"The 1% Use These SUCCESS HABITS To Become PRODUCTIVITY MASTERS!" | Nir Eyal & Lewis Howes

let's just start with tomorrow as opposed to oh what do i want to do in five years and my vision board and my mood board and all that stuff how will would the person you want to become again it's about living according to your values and nobody can tell you what your values are how would the person you want to become spend their time i think you gotta have a dream the school of greatness please welcome us how do we hook people if we are an entrepreneur a business owner or if we are dating someone how do we hook people to want to give us their attention over and over again in any area of life for our benefit and it benefiting them by them giving us their our their attention what is that thing that you've learned over the last eight years now of applying from that first book to get people really hooked for good not a negative way but for good yeah yeah so just to you know set the stage so i wrote hooked after teaching the stanford graduate school of business for many years then later i moved over to the hassel platter institute design and what i wanted to do was to steal the secrets of the companies like facebook twitter youtube instagram slack snapchat i wanted to understand what they were doing so that the rest of us could use those techniques could use those psychological hacks so that we can build the kind of products and services to improve people's lives so i didn't write hooked my first book for the big tech companies i wrote it for the rest of us right i wanted to steal their secrets and democratize that stuff they and why because they already knew these techniques i didn't need to teach them anything they've known how to do this for for decades um so in writing hooked what i wanted to do was to give entrepreneurs out there a a pattern a model they could use to build healthy habits in people's lives by the way the book is not called how to build addictive products my publisher wanted me to call it that and i absolutely refuse because an addiction is very different from a habit an addiction is a compulsive dependency on a behavior or substance that harms the user whereas a habit is simply an impulse to do something with little or no conscious thought and we have many good habits as well as bad habits my second book indistractible is about how to break bad habits but hooked is about how to build good habits in people's lives and so i i you know the the book now has been published now for what six years and uh sold over 300 000 copies and it's been used in every conceivable industry uh from education uh kahoot is a the world's largest education software company and they use the hook model to get kids hooked onto learning uh companies like fitbod use the hook model to get people hooked to exercising there's all kinds of ways that we can use these techniques for good that we can improve people's lives by building good habits um there a for is there a formula for the hooked model that has been upgraded since the book oh upgraded no it's the same basic four steps in the hook model of trigger action reward and investment and it's specifically for product design it's really written for entrepreneurs i i read uh the inspiration for me was i read charles duhigg's power of habit i loved it i thought it was a great book uh the what i was looking for though was okay how do i apply this as an entrepreneur how do i get people to come back to my business because that is a huge competitive advantage right if you think about google right why does google have 85 market share out there it's simply because of a habit it turns out if you look at head-to-head comparisons between google and bing the number two search engine if you stripped out the branding people can't tell the two apart it's a 50-50 preference split and yet every day when we say oh i don't know something we don't think to ourselves hmm i wonder who makes the best search engine no we just google it right with little or no conscious thought out of habit so if you can create that kind of habit with your customers it's a massive competitive advantage and it's a a way to help people form good habits in their own lives should we be thinking of this four-step approach in terms of our products and services that we create or should we be thinking about who is our core audience and how will they what is the psychology of this core audience what is their needs and then building it based on their needs so those two are not mutual exclusive it's actually a huge component of of how we build habit forming products is that we always start with a customer need and in fact we start with the itch and the itch is what we call an internal trigger so there are two types of triggers we have external triggers and internal triggers external triggers are the pings the dings the rings everything in our outside environment that tells us what to do next but and that's what everybody tends to think about in terms of you know the alarms of life waking up with an alarm having a notification exactly emails no yeah notifications all that stuff that's actually not as important as what we call the internal trigger an internal trigger is an uncomfortable emotional state that you seek to escape from and the solution to that discomfort is found with the products you use so fundamentally and this is really important to understand if you're trying to build new habits and your customers are trying to break bad habits in your own life fundamentally you have to understand that your behaviors always originate from discomfort always everything you do even the desire to pursue pleasurable sensations is itself psychologically destabilizing and so when you think about how oh i'm feeling lonely check facebook i'm uncertain google uh i'm bored oh lots of solutions for boredom right you know who's watching the news stock prices sports scores instagram tick tock yeah all these things fundamentally everything you do is about a desire to escape discomfort so what that means if you're building a habit-forming product you have to identify what is that frequently occurring itch in the user's life if you're trying to break a bad habit you have to understand wait a minute what am i seeking to escape from and understand how to deal with that discomfort in a healthier manner give me an example someone's uh looking to escape from what's a common thing right now people want to escape from is it loneliness is it depression is it uncertainty is it what is the thing let's make it personal lewis tell me is there is there a bad habit is there do you find that you get distracted what distracts you like what things in the world distract my attention that like make me want to go there or what's the internal thing that makes me then no no let's start with what is the distraction uh probably i mean