started right now. But first, let me
check some email. Let me just scroll that
Slack channel real quick. Let me just do those easy
tasks on my to-do list for a quick minute
just to get started, just to get some
momentum going, right? And I didn't realize that that
is the most dangerous form of distraction. As much as we talk about
external distractions like the social media or
whatever else we might see, what we don't realize is that
the most harmful distractions are the ones that we don't even
realize are distracting us. So if you're checking
email when you plan to work on a big,
important project, that work email is
still a distraction because you don't even
realize that you're off track. So just because something is
a work-related distraction doesn't mean it's not just
as dangerous of a distraction as the typical, usual
suspects of video games and social media. If it's not what you plan
to do with your time, it is a distraction. So now we have traction. We have distraction. Now let's talk
about what triggers us to take these actions. What most people think about
are the external triggers, the pings, the dings, the
rings, all these things in our outside environment
that can lead us towards distraction. But would you
believe studies find that these external triggers,
these pings, dings, and rings, these things outside
of us, studies find only account for 10%
of our distractions, 10%. So what accounts
for the other 90%? It turns out that 90% of the
time that we get distracted, it's not because of what's
happening outside of us. But rather, we know that
90% of our distractions begin from within. We call these internal triggers. What are internal triggers? Internal triggers are
uncomfortable emotional states that we seek to escape from. And it is the most important
and first critical step we must take in order to
become indistractable. Internal triggers like boredom,
loneliness, fatigue, stress, anxiety, these
uncomfortable sensations that we seek to escape from-- what we have to realize is
that if we don't understand the source of that discomfort,
we will always try and escape it-- that, fundamentally,
distraction is always an unhealthy response
to an emotional trigger, to something that we
don't like to feel. And so we escape
that discomfort, whether it's stress,
anxiety, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, whatever it might
be, with something that takes us off track. So what do we do
about that problem? If we want to master these
internal triggers so they don't become our master, we
only have two potential options. We can either fix the
source of the problem, figure out what is causing
us that emotional discomfort and do something
about it, or we have to learn healthier
strategies to cope with that discomfort starting
with this understanding that blew me away when I started
this line of research that, fundamentally, time
management is pain management. Let me say that again. Time management is
pain management. Procrastination
and distraction is nothing more than an
emotional control issue. And most of us,
maybe all of us, we have not been taught how to deal
with that emotional discomfort in a healthy way that
leads us towards traction versus an unhealthy way that
leads us towards distraction. Time management is
pain management. So what do we do about this? Let me give you some
very practical tips. We're not going to be able
to go through everything in my book, Indistractible. But I want to give you a few
very actionable techniques that you can use today
to start mastering these internal triggers. The first thing you can
do, psychologists tell us, is to note the sensation. If you can simply
write down what is that sensation that
you're experiencing right before you get distracted,
whether it's boredom, fatigue, stress, anxiety, whatever
it is, just noting it down is an important first step. Then what you want
to do is to get curious about that
sensation, not contemptuous. You see, people tend to
divide into two buckets when it comes to distraction. We have the blamers. The blamers blame things
outside themselves. Oh, it was my phone. It was my kids. It was my boss. It was the news. It's all this stuff outside
of themselves that they blame. And, of course, that doesn't
work because people have always struggled with distraction. As we learned about
earlier from Plato, blaming things outside of
you doesn't fix the problem. Then we have what's
called the shamers. The shamers don't blame others. They shame themselves. They say silly things like, oh,
I'm no good at time management. I have a short attention span. There must be something
broken about me. Silly. It's not true. And, in fact, we know that
shame is a very uncomfortable internal trigger. And the more you feel
shame, guess what? You're more likely to experience
that discomfort, which leads to more distraction. So we don't want to be a blamer. We don't want to be a shamer. We want to be what's
called a claimer. A claimer claims responsibility
not for that urge, not for that sensation, because
you know you cannot control your emotions. You do not control these
urges any more than you would control the urge to sneeze. If you feel the urge to
sneeze, it's too late. You've already felt
that sensation. All you can do is
to choose how you will respond to that sensation. Are you going to sneeze all
over everyone and get them sick? Or are you going to do
the responsible thing and take out a tissue
and cover your nose? So it's not about changing that
sensation, changing that urge. It's about deciding how we
will respond to that sensation, hence the term responsibility. So knowing in advance
how you will respond to that sensation of boredom,
stress, anxiety, fatigue, and having tools in your
tool kit ready to go is the responsible thing to do. This is how we
claim responsibility even when the distraction
isn't our fault. It's not your fault
that you felt this urge, but it is your responsibility
to know how to deal with it. So here's one tool that you
can put in your tool kit right away. This is called surfing the urge. This comes from acceptance
and commitment therapy, a very well-known
technique that's been studied in
thousands of studies. Surfing the urge acknowledges
that these emotions, these urges, these cravings,
they crest, and then they subside, just like waves. And so it's your job
to surf that urge like a surfer on a surfboard. How can you do that? Well, one technique that
I use every single day is called the 10-minute rule. The 10-minute rule
acknowledges that you can give in to any
distraction, whether it's checking that email inbox
when you should be working on that big project, whether
it's checking social media when you said you were
going to read a book, whether it's eating that
piece of chocolate cake if you're trying to lose weight. Any distraction, you can give
into, but not right now-- in 10 minutes. So, for me, I'm a professional
author and researcher, so I'm writing every day. And all I want to do when I'm
writing is to go check the news or go do some research or
go look into this or that. And I know that those
are all distractions in that period of time
when I said I'm going to do my writing and research. So what do I do? I tell myself, OK. I can give in to that
distraction in 10 minutes. I set my phone for a
timer for 10 minutes. I put the phone down. And now I have a choice to make. I can either get back to the
task at hand or surf the urge. Now, how do I do that? I close my eyes
for a few minutes, and I say a simple mantra. My mantra is this is what
it feels like to get better. This is what it feels
like to get better. And just reminding
myself that hard work is supposed to be hard. If it was easy,
everyone would do it. And so reminding
myself that it's OK that a task is
difficult. It's OK that I'm experiencing
these internal triggers. And I start naming them to
myself, and I start reframing. And I teach you exactly
how to do this in the book, how to reimagine the
conversation you're having with yourself
so that it serves you rather than hurts you. And here's what happens. Eventually, I decide to get
back to the task at hand within those 10 minutes. And I forget about
that urge ever existing because I allow myself time to
ride the wave until it subsides because we think that these
emotional emotions are going to last forever. But, of course,
that's never the case. And if, at the end of
those 10 minutes, I do want to give in to
that distraction, fine. I let myself. But 9 times out of 10,
that's not the case. And so what's going to happen
over time is that the 10-minute rule, which pretty
much anyone can do-- we can delay distraction 10
minutes, anybody can do that-- what you're going to find
is that the 10-minute rule becomes the 12-minute rule
becomes the 15-minute rule. And you're building your
agency, your efficacy, to prove to yourself,
hey, wait a minute. I'm not beholden to these
pings, dings, and rings. I can decide when I will
give in to these distractions on my schedule,
not someone else's. So that's just the
tip of the iceberg. There are dozens of different
techniques you can use. But let's move on
to the next step of becoming indistractable,
making time for traction. Again, traction is any
action that pulls you towards what you said you were
going to do with your time and attention, which means-- this is very important--
you cannot call something a distraction unless you know
what it distracted you from. Let me say that again. Write it down if you can. You cannot call something a
distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. So if you have a calendar
with lots of open white space, you cannot say you got
distracted because what did you get distracted from? Which means unless you're
a child, or you're retired, you have to schedule
every minute of your day. I'm sorry. I know this is going to
rub people the wrong way. But. I need my time to be creative. But I need my time to be
accessible to my team. What if my boss wants me? I can't possibly schedule. Yes you can. All those excuses you
hear in your head-- and let me tell you, I've
said them all to myself. I've heard them over the years
from all kinds of people. And what we find is that by
far the most effective time management technique
you can possibly use after mastering
those internal triggers is to schedule your
days, or someone will schedule them for you. And that means down to the
minute based on your values. Now, this doesn't mean your day
needs to be filled with work. I want you to schedule time
to watch videos on YouTube. I want you to schedule
time for video games. I want you to schedule
time with your family. Whatever is important to
you and your values, put on your calendar. That is the only
way that we know the difference between
what is traction, what is on our calendar,
and everything else becomes a distraction. So you can take those otherwise
distracting things that you think are pulling
you off course, and by putting them
on your calendar, you're essentially taking
distraction and turning it into traction. By making time for traction,
what you're doing is you're planning the input. Our input is our time and our
attention, not the output. We know that people who
only plan output-- these are people who
follow to-do lists. By the way, to-do lists
are one of the worst things you can do for your
personal productivity because to-do lists are nothing
but registers of output. It's what we want to have done. But, of course, without
input, you can't get output. So it's much more important to
only schedule the things that-- sorry, to plan for that
input of the things that must go into the output. And that is, again, our
time and our attention. I want you to stop
measuring yourself by how many cute little
boxes you checked off. That turns out to be a
very ineffective technique for several reasons, mostly
because to-do lists have no constraint. You can always add
more to a to-do list. And this is why we come home
from work every day exhausted. And then we look
at our to-do list, and we still haven't
finished everything. And then we feel like losers. And what does that
do for our psyche if day after day, week after
week, month after month, year after year, you're
constantly reminded, hey, you didn't do what you said
you were going to do, loser? So a much better tactic
is to timebox that task and not care about finishing it. What? Did you hear me correctly? Yes. Don't worry about
finishing the task. Your only metric of
success should be, did I do what I said I was
going to do for as long as I said I would
without distraction? That's it. It's not about finishing. It's not about checking
those cute little boxes. It's about, did I do what I said
I was going to do for as long as I said I would
without distraction? And it turns out--
here's the kicker-- people who use this method,
people who measure themselves simply by that one
metric of did I do what I said I was
going to do for as long as I said I would without
distraction, they finish more. They actually are
more productive. They live out their
intentions much, much better than the
to-do list devotees because when they simply
focus on one thing at a time, they have feedback to
understand how long things take. This is called the
planning fallacy. We know that people on average
take three times longer to finish a task
than they estimate. Why does that happen? Because I say to myself, oh, I'm
going to finish that project. I'm going to finish
those slides. I'm going to finish
that proposal. But then I start working
on it for 10 minutes, and then, oh, I've got
to check that email. And, oh, my boss
needs something. And, oh, I better
do this and that. And it turns out that we never
get a good assessment of how long things actually take. Whereas when we use