if they're distractions but they're all i look at his research also because i'm in this space so i'd say the social media apps especially right now clubhouse tick tock and instagram but again i also look at it as i'm researching it for my business but there are times where i'm like oh i catch myself i'm being on here and not researching so this is a really really good place to dive in so let's start let's actually back up a step and understand what is distraction distraction is one of these words that we toss around and most of us don't really understand i certainly didn't understand what that meant let's talk about what is distraction okay distraction the best way to understand what distraction is is to understand what distraction is not okay if you ask most people what is the opposite of distraction they'll tell you it's focus right wrong the opposite of distraction is not focus the opposite of distraction if you look at the origin of the word the opposite of distraction is traction that both words come from the same latin root trejore which means to pull and they both end in the same six letters a-c-t-i-n that spells action so traction by definition is any action that pulls you towards what you say you're going to do things you do with intent things that pull you towards your values and help you become the kind of person you want to become the opposite of traction is distraction distraction is any action that pulls you further away from what you intended to do further away from your values and becoming the kind of person you want to become so the difference between traction and distraction is one word and that one word is for thought forethought so if you plan the time to do quote-unquote research lewis and that's what you want to do with your time awesome just as if you wanted to plan time to go on social media or play a video game or watch a movie or meditate or pray or look at a sport or a hobby it doesn't matter yeah yeah as long as it's done with intent so why is this so important okay this is so so it's saying so it's done with intent where it's saying i'm gonna go on here for free time to do whatever i want but it's not necessarily pulling me away from my goals because i'm also spending time doing that as well well it's it's about forethought it's about four thoughts so uh here's the difference so this is what used to happen to me almost every single day when i would sit down at my desk and i'd say okay i got to do all this stuff i had a big long to do list we can talk about why to-do lists are terrible for your productivity in just a minute but i would sit down and i'd say okay i got to do all this stuff and i've got that big project i've been procrastinating on i really got to work on that today let me get started on that right away here i go nothing's going to get in my way nothing's going to distract me email no even even worse even worse lewis let me just check email real quick yeah email right so not even the external stuff right not even the pings and dings but oh you know what uh i really should check on that thing uh so that slack channel probably somebody's waiting for me or let me just clear out my email real quick or let me just do this one thing that feels worky right i call this pseudo work it feels like i need to do i gotta check email sometime today don't i i better go check on it real quick and what i didn't realize is that that is actually the most dangerous form of distraction the distraction that tricks you into prioritizing the urgent at the expense of the important okay so anything that is not what you plan to do with your time you know research is great going on facebook is great playing video games is great as long as it's not what you plan to do with your time as long as sorry as long as that is what you plan to do with your time as long as you scheduled doing something exactly exactly so that's the big difference between traction and distraction so we have to define what that is one of the big mantras of the book is that you cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from let me say that again you can't call something in distraction unless you know what it distracted you from so if you're kind of floating through life saying oh i got a million things on my to-do list i'll just get to them when i get to them you know what's going to happen you're not going to get to them it has to be scheduled in your day so that's the difference in traction and distraction okay so now you can have a mental picture in your mind and this is kind of the key framework in the book two arrows one to the right one to the left traction and distraction okay now we have to ask ourselves what prompts us to traction and distraction what prompts these actions internal triggers and external triggers so coming back to what we talked about for a minute earlier these external triggers the pings dings and rings in our environment anything in our outside world that prompts us towards traction or distraction of course you know we have the usual suspects of our phones and our computers it can be other people right the number one source of distraction in the workplace is other people just asking your questions yeah exactly hey did you hear about that gossip or did you see that show or you know let me just ask you a quick question for a quick second it doesn't take a quick sec that is actually the leading cause of distraction the workplace and at home now that so many of us are working from home it's kids it's roommates it's spouses all these things are external triggers now that is not the leading cause of distraction there was just a study released about two months ago that found that ninety percent of the time we check our phones okay ninety nine zero ninety percent of the time we check our phones it's not because of any kind of external trigger ninety percent of the time we check our phones it is because of a bad feeling boredom loneliness fatigue uncertainty fearfulness stress anxiety these are the internal triggers that we seek to escape from and the reason this is so important to understand louis is that none of the tips tricks gurus all the books the seminars anything having to do with time management is garbage does not work unless unless you start with the understanding that time management is pain management pain management time management is pain management absolutely what does that mean if you don't understand how to deal with that discomfort that drives you to escape you're gonna find it you're always gonna find it whether it's too much news too much booze too much football too much facebook it doesn't matter you will find distraction unless you first start with understanding and dealing with the internal triggers when did you finally deal with the internal triggers in your own life and how is that process for so for me there was a seminal moment