a timebox schedule, and we only measure
ourselves by, did we do what we said we're
going to do for as long as we said we would
without distraction, we can look back
on that time slot and say, OK, I worked
on that for 30 minutes. And I finished about
2 out of 20 slides. OK, that means I need
10 more timeboxes to finish the whole project. And this is how we get a
feedback loop to understand how long things take us. So planning the time, not the
input, is absolutely critical. Another thing we have
to do is to spend less time communicating and
more time concentrating. You see, so many
of us are inundated with all these messages, all
these things to respond to. And, of course, that's
part of everyone's job. This is called reactive
work-- reacting to messages, reacting to Slack notifications,
reacting to requests, reacting to meetings. That's part of everyone's job. The problem is that we become
habituated to only doing reactive work. How many of us, when we
don't know what else to do, we check our inbox. Our inbox will
tell us what to do. Well, that's a
terrible strategy. What you've got to
do is to put time in your schedule not only for
the reactive work but also for what's called
reflective work. Reflective work is
the kind of work that can only be done
without distraction. Planning, strategizing,
thinking, for God's sakes, can only be done
without distraction. So I'm not saying
your entire day has to be in a cave isolated
and not talking to anyone. No, no, no. But at least some
part of your day has to be spent
without distraction. So whether that's 15 minutes,
maybe a half an hour, maybe an hour if
you can afford it. That work that can only be
done without distraction has to be scheduled for. If you don't, I
promise you you're going to run real fast
in the wrong direction. You have to plan time
for that reflective work. Now, part of the reason
it's so difficult to find time for that
reflective work time is that we are
inundated, so many of us, with these external
triggers, these requests from other people for our time. And we know that there
is one industry where these external
triggers are literally a matter of life and death. If I were to ask you, what
was the third leading cause of death in the United States
of America before COVID, the third leading
cause of death? I'll give you the first two. Number one was heart disease. Number two was cancer. The third leading cause of
death, if you would believe it, the third leading cause
of death before COVID was prescription mistakes. Prescription mistakes--
people in hospitals receiving the wrong
medication or the wrong dosage of medication from health
care practitioners. And, by the way, this
isn't a US-only problem. This happens all over the world. And it's something that is a
100% preventable human error. This happens when nurses
are dosing out medication. And then one of their colleagues
taps them on the shoulder and asks them a question. And then they get distracted,
and they make mistakes. Now, I know very few of you are
in the health care profession. But I'm telling you this
to illustrate a point that what we found with
these nurses is that they didn't realize they were making
mistakes until it was too late. It wasn't until they gave
someone the wrong medication, and then they would suffer--
and then that patient would suffer horrible consequences. So I ask you to ask
yourself, how many consequences do you not
realize are degrading your work performance as a
result of distraction? You may not even
realize how much better your work performance
could be if you worked without distraction. So, thankfully, this story
has a very happy ending. It turns out that
nurses at UCSF decided to take on this
problem of distraction with nurses when they were
dosing out medication. And they found a solution that
reduced prescription mistakes by 88%. They almost eliminated
this problem completely. And the solution was not some
fancy retraining program. It wasn't some new
multi-million-dollar technology. The solution was plastic vests,
these cheap plastic vests that nurses wore when they
were doing their drug rounds, when they were
distributing medication, that almost eliminated
this problem completely. Now, how could we apply
this amazing lesson to our own work life? I know very few of
you are nurses, so why am I telling you this? Well, what if we applied
something similar to our workspaces? What if we use a screen
sign which is in every copy of my book-- there's a piece
of cardstock that you can tear out, or you can download
it from my website-- and we put this on
our computer monitors to tell our colleagues,
hey, for a certain number of hours per day, I need to work
without distraction in order to do my best work? I know some of you
are saying, yeah, but that's why I
put on headphones. Let me tell you, when
you put on headphones, people think you're
watching some video or listening to a podcast. We need to be explicit
about this message that we're sending that
it's all right to work without distraction-- that we
can't do our best work if we're constantly bombarded with
requests every 30 seconds. Now, for some of you, I know
you're working from home. No problem. In this case, where
the distraction is not your boss or
your colleagues-- sometimes it's your kids. And so what do we do when
we're working from home? So this is a picture
of my wife, Julie, and she is wearing
what we call it in our household the
concentration crown. And when my daughter
was only six years old, we got this concentration crown. And we told her, when mommy
is wearing the concentration crown, that means that she can't
be interrupted for the next 30 minutes. The only case when
you can interrupt is if you're bleeding. So if you're not bleeding, go
find some toy to play with. Go do something
else because when mommy is wearing the
concentration crown, she can't be interrupted. This is something
we got off Amazon for, I don't know, I think
it was like $5, $6 online. You can use any silly hat
because, frankly, our kids don't know when we're doing
something important that we can't be interrupted online
or when it's something they can interrupt us. This works really,
really well with kids. It also works really well
with husbands as well. You want to send that
explicit message that interrupts the interruption. Another thing we can do to hack
back those external triggers is to use the functionality
on everyone's device. I know it's on Android devices. It's on iPhones. This is called "do not
disturb while driving." A lot of people worry
that, hey, what if somebody needs to reach me, and I'm
having my reflective work time? What if I've time blocked
time to do a project, but somebody might
need me urgently? No problem. You hit one button called "do
not disturb while driving," and if someone texts or
calls you during that time, they will get a message that
says, I can't talk right now. But if this is urgent, text me
back the word urgent and then the message will come through. I've been using this feature
for, what, four years now, and I've never had
anyone interrupt me because they know, OK, he'll
get back to me very soon. The next thing you
can do is to clear off all that digital clutter. How many of us have home
screens that look like this? This is what my home screen used
to look like, all these files. We don't have to live this way. We can clear all that away. I took all those files. I put them into one
folder called everything. And, of course, our search
functionality on our machines is so good today we can
always find that file later. So we know that that visual
clutter, whether it's in physical space
or on our desktops, contributes to distraction. Our devices-- how many
of us are inundated with all these notifications? Did you know that 2/3 of
people with a smartphone, 2/3 of people with a smartphone
never adjust their notification settings. Can we honestly say
that we're addicted to our devices, that it's
hijacking our brains, that it's stealing our
focus, when we haven't even taken five minutes to change
these notification settings so that only the most important
messages get through? What we have to do is to hack
back these external triggers by asking ourselves, is
this trigger serving me, or am I serving it, and removing
those external triggers that are not serving us. For example, an external
trigger that tells you, hey, it's time for that meeting,
or it's time to go exercise, that's great. It's not a bad thing. Technology is
wonderful when it tells us to do the things that
we ourselves want to do. But when I was with my daughter,
and we were having some quality time together, and I
checked my phone because of some ping, ding,
or ring, well, now I was serving
the external trigger. It wasn't serving me. The next thing we
want to do is to leave those distracting devices
outside of meetings. How many of us attend what we
call zombie meetings, where we go to meet with other
people, whether it's physically or virtually. And we can tell the
bodies are there, but the brains are something
else because everyone's on their device. So if we are going to
meet physically in person, we have to be there
both in body and mind, not just in the corporate
workplace but also at home. Declare no-phone zones. For example, in my
family, what really works for us is that the dining
room table, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, that
is a no-phone zone. That's where we want to
reconnect with each other. We know that children who
have meals with their parents have fewer behavioral
issues, they have fewer mental health
issues, fewer eating issues like bulimia and anorexia. You really want to make sure
you have that time declared as a no-phone zone both
in the family space as well as in the
workspace so that we're fully present with each other. Finally, the last step to
becoming indistractable is to prevent
distraction with pact. A pact is a pre-commitment. The first recorded case of
one of these pre-commitments comes to us from the story
of Ulysses in the Odyssey. Now, Ulysses is this Greek hero. 2,500 years ago, he sails his
ship past the sirens' island. Now, the sirens are
these magical creatures who sing this song that any
sailor hears and will decide to crash his ship onto the shore
of the sirens' island and dies. Now, Ulysses knows
about this threat, and so he makes
a pre-commitment. He plans in advance. He tells his crew to put
beeswax in their ears so they can't hear
the siren song. And he instructs
his crew to bind him to the mast of the ship. And he tells them,
no matter what I do, no matter what I say,
do not let me go. And you know what? It works. He's able to sail his ship
right past the sirens' island, returning his crew and
his ship safely home. So why am I telling
you this story? Well, in this story,
you are Ulysses. There's lots of distracting
stuff out there. And, of course,
that could be you there on the shore
of the sirens' island as well if you don't plan
ahead, if you don't make one of these pre-commitments. How do we make a pre-commitment? We don't need to stuff
beeswax in our ears. We don't need to bind ourselves
to the mast of a ship. But we can take steps
today to prevent getting distracted tomorrow. For example, we can use tech
to block out distracting tech. So two tools I use
every single day-- on the right-hand side,
you'll see this app for your desktop called
Cold Turkey, totally free. And it will block out certain
websites any time you set. So you know what? As the last line of
defense, as the firewall against distraction, when
I have my working hours, I don't want to check email
when I'm supposed to be writing. I don't want to go look at
the news or do whatever. So I put those
distracting websites in this free technology that
will block those websites during certain hours. Another wonderful app that
I use, it's so simple. My daughter uses it
all the time as well. It's called the Forest app. Forest works like this. You dial in how much
focused work time you want. You hit the button. It plants that cute
little virtual tree. You see that virtual tree
on the left-hand side? And if you pick up your
phone and do anything with it during that period of time,
that cute little virtual tree gets cut down. And you don't want to be
a virtual tree murderer. So it's enough of a
reminder to say, nope, that's not what I
want to do right now. I want to stay focused
on the task at hand. You can also get a focus friend. One of the most underrated
techniques is to call a buddy and say, hey, look, I've got
this big project to work on. I want to make sure that
I stay focused on it. Hey, let's co-work. Let's sit side by side
or at a coffee shop or in the company canteen and
make sure that we stay on task. If you're working
from home, no problem. Technology to the rescue. There's a website
called focusmate.com. I loved it so much I
became an investor. Here's how it works. You find a time that you
want to do focused work for. For me, it's early
in the morning. I sometimes have
trouble getting started. But I know, hey,
there's somebody waiting for me at 8:30
who's dependent on me as their focus mate. And here on the right-hand
side, you can see a screenshot. This was a medical
school student, and he was studying anatomy. I was working on
this presentation. He said, hello, OK, go. And for the next 45 minutes,
we worked without distraction. It's amazing how entering
into that pre-commitment with another person
is an amazing way to help you stay on track. Now, the idea here is to
reduce distractions with pacts by using tech to block out tech. There's all kinds of other
pre-commitments we can make. But be careful. There's two words
of warning here. Number one, this is the
last line of defense. This is the firewall