in my life um shortly after i'd written hooked where i was sitting down with my daughter and we homeschool we have for years and uh we had this perfect day planned we had this wonderful afternoon planned and uh i remember my daughter and i had this book of activities that we could play together and some of the activities in the book included you know make origami make it do a sudoku puzzle together make a paper airplane there's all these like cute little activities that daddies and daughters could do together and one of the activities to kind of bring us closer together was to ask each other this question 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 got distracted i was checking my phone as opposed to being fully present with someone i love very much yeah and if i'm honest with you it didn't just happen that time and it didn't just happen with my daughter it would happen when i was at work and i would say oh i'm definitely going to work on that big project i'm not going to procrastinate and 30 45 minutes later i was doing something other than the thing i said i was going to do uh what happened with with my personal health you know how many times did i say oh i'm definitely going to go to the gym today but i wouldn't i'm certainly going to eat right but i didn't and so when i realized wait a minute you know what if i could have any superpower the skill of the century i believe is the power to be indistractible that's why indistractable sounds like indestructible right supposed to sound like a superpower because there is no facet of your life that is not affected by the ability to sustain and control your attention that is the macro skill that we have to master to get anything else we want right whether it's hey you want to read more books you need to you need to sustain attention you want to exercise you want to eat right you need to sustain attention you want to have good relationships in your life who doesn't know that you have to be fully present with people that you love in order to have better relationships you want to be better at your job guess what you have to do the work especially the hard stuff that other people don't want to do all of this requires you to control your attention in order to choose your life so how did you learn to control your attention so uh once you realize that you're right once you realize that pain of oh i'm not being present with my daughter and other people in my life yeah so the book took me five years uh the reason it took me five years is because i kept getting distracted you know so i didn't write the book because i knew the answers i wrote the book because i was looking for the answers i mean this is something that i struggle with it was a very personal journey and i did a lot of research um you know i wanted to write a very specific type of book the kind of book that i like reading which is one that is not only full of tactics that work but also is backed by good research and so when i went to look at the the popular literature the pop psychology of of of distraction attention time management i found it was full of junk like old studies that could not replicate many many studies that can't replicate old ideas that really should be tossed out for example the idea that willpower is a depletable resource we've all heard this right can't replicate it it's not true the myth that we should run our life with a to-do list crap it's bunk it doesn't work that there are much better techniques out there that just you know hadn't been explored people were you know writing books with their little pet theories and i said no no i want to see the literature i want to see the peer-reviewed study in an academic journal before i'm going to recommend it to others or use it in my own life and so that's why i really wanted to boil down the this this massive amount of literature that's been uh published over the years about time management focus and attention into a four-part model that anyone can use and what's that model sure so we talked about earlier the the this this picture in our head so hopefully you can imagine this of an arrow pointing to the right that's uh traction to the left is distraction we have two arrows pointing into the center those represent external triggers and internal triggers and now we have the four points of our compass okay so we start at the top with north master the internal triggers first and foremost we have to have tactics to deal with that discomfort in a healthy way that leads us towards traction rather than an unhealthy escape into distraction that's step one okay so that's the first most important internal triggers like you said yeah internal triggers exactly mastery so when i'm feeling sad anxious unclear uh disappointed it's learning those tools to master those feelings exactly exactly and this isn't you know you don't have to go see a psychotherapist this is something anybody can do but absolutely that is the first step and what were the tools that you uh learned to use for your distraction for the internal things that were holding you back the internal triggers yeah so for internal triggers there are three big tactics here so uh to define the two so tactics are what you do strategy is why you do it so it's more important that we understand the strategy versus you know the little tips and tricks that you see on you know 10 ways to master your smartphone addiction you know that giving people little tips and tricks grayscale your phone turn off notifications really seriously that's the best we can do no no we want to go much deeper than that crap and actually understand what's going on so that's why we you know we can't gloss over this idea that internal triggers are super super important so here's what we do with internal triggers we have to re-imagine the the this these internal triggers so we can deal with them in a healthy way not to uh quell them not not to you know squash them because we have to remember too that feeling bad is not bad okay i think part of my beef with the self-help industry these days is that we are sold this unrealistic and unhealthy fixation and obsession with happiness and most people don't understand that we are not evolved to be constantly happy right that is an unrealistic ideal that in fact think about it logically for a minute right uh if you subscribe to the theory of evolution think about what would have happened if there were a tribe of homo sapiens who were sitting around the savannah happy all day right just oh everything's great everything's happy everything's contented all the time if that would have happened our ancestors would have killed and eaten them okay that does not make sense on an evolutionary basis you want a species to be perpetually perturbed you want us to always strive to always want more to always be discontented so that we fix things so we have