against distraction. It will not work--
these pacts do not work if you don't first do the
other three steps we discussed of mastering internal triggers,
making time for traction, and hacking back
external triggers. Do those three things
first and then make these pre-commitments. The other word of warning
has to do with the fact that some people,
when they fall off the wagon on the path to
becoming indistractable, some people have a really tough
time getting back on track. Now, who are those people? Those people tend to be people
who do not offer themselves self-compassion. We know that people who
are self-compassionate are much more likely to
reach their long-term goals. So how do you cultivate
self-compassion? It's actually quite simple. The way to cultivate
self-compassion is to talk to
yourself the way you would talk to a good friend. So if I had told you about
what happened with my daughter, that I was embarrassed,
that I was distracted when I blew this
perfectly wonderful moment with my daughter,
would you tell me that I'm a horrible father,
that I'm a terrible human being? Not if you were my good friend,
you wouldn't say those things. And yet that's the
kind of stuff I would tell myself all the time. And you know what? It wasn't helpful,
and it wasn't true. And here's what
else isn't true-- this idea that technology
is hijacking our brains, that it's addicting
everyone, that there's nothing we can do about it. That is not helpful
and not true. There is so much we can do. We can master those
internal triggers. We can make time for traction. We can hack back the
external triggers, and we can prevent
distraction with pacts. So what I want to leave
you with is that there's so much we can do here. Unfortunately, we
don't have enough time to get into everything
that's in the book. This is just a small sliver. We didn't talk about how to
raise indistractible kids. We didn't talk
about how to build an indestructible workplace--
very, very important. We get into some of that in
the Q&A. I'm happy to do that. But the message I want
to leave with you today is that we can do this. We can get the best
of our technologies without letting it
get the best of us. We can all become
indistractable. And with that,
thank you so much. I would love to ask you
for a very quick favor before we jump into the
Q&A. On your screen, you'll see a URL and a QR code. If you have your
phone handy, you can take a picture of that URL. And, hopefully, it'll
take you to a website. Or you can just type that URL,
OpinionTo.us, OpinionTo.us. It'll just take you to a quick
Google form for a quick survey. It's only five questions. Would love to know what you
thought of the presentation. I read every single
piece of feedback, so if you could just
tell me what you thought, I'd certainly appreciate it. And the reward for that,
if you'd be so kind, is that if you fill
out that quick survey, you'll be given a link to
my SlideShare page where you can have all the
slides you just saw. Of course, feel free to share
that with whoever you like. And if we don't, for some
reason, get to your questions, feel free to visit my
website, NirAndFar.com. It's there at the bottom of
the slide, NirAndFar.com, but Nir spelled
like my first name. There's a contact link there. Please feel free to send me any
questions if we don't have time to answer yours today. And with that, let's
open it up to questions. VATSALA DEORA:
Thanks so much, Nir. This was fascinating. I took so many notes. I have so many questions. NIR EYAL: Yes, let's dive in. VATSALA DEORA: But
just starting off, this is just an
interesting area of work. What led you to this
field of research? NIR EYAL: So, for me, it
was a personal problem. I write books not
because I know the answer but because I need the answer. And so when I was struggling
with distraction for myself, the knee-jerk reaction was,
well, it's technology's fault. Stop using technology
because that's frankly what a lot of books
tell you today, right? They tell you that our
attention is being stolen, that our brain is
being hijacked. Just stop using the technology. That's really easy for a
tenured professor to say, but I need to use technology. We all need to use
technology to keep our jobs. So how do you just say,
stop using technology? That's silly. That's not a very
practical solution, or you're going to get fired. And frankly, even when I did-- one of the things I did before I
embarked on this research was I got myself a flip
phone from Alibaba, so one of these $12 phones. And all it did was send
calls and text messages and no apps on it whatsoever. And I still got distracted. I would still find-- oh, I
need to check out that book, or I need to clean my desk. Or let me take out the garbage. I kept getting distracted
because I realized it wasn't just the technology. It was that I didn't deal with
the real issue, the real core of distraction, which
is the fact that I didn't know how to deal with
these internal triggers. And I didn't have these
other practices in place. So it was only when I was so
frustrated with all the other books out there that tell
you how to manage your time and attention that really
weren't working for me that I needed to start with
first principles and go into the psychology research and
understand what works and what doesn't. VATSALA DEORA:
That's fascinating. I mean, I think this is a
problem that many of us face. And, honestly, that one
sentence, time management is pain management,
is super interesting because when we're going
through fitness or something we're like, OK, we're trying
to do this because it's going to help me get better. But I've never thought
about connecting that to attention and to traction. So one of the things that I
struggle and I think many of us struggle with is we come out
with these best intentions. We plan our day, or
we plan our week. And on a Monday, we'll be super
into it and be very energized. But then slowly through the
week, we'll kind of taper off. Does that happen
to you, and then how do you stay
motivated and committed? NIR EYAL: Yeah, so the
idea of a timebox calendar is that you don't
set it and forget it. You're changing it not in
the day, never in the day. You're changing that
timebox schedule to make it easier
to follow over time. That's the idea behind
this timebox calendar. So what you're going to do at
the beginning of every week-- for me, it's Sunday
nights, 8:00 PM. I have that in my schedule. I sit down, and I
look at the schedule for the week that passed. And then I try and
figure out, how do I make the week that is
coming easier to follow? And that's when you can
change things around. So if you say, you know what? I'm much better doing
my reflective work early in the morning
versus in the afternoon. No problem. You can change that around. Maybe I need time for a walk
in the middle of the day. Maybe I need to
take an early lunch or more time with my family
or less time with doing email. Whatever the case might be, I
want you to sit down and ask yourself, how can the
person you want to become spend their time? That's the key question. You're turning your
values into time. So you can change your schedule
from day to day and week to week. That's totally fine. But once you set that
schedule for the day, now you have to follow it. You have to stick
with what you said you were going to do
because anything that is not that thing becomes distraction. So if you see, you know
what, I'm losing energy, I'm losing steam towards
the end of the day, maybe that means
you need to plan some more breaks in the future. Or you need to adjust
your tasks accordingly. That's totally
fine as long as you don't adjust them in the day. VATSALA DEORA: Yeah,
that's a really good-- that's a really good point. And then what about-- well, the other thing
I think a lot about is, when do I get my
bursts of creativity, or when do I get my
bursts of inspiration? In many of our
jobs, we have to do a lot of problem-solving
and pushing ambiguous problems forward. And I struggle
with how I say, OK, this is my whiteboarding
time or whatever it is. So often it's in
the shower or when you're running or something. So how do you think
about creating avenues for creativity? NIR EYAL: Yeah. Let me give you a very,
very high-tech solution, OK? This is it. The idea here is that-- I always have this
with me, right, is I have a piece of
paper and a little pen at my desk at all times. The idea here is that when
I have an idea or a worry-- this happens much
more for me at least, many more worries
than creative ideas-- what used to happen
is every little spark of creativity, every
worry, every concern, oh, let me just go take
care of that real quick. And then, of course,
that would totally pull you away from
executing your great ideas. The hard part about
doing great work is not coming up
with great ideas. Great ideas are cheap as hell. Everybody has great ideas. Nobody's that special. We all have great ideas. It's doing them. And doing them
requires you to focus. It requires you to work
without distraction. So you are giving up
so much every time. Like me, I used to
do, oh, OK, I have to take care of that one thing. Let me go take care of
that for 30 minutes. And now I didn't even finish
the task I was working on. I didn't give that
appropriate time. Instead, what I do now is every
time I have a creative idea, or I have a worry,
I jot it down. I put down a few words. And then I have time in
my calendar to worry. I literally have time in
my schedule for worry time. Here's what's
amazing about that. Number one, my brain can
refocus on the task at hand because opposed to me
saying, oh, I might forget, I might forget, I might
forget, I won't forget. It's right here. And knowing that I will have
time later on to deal with it lets my brain relax
and truly focus on what I'm working
on right now. The other great part about
that is that 9 times out of 10 when I sit down for my worry
time or my whiteboard time, I think about it. I say, actually, that
wasn't even that important. What was I worried about? That's not that important. So the thing you think about
in the moment that, oh my god, it's such a great idea
or, oh my god, that's an important concern, if you
give it some time to marinate, what you oftentimes
find is, eh, there's something else that's more
important that takes the time. So by putting it on a
quick piece of paper, just three words--
don't act on it. Don't betray yourself and
get distracted at the moment. Put that time in your schedule
for whiteboarding time and worry time. And a lot of people say, oh,
but I need to be creative. I need to be spontaneous. That's your amateur
voice talking. Professionals, what pros do,
they sit down and do the work. They are able to sit
down and actually create. And if you think, OK,
I need to be creative whenever I feel like it,
that's just not true. That model tends to
really not work for people unless your whole day
is spent that way. Some people are just
artists all day. But in the modern working
world, you've got meetings. You've got emails. You've got kids. You've got tasks. It's just not feasible. But if you plan time for,
hey, here's my hour and a half or whatever it is for that
creative work time, that's when you really turn
pro is that you're able to sit down and be like,
OK, here's my list of ideas. Here's the things I
need to think about. OK, now's the time for it. VATSALA DEORA: Yeah,
that's really interesting. And when you spend your day like
this, your days are timeboxed, your every hour
is accounted for, how do you feel at
the end of the day when you get to that
every single day? Yeah. NIR EYAL: Yeah. So very few people these
days have experienced what leisure actually feels like. Especially high
performers like people who work at Google,
very few of you actually have any clue
what leisure is like. Here's why. Because if you use the
to-do list mentality, if you use that methodology of
I've got these things that I got to get done, even when you
give yourself time to breathe-- you go out with your friends,
you sit down with your kids, you're having a nice meal-- you're still thinking about all
that stuff you haven't done. Right? I know. I used to be there too. So even when you're
trying to have fun, when you're trying
to relax, you can't because you're thinking about
all the stuff left undone. As opposed to a person who
uses a timebox calendar has on their schedule
time to play with my kids. Time to exercise. Time to meditate. And that's all you can do. Hey, time to play video games. Great. Do it. Time to go watch YouTube videos. Awesome. And now you can do those things
without guilt because that now becomes traction. Anything else, even doing
work, becomes distraction. VATSALA DEORA: Yeah, that's
actually a really good point because you're always
not present otherwise, to your initial anecdote. OK, so I know we have a bunch
of questions from the audience as well, so I'd love
to turn over and see. So the first is
from Sandeep Giri. In your research, how
does one train differently for concentration
versus contemplation versus open,
non-judgmental awareness? Thanks for the
question, Sandeep. NIR EYAL: Yeah, I'm not-- I'll give it my best shot. My guess is with training-- that like anything, if you want
to get better at something, you practice it. The problem is that
things worth having in life take effort, take
work, and take focus, right? If you want to have a wonderful
relationship with somebody, you can't just
say, oh, I'm going to take you to a fancy dinner,
and we're going to be in love. No, you've got to put
in the day-to-day work to have a close relationship. If you want to start
a great business, if you want to have
a wonderful career, you have to put in the diligent
work day after day after day. If you want to get rich,