to start number one with reimagining the internal trigger reimagining the purpose of wait why do we feel discomfort so when we feel bored lonesome uncertain anxious fatigued fearful we have to start by understanding that these uncomfortable sensations are a gift or a gift to help us use that discomfort as rocket fuel towards traction rather than trying to escape it with distraction what most people do when they feel you know lonesome bored indecisive fearful whatever it might be they look for escape oh let me just turn on the news real quick because i feel fearful maybe maybe the news will give me the answer of course it won't uh you know i i feel lonely so let me just check facebook real quick so that i can feel connected to others well no not really that's not really going to give you that that that's you know a wholesome feeling of a friendship with that you might get it's it's a band-aid right um we feel stressed so you know let me just take a quick drink real quick to calm my nerves have that glass of wine after dinner so that i don't feel stressed these are escapes from these uncomfortable internal triggers as opposed to harnessing them as opposed to using it as rocket fuel to make things better okay make your own life better make the world better by reimagining the internal triggers so discomfort is not necessarily a bad thing feeling bad is not bad how did you harness these uh feelings when you started to recognize you were having them and you had these tools what did you start to do to put into practice yeah i'll give you i'll give you a great example so i used to have terrible stage fright okay but i'm a professional speaker for a living it kind of sucks right um and i used to uh you know whenever i would get on stage i would lit you know feel these cues my body was giving me of you know shortness of breath even actually just thinking about it right now i can feel it uh you know shortness of breath uh sweating uh you know i would start getting nervous and saying oh my goodness you know are people going to see my armpits are sweaty that my i've got sweat on my brow that i i won't be able to talk properly i'm going to tumble over my words i'm going to look like a fool and you see what was happening i was ruminating on the negative aspects of this feeling and all i wanted to do was get the hell out of there right before i went on stage i would secretly pray that the av system would crash right before i was gonna go online right before i was gonna go on stage i should say and so that i wouldn't have to do the talk well that wasn't serving me right i was looking for escape and i would have done everything to get off stage but here's the thing when i started reimagining the trigger and started seeing it as wait a minute no no this discomfort is a blessing what this is telling me when i feel my heart rate go up is not that i'm going to mess up i'm not nervous i'm upping my game my body is increasing my heart rate so i can get more oxygen into my brain so i can deliver the best possible talk so i started changing the script that i would tell myself in order to reimagine the trigger so we can do this with all sorts of internal triggers when i sit down to write okay writing is really freaking hard you know this right writing is really hard work right and i hate it when people say oh just turn writing into a habit make it into a habit that's ridiculous i've never turned right into a habit i've written thousands of articles by now two best-selling books writing will never be a habit people it is not a behavior done with little or no conscious thought it sucks the entire way through but here's the thing by understanding that it's supposed to suck right this is my big beef right now with habits you know i think we have reached peak habit that everybody thinks that habit means the sucky behavior done effortlessly that is not what a habit is okay when people say oh i want an exercise habit or a writing habit what they're really saying is you know that really hard thing that i don't feel like doing how can i do it and make it not suck anymore well that is an unrealistic expectation because here's what happens people embark down this path of forming a quote-unquote habit and then they see oh well the guru said that after 60 days after 90 days it's supposed to turn into a habit but then guess what it never does right it never becomes effortless why because deliberate practice you know the whole ten thousand hour rule all this idea of you know in order to get better at something you have to focus you have to engage with it you have to be fully present that is the antithesis of a habit the opposite of a habit is deliberate practice so when we have these expectations that oh i can turn everything into a habit 60 days later people say wait a minute how come exercise still isn't easy how come writing is doesn't come effortlessly and you know what they don't blame the author of that book that gave them a bad technique no they blame themselves they say oh i must be broken i must be messed up there must be something wrong with me and we leave them worse off than we began so what we need to start doing is to not expect these behaviors that we want to turn into quote unquote habits to be easy in the first place we need to be comfortable with discomfort that reimagining the internal triggers is a very important step it's one of these three steps that we can use to to to help us master and and overcome these internal triggers so they serve us as opposed to us serving them how do you reimagine the i guess the idea of that writing is hard what do you do for that when you sit down and write you're like man this is every time i've been doing this it doesn't get easier maybe it gets easier and you you flow a little better but it still takes time effort and attention it's not just this thing you turn on automatically right right so there's there's a few different ways we can do this and i talk about this in the book but really it's about reimagining that internal trigger so that when you feel boredom uh when you're at your desk working uh you know how to address it right when use you know when many times when i sit down to write uh it you know i feel like i want to do everything but right let me just go i'm working on a book that's me i've been researching for a year and a half yeah well when you said when you said research i was like oh oh i know what he's talking about and we justified right back to what we were saying earlier you know we say to ourselves oh i just need to do this quick i just need to google this one quick thing uh that turns into three hours and then you don't get exactly and most often we didn't really need to go to that one thing right we could have just kept writing but why do we do that we're doing it because we're seeking to escape but if we keep glossing over that fact