you have to accrue money over a long period of time. There's no get rich
quick scheme that works. We have to do that effort. So whether it's anything
that's difficult that's worth having
in life, we have to put in that diligent
work over time. One of my life mantras is
consistency over intensity-- that many people think
that there's one quick way. Just let me take a pill, let
me flip a switch, and boom, I'll have the thing I want. I'll feel the way
I want to feel. But that's pretty fleeting. The real things
worth having in life require consistency
over intensity. So whatever type of work
style you want to cultivate, whether it's a high degree
of focus and intentionality, that comes from practice. But we can only get
in that practice when we make the time to
do it without distraction. VATSALA DEORA: Thank you. Next we have a
question from Sean. In tech, we need to
task switch a lot. What should we do if
our jobs require us to constantly switch in between
tasks or are very reactive? For example, needing to
be responsive to clients. Thanks, Sean. NIR EYAL: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So I see this a lot in tech. Now, we know-- just let's
go to the other side when it comes to
reflective work. Very few jobs require 100%
reactive or reflective work. So everybody's job has
some mix of the two. Sometimes that's not the case. Like for an engineer,
for example, almost their entire day is
spent doing reflective work. And we know that the number
one source of bugs in code is distraction. It's somebody saying, oh,
I need that TPS report. Meanwhile, the engineer
was deep in thought, and now they've messed it up. They have difficulty getting
back to where they were. So one of the best things you
can do as a manager is frickin' leave your employees alone. Give them time to work
without distraction. It's amazing the productivity
killer of stupid meetings that didn't need to be
called, dumb emails that do nothing but circulate
superfluous information. And we talk about all this in my
book, exactly how to hack back email, hack back meetings. There's a lot you can do there. But when it comes
to, how do you find that time for
reflective work, one of the best things you can
do is to do a schedule sync. A schedule sync is
part of a practice that I call managing your
manager or managing up. Now, how does this work? One of the worst pieces
of productivity advice that we hear all the time is if
you want to be more productive, you have to learn how to say no. How many times
have we heard that? Learn how to say no better. What kind of stupid
advice is that? You're going to tell
your boss, you're going to tell your manager,
the person who pays your bills, you're going to tell
that person, no thanks. No. I'm not going to do it. You're going to get fired. That's terrible advice. What you want to do
instead is print out that timebox calendar. We talked about
timeboxing earlier during the presentation. One of the benefits is that now
you have a physical artifact. You can literally print out your
schedule for the week ahead. You book a 10-minute
meeting with your boss. 10 minutes is all you need. Say, hey, boss, I just
want to show you something. Here's my schedule. See here? Here's my Monday
through Friday for how I'm going to spend my
time at work this week. Here's that meeting
you ask me to attend. Here's I'm giving two hours
to work on this project without distraction. Here's where I'm going to go to
XYZ meeting, whatever the case. Here's my week ahead. OK, now you see this
other piece of paper? Here on this other
piece of paper, I wrote down all
the things you've asked me to do that I'm
having trouble prioritizing. Can you help me prioritize? That is your boss's
most important job. Your manager or supervisor's
most important job is to prioritize. And so when you show them
your timebox calendar, they will worship the
ground you walk on because they're wondering what
the heck you're doing all day. So by showing them, hey,
here's what I'm doing, help me reprioritize
this stuff you asked me to do that I'm
having trouble prioritizing, you're not saying no. You're saying,
help me prioritize. And so here's what's
invariably going to happen. They're going to say, oh,
you know that meeting? You really don't need
to go to that meeting. What you really need to work
on, what's way more important is that thing on this
piece of paper over here. That's way more important. Let's swap those out. So you're giving
your manager exposure to how you spend your time. And this, to answer
the person's question just now about
constant interruptions, you're showing them when you
are working without distraction. So you say, OK,
here, from 9 to 11, that's what I'm indistractable. See? OK, it's in my schedule. We talked about this, right? That's when I can't
be interrupted. If that's a problem,
let me know. I'll move it around. So by giving them transparency
into your schedule, that's a huge resource. Another thing you
can do, by the way-- if you work in the kind of job
where you feel like you need to be responsive, the
first thing I would do is to ask yourself,
is that real? Or is it your fear that
you will be needed? The vast majority of people
I work with, they think, oh, I need to
constantly be on call. It's just an excuse
their brain is making up that prevents them from
doing the hard work they know they need to do. What if somebody needs me? What if an employee? What if a customer? What if a client? They might need me. But when they actually sit down
and work without distraction, they realize it's
just a feeling. It's not an objective reality. It's completely subjective. They just think that people
need them all the time, and they don't. But let's say you're
in a kind of industry where you do constantly
need to check. No problem. Put in 30 minutes
of focused work time and then 15 minutes
or 30 minutes or whatever amount of
time for reflective-- or for reactive work time. That's totally fine. You can structure your
calendar whatever way you want. The idea here, though, is
to work that schedule-- to decide in advance
how you will spend your time because if you don't,
other people will decide how you spend your time for you. VATSALA DEORA: Yeah. I'm a manager, and I would
love that conversation from everyone. NIR EYAL: So the problem is
as a manager, by the way, it's kind of difficult
because if you tell employees to
do this, they feel like you're micromanaging them. So this is really an
empowerment strategy to manage your managers. You could do this with
your manager as well. And you know, of course,
if people read this and see it's working for
other folks, then hopefully this becomes an
institutional practice. VATSALA DEORA: No, absolutely. Next question from Kareem. Can you share tips on how
to tweak these techniques so kids can use them? Great question. Thanks, Kareem. NIR EYAL: Yeah, absolutely. So there's a whole