if we keep thinking oh i really do need to google this one thing or where was that study or where was that book that i was reading where was that thing i need to put in my writing if we don't realize the real reason why we're looking for escape we're going to believe this lie uh that leads us towards distraction so it's really about understanding okay wait a minute okay this is hard writing is difficult why is it difficult well you know why because i'm plowing through new territory right when you are working on something that has never been done before when thoughts have never been strung in the way that you are stringing them together that's hard work right that's that that's virgin territory and virgin territory requires more effort to get through right a path that's already been paved is very easy to walk through but when you're paving a new path you gotta clear out the brush and that that clearing of brush that emotional attacks is what we feel in the form of boredom and uncertainty and fatigue that's what it takes and and we should recognize it and feel it and so there's a few different techniques for example one technique i talk about in the book is the 10-minute rule and this is not something i invented you know as i mentioned everything i talk about in the book is backed by peer-reviewed studies there's over 30 pages of citations so i'm really into the research so this comes from cbt and this is a technique that is is called the 10 minute rule and the 10 minute rule says that you can give in to any distraction but not right now not right now okay and this applies just as well with that piece of chocolate cake you know you should need if you're trying to lose weight uh with that cigarette you're trying not to smoke with uh checking social media or email when you should be working on something else at your desk the 10 minute rule says i can give into that distraction in 10 minutes now the the first response when people hear about this technique is well why don't you just say no to yourself why do you need this silly technique you know just abstain okay unfortunately what we know from the research literature is that abstinence frequently backfires that when you tell yourself no then we don't do that then we binge exactly why do we binge because this technique that you know the absence technique is like pulling on a rubber band right if you have a rubber band and you pull on that rubber band and you pull pull pull pull pull eventually you can't pull anymore it's going to snap but it's not just going to snap back to where it started no it's going to ricochet across the room and so when we tell ourselves don't do something that tension that's built up is itself an internal trigger and ironically when we give into it we are reinforcing the very behavior we're trying to avoid let me give you an example when someone tells themselves don't smoke don't smoke don't smoke don't smoke don't smoke okay fine i'm gonna have that cigarette that feeling of relief that relief of that tension of telling yourself no is actually what feels good when they survey smokers and they ask them do you actually like the sensation of smokers the overwhelming majority of smokers don't even like the taste the the sensation of smoking what they like what they habituate to what they get addicted to turns out it's not the nicotine it's in fact the relief of not having to tell themselves not to do something that they want to do and as crazy as that sounds i mean this really blew my mind when i read this research it's pretty extensive at this point it's not just the nicotine it's really about this this telling yourself not to do something giving into it eventually and that feeling of the relief of that tension of telling yourself no is it is actually what we get habituated to so instead of a 10 minute rule yeah it's not saying no it's just saying no right now it's not saying no it's saying not yet not yet not yet so when we use the ten minute exactly we you know we set a time i literally take out my phone i set it i you know i ask uh the lady whose name i'm not gonna say right now because it's gonna it's gonna show up on my phone uh i tell a setup timer for 10 minutes i put my phone down and now i have a choice to make okay i can go down two paths i can either get back to the task at hand like in this case let's say it's writing okay get back to the writing or if i feel like i have that urge if i have that sensation where i just want to go check email i just want to go do this one thing i just want to go do whatever it's not that is not what i said i was going to do i'm going to do what's called surf the urge surf the urge kind of like serve a surfer on a surfboard i'm going to ride that sensation because what we don't realize about emotions and these uncomfortable internal states is that they feel like they're going to last forever but they never do yeah right emotions are like waves right we think okay when i'm angry i'm always going to be angry when i'm bored i'm always going to be bored and that's never the case emotions are like waves so if we can ride that sensation like a surfer on a surfboard what we'll notice is that the wave will crest and then subside so giving ourselves the 10 minutes so just okay what am i experiencing right now all right i'm feeling frustration why am i feeling frustration well this is something hard this is something new this has never been done before and starting to change that internal dialogue until we feel ready to go back to that task at hand okay so you're either surfing the urge or going back to that task at hand and what you will find 99 of the time within those 10 minutes you'll forget about that urge when the timer rings you'll be like oh i'm back into doing what i'm doing i don't even remember what what was going to distract me so that's why we want to use this 10-minute rule to tell ourselves not no but not yet so that's one of many many different tactics we can use and you mentioned that a to-do list is probably one of the worst things that we can do to be productive as ever why is the to-do list so ineffective in actually being productive right okay so let me let me clarify a bit and qualify a bit it's not that i'm anti-writing things down that's that's a a time-honored technique of getting things out of your brain and putting them on paper very very effective what i am against is running your life with a to-do list okay so what most people who keep a to-do list do they wake up in the morning and they say oh what am i supposed to be doing with my time and instead of looking at their calendar they look at their to-do list and the to-do list is a seductive trap because what people do when they look at the to-do list you know what they do they do the easy thing right they don't they do the fun thing first they don't eat the frog first yeah right right they do the stuff that's easy and fun not the important and urgent right not the stuff that really needs to get done so they they do that that that stuff that takes them off track from the first minute they wake up because you're looking at the wrong place you shouldn't look at your to-do list you should look at your schedule and part of the reason that to-do lists are so dangerous is that there's no constraint with a to-do list right you can add more and more and more and more things to a to-do list and this is what this is what i used to do when i used to keep it a to-do list you know i read the all the books that said to do so the best thing ever run your life with the to-do list and i would do this and i'd have 100 things on my to-do list and i would never finish everything and so at the end of the day i was reinforcing a self-image of someone who doesn't do what they said they're going to do and day after day week after week month after month year after year if you tell yourself another day went by and i'm a goddamn liar right because i said it was going to do these 10 things and i didn't do it now this is a conversation i would have with myself so what happens after years of doing this oh i must be bad at time management i must not be very good at this right we start believing this ridiculous script that we made up based on this bad evidence of using a crappy technique and it wasn't us that's broke and there's nothing wrong with us it's that this technique doesn't work because and and because we believed it we reinforced a self-image that made things even worse okay instead of a to-do list what we want to do is to make a schedule and this is part two so so section two of the book is about making time for traction so step number one is mastering internal triggers step number two is making time for traction and so when we use a schedule as opposed to a to-do list we do have a constraint right we do have the same constraint that everybody else on earth has which is the same 24 hours in a day you know you can have limitless amounts of money you can be jeff bezos or bill gates and have you know oodles of money but you still get the same 24 hours and that constraint changes the paradigm of how we measure ourselves okay so people who run their life on a to-do list they measure themselves based on how many boxes they check off right if i checked a lot of boxes oh i'm so good if i didn't check enough boxes i'm a bad person right ridiculous silly very harmful instead i want you to stop measuring yourself by how many things you finished that's a ridiculous metric okay stop doing that the only metric of success from now on for you should be one thing did i do what i said i would do without distraction that's it that's all you got to do it's not about finishing anything it's not about finishing anything because when you say to yourself in your calendar i am going to sit on my desk and work on my book as you said louis right for 30 minutes 45 minutes whatever it is you say you want to do i don't care how long you work on it whatever you said you're going to do that technique has been shown this is called making an implementation intention which is just a fancy way psychologists call planning out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it that technique has been shown to be more effective here's the kicker the people who do that actually finish more they actually get more done than the people who use the to-do list technique it's kind of like saying okay i'm not going to go run for an hour today but i'm going to put my shoes on and i'm going to go outside and i'm going to start the run for two minutes and i'm just gonna do that every day but by saying okay i'm gonna schedule this for 10 minutes or whatever then you typically want to do more because you're already in the flow right it's a little bit more than tiny steps it's actually saying for that period of time so i i respect that you know just get started technique very nice but it's the don't stop technique got it more than just so don't get discarded go for 30 minutes go ahead go for the time you scheduled in your calendar right don't say oh i'm gonna run a 7 30 or whatever say i am going to walk for 30 minutes and i'm not going to do anything else that might take me away from working on this thing for 30 minutes in my life okay i'm gonna be with my child without distraction for one hour that's all i'm gonna do i am going to check email and do nothing but flush through my email uh inbox for 15 minutes without doing anything else i am going to read a book and nothing else for 20 minutes that is all you need to do to measure yourself don't worry about will i finish the book will i get to inbox zero will i have a beautiful relationship with my child will i ever you know be in physical good physical fitness don't worry about the end goals worry about did you put in the time to work on the task you wanted to work on without distraction that's your only metric of success and what happens to our self-confidence or the belief in ourself when we constantly let ourselves down with this process of not doing what we say we want to do right so if you use the if you run your life on a to-do list and you don't finish what you said you're going to do which barely anybody with a to-do list actually you know who runs the life of the to-do list actually does you're reinforcing a negative self-image of another day went by and here i go i didn't do what i said i was going to do look i still got all these things that i didn't get to what a loser as opposed to when you measure yourself based on this only metric of did i do what i said i was going to do for as long as i said i would without distraction you are a winner with every time box being just being your words yeah it doesn't matter the results you get it's just that i was my word today how was my word that and what i said i was going to do i did it and that builds it better exactly right self-image and self-confidence with with self right bingo so so being indistractible first and foremost is about personal integrity it's about being as honest with yourself as you are with other people right we all know that we wouldn't want to be a liar being called a liar is one of the worst insults anybody could say to you right you wouldn't want to lie to your friends to your family to your co-workers and yet we lie to ourselves every day right oh i'm definitely going to go work out no you didn't i'm definitely going to eat right nah i'm definitely going to be fully present with the people i love not really we lie to ourselves and that takes a huge psychic toll on our self-image and we don't even realize it until it's too late and that's when people start concocting all these ridiculous ideas oh i have a short attention span or i'm bad with time management or hey you know what i probably