section in the book, and I could do a whole
nother hour presentation just on how to raise
indistractable kids. But I'll give you
a few quick tips. The best thing you
can do if you want to raise indistractable kids is
to be an indistractable parent. We cannot tell our kids, oh,
get off Fortnite and stop doing this and that when meanwhile
we're checking email or whatever on our phones. So the best thing
you can do is to set a good example for your kids. You can't raise
indistractable kids unless you're an
indistractable parent. And tell your kids
you're struggling. That's totally fine. These tools are
made to be engaging. It's no wonder we
struggle to put them away. That's totally fine. Let them know that you're
struggling with it as well. And then we can
simply work around the very same four steps. So understanding what those
internal triggers are. There's a much more in-depth
conversation around kids and the internal triggers. The internal triggers
that kids face are different from
what adults face. So that's a whole-- I encourage you to
check out that section in my book around
the internal triggers that kids are suffering from. There's what's called the
needs displacement hypothesis that when kids or adults aren't
getting what they need offline in the real world, they look for
those psychological vitamins, if you will, those
psychological nutrients online. So if you're not feeling
competency, autonomy, and relatedness, these three
psychological nutrients in the real world, you're
looking for them online. So that's a big part of why
kids overuse technology is that school today is, for many
kids in many cases, a prison. And so they're looking
for competency, autonomy, and relatedness online. But that's another subject. Number one, internal
triggers-- help your kids have these
tactics to deal with these internal
triggers in a healthy way. The next way is to schedule
the same way we would for ourselves, turning
your values into time. Now, for kids, if they're
in school, most of the day is already scheduled. But after school, one
of the best things you can do for your kid is to
schedule time for the things that you think are distractions. So scheduling time
for video games. Put it on their schedule. How much time do you think is--
for you, how much time, given all the other stuff you need
to do homework, chores, playing with friends, how much
time works for you? This is a conversation
I had with my daughter when she was just six
years old, and now she has that time in her schedule. She doesn't have
to think about, oh, when do I get time
to go on YouTube? When do I get time
to do these things? It's in her schedule. She knows exactly. She doesn't have to
think about it all day. Hacking back the
external triggers. One of the best things
you can do for your kids is removing any external
trigger that interrupts sleep in the bedroom. So kids should not have
anything that beeps, buzzes, or boops in the bedroom. Very, very important quick tip. There's a lot of other
things you can do as well. And then finally preventing
distraction with pacts. So I showed that app Forest that
helps you set the time that you want to do focused work
for, and then there's that cute little virtual tree. My daughter loves it. Every time she has to do
homework, she uses that tool. I use it as well. And that's a wonderful way
to make a pact to make sure that you stay on track. So it's really around
teaching your kids these same four strategies
to becoming indistractable themselves. VATSALA DEORA: At the
age of six, that's great. I feel we often think that,
oh, they're too young. They're too young. But the fact that you
can start very early-- NIR EYAL: Absolutely,
absolutely. And remember, the
goal of parenting is not to raise a child. It's to raise a
future adult. So this is the skill of the century. I mean, it doesn't matter
what knowledge is in a book if you don't have the focus
and attention to read the book. So we've got to teach our kids
how to become indistractable so that they can pay
attention long enough to absorb these amazing
lessons that the world has to teach them. So it's absolutely critical
we teach them how to do this. And if they don't
learn now, they're going to have trouble in
middle school and high school. And of course in college when
they're outside of the home, it's going to come
back to bite them. So we really have to
teach them how to do this. VATSALA DEORA: Totally. I think we have
time for one more. Hi, Nir. Thanks for the talk, from Alan. You mentioned that to-do lists
were a negative influence on productivity. Could you elaborate? Thanks, Alan. NIR EYAL: Sure. There's a few reasons
why to-do lists are dangerous for your
personal productivity. Number one is that there's
no constraint, right? We talked about it a little bit
earlier in the presentation. You can always add more
to that to-do list. Where as opposed to
a timebox calendar, you only have 24 hours in a day. So it's a forced constraint. When you have a
timebox calendar, it forces you to
make trade-offs. The problem that people
have is that they want to do everything all at once. Well, you can't. You have to make trade-offs
based on your values. And so that's a much
healthier system, a timebox, versus a to-do list
that you'll never be able to finish everything. The other thing that's
so bad about to-do lists is that it doesn't
account for the input. I can-- write a novel, start
a business, fall in love. I can write to-do lists all
day long, but that's output. There's no register of input. That register of input,
again, for knowledge workers is time and attention. And so that has to
be on your schedule. And then, finally,
the last point we talked about a
little bit, I think, in an earlier question around
how when you use a to-do list methodology, you have
no sense of leisure because you're always thinking
about the things left undone. As opposed to a
timebox calendar when you say, oh, what I'm
supposed to be doing right now is exactly what's
on my calendar. I'm supposed to be enjoying
time with my family. I can do so without
guilt. So those are a few reasons why timeboxing
beats to-do lists hands down. VATSALA DEORA: Thank you. Oh, wow, this hour has just-- it's just flown by really. So, Nir, I think on behalf of
everyone at Talks at Google, thank you for your time
and invaluable insights during this fireside chat. Your research is so
insightful, and I've got like a page and
a half of notes. And I know that I and
many others on the call will be trying these strategies
ourselves at home and at work. So thank you again
for your time, and we're excited to
read Indistractable. NIR EYAL: Thank you so much. Appreciate it. And, of course, if
anybody has any questions I didn't get to today,
please visit NirAndFar.com. VATSALA DEORA: Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]