need some kind of diagnosis it's all ridiculous for the vast majority of people there's nothing wrong with them right they just reinforce this crappy self-image of someone who's incapable when they are perfectly capable if they had the right techniques how much does self-confidence or believing in yourself matter in terms of accomplishing the goals we set out for ourselves is it if we have a low self-esteem and low self-confidence do you believe that we can still accomplish the goals and dreams that we have what do we really need to start building confidence and belief in our actions and in who we are with those actions in order to accomplish those goals yeah so this is where the psychology of agency comes into play that believing that you can do something is incredibly empowering the question of course is well how do i get that belief and what where most people go wrong is that they have these big hairy goals right we've all heard about oh you have to have a specific measurable action well you know the smart goals and all that stuff and it turns out that the literature around this is another one of these areas that we've seen you know the the the popul the pop psychology is so off base right you know one of the most popular things that you hear these days around goals is that you have to have visioning let's all sit down and make a five-year plan and a visioning board right so that we can envision what we want and it turns out that studies show that people who do this are shooting themselves in the foot wow that we know that studies find that thinking to yourself oh you know i want that beach body is pretty much the worst thing you can do if you really do want that beachbody really what should you do instead here's the difference there's there's a good visioning and bad visioning bad visioning is envision your you know the this this bullet excuse me for that comes from this idea of the secret right the law of attraction that uh you know envision yourself wealthy envision yourself being in love envisioning yourself being uh in in physic in good physical shape terrible don't do that the good kind of visioning is not visioning the outcome because what's happening when you envision the outcome is that you are satiating that desire by imagining it you are satiating it it feels like you already got it instead the good kind of visioning is to envision what you will do when something gets in the way of the actions you have to take to get that goal so when you're distracted what are you gonna do what are you gonna do exactly so instead of thinking oh my god i'm gonna look so good with a six pack instead think about what am i going to do next time i go up with my friends and they offer me a piece of chocolate cake because that's the right kind of vision because envisioning this incredible result in a year or 10 years is is nice in theory but it's going to be extremely hard to get there with a big goal that you might have a big dream launching anything a book the physical body the relationship it's not just going to happen instantly without effort and work so that what i'm hearing you say is to focus on that's going to take a lot of work and time energy so every time i'm pulled away from that envisioning how you're actually going to show up for yourself to support yourself and getting there that's right that's right so that's why reimagining these internal triggers is so important as we talked about earlier what is the dialogue what techniques will i have what arrows will i have in my quiver ready to go when i am tempted with procrastination and distraction what will i do in those times is there good research on what did you call this revisioning or what would you call this yeah yeah there is there's actually some there's an article on my blog i can i can give you a link in the show notes where i talk about the difference between good visioning and bad visioning very very important uh because it you know if there's one mantra i live by and is kind of the foundation uh of my life now since writing this book and i didn't used to be this way by the way i you know i'm 42 years old i used to be clinically obese uh today i'm in the best shape of my life i actually have a six-pack for the first time ever and i'm not saying this to brag i'm saying this because what i've learned is that consistency is more important than intensity right consistency over intensity in every area of your life you want good relationships you have to be consistently present with the people you love you want to be great at your job you have to consistently do the hard work that other people don't want to do you want to have a you know be in good physical shape you have to consistently show up and do the workouts not about the intensity it's not about oh it's new years i'm going to make a resolution for five days and then quit it's about consistent action and that only comes not here's here's a really important point it's not about knowing what to do you know we become so obsessed with oh what's the right workout what's the right diet what's the right uh way this that you know i better go get a book to tell me what to do like let me go listen to some guru to give me all the answers we basically all know what to do right and if you don't know what to do google it for god's sakes all the answers are right there right we basically know what to do what we don't know how to do is how do we stop getting in our own way the real problem is not that we don't know what to do it's we don't know how to stop getting distracted so how do we get out of our own way yeah so we went through through one and a half of the strategies number one is mastering the internal triggers number two is making time for traction which we talked about a little bit in terms of you know why uh making a a schedule is so very important it turns out the vast majority of people don't keep any sort of a calendar two-thirds of people don't keep a calendar even those who do keep a calendar typically don't do it properly and the proper way to do it is by using what's called a time box calendar and i show you how to do that this technique has been around for for ages it's been around for decades it's actually one of the most studied techniques uh out there uh very very uh well researched technique of planning your day it's called making implementation intention but we can go beyond that too where uh what i advise in the book and this hasn't been published elsewhere is this process of what what i call schedule syncing which is very very important so um making it so making it um making time for traction is all about deciding how you want to spend your time right but to do that well the question is well how do i do that how do i decide how i'm going to spend my time and this is where a lot of people get stuck with the time boxing technique you know we've all heard it but this is why people don't do it they don't understand that what what is the first step how do i really get started in time boxing the first step is to start with our values okay turning our values into time so what are values values are attributes of the person you want to become let me say that again what are values values are attributes of the person you want to become so what we're going to do is we're going to ask ourselves how would the person i want to become spend their time and we're going to ask ourselves this in three life domains these three life domains of you you're at the center of these three life domains then your relationships then your work most people do in the wrong order right they start with their work and then only then they give that whatever scraps of time are remaining to their friends their family and to themselves no we want to start with you so we ask ourselves how would the person i want to become spend their time investing in themselves now it is not up to me or anyone else to impose their values onto you you have to ask this of yourself how would the person i want to become spend their time investing in themselves so how much time would they invest in physical fitness if that's important to you i'm not saying it should be but if it's important to you is that time to go to the gym to go on a run to go on a walk whatever it might be proper nutrition rest oh my god how many of us know we have to get quality sleep everybody knows this i don't need to tell you that you've you've read tons of literature that says sleep is important how many of us have a bedtime right how many of us actually have our calendar yeah scheduled yes very few people do right we have to have that time schedule because you know what you're going to do if you don't you'll check facebook for another distracted thing on netflix right you've got to have that time scheduled now again it's if you say uh you know the way i invested myself is i play video games for four hours a day i got no problem with that i'm not one of these chicken little tech critics that's going to say oh no you know watching football is okay but playing video games is bad no ridiculous anything you want to do with your time is fine as long as you decide in advance so if you say i want time to play video games great but put it on your schedule don't do it according to the tech company's schedule do it according to your values and your schedule so that's the u domain next comes the relationship domain and this is a really important one part of the reason we have a loneliness epidemic in this country uh and and you know we know that the researchers tell us that loneliness is as detrimental to our health as smoking and obesity wow it is a real crisis right now the reason this is happening this is not happening because of social media social media is the symptom to this disease which is that the the the proportion of time spent in planned social engagements in this country has been in a precipitous decline okay so if you read robert putnam back in the 1990s he wrote this book called bowling alone right way back before facebook and you know social media and he documented this trend this this 50-year trend now of people spending less time in scheduled engagements with their friends so he called it bowling alone because bowling used to be you know a big social activity you'd go to the bowling league and you'd see your friends and you'd get together every thursday night with your buddies and that doesn't happen like it used to right uh the secularization of of the of the united states not that i'm you know i'm a pretty secular person i'm not saying people should go to church or synagogue or whatever i'm just saying that those regular uh pillars of social engagement in our life for mo more and more people don't exist right so the lack of those scheduled times for our relationships takes a deep psychological toll so you have to ask yourself how would the person i want to become spend time with the people they love okay not giving them whatever scraps of time are left over between everything else but actually booking that time right how many times oh we should get coffee someday yeah okay right that's that's code for never right uh so having that time with your children your family you know your parents your siblings your best friends having that time on your schedule i know many of us are at home right now during covid got it maybe one of the silver linings is that people now are more proactive about scheduling those zoom calls i think i hope those will continue right i mean i'm spending much more time over zoom with my parents than i were before it was before uh kovit so scheduling that time you know with your spouse very very important having that time on your calendar say okay this is our time together whether it's a regular date day a walk time whatever it might be having that time scheduled and sacred for the people you love and then finally the last domain is the work domain and uh when it comes to work we have to realize there are two types of work okay there's what we call reactive work and reflective work reactive work is a part of everybody's job okay it's the phone calls the meetings the slack channels it's reacting to whatever is happening in your work environment and that that's part of the job i get it some jobs few jobs are 100 reactive okay if you uh work in a restaurant if you're working a call center your job is to show up you're not a schedule maker you're a schedule taker right you take whatever schedule is given to you you show up you do whatever needs to get done it's all reactive okay or almost all reactive other jobs are almost all reflective so if you're a software engineer a marketing executive a sales person you're not a schedule taker you're a schedule maker you have to sit down and say wait a minute how will i plan my day how should i spend my time and you have a tough job because your most important job is to figure out how to spend your time what most people do is they take the easy default the easy default is i'll just take whatever comes to me they think they're working in a reactive job but really they're working in a reflective job and those are the kind of people who suck at their jobs right why if you want a competitive advantage if you want to be better than everyone else in your field let me give you a little secret okay that no one else is doing think think make time to actually sit and think in your day you know why because nobody else is doing it i promise nobody they're reacting exactly they're constantly reacting but look to plan to strategize to think ahead you have to sit down without distraction and make some time to be with yourself in your own head to figure out what to do next right you have to prioritize that takes time to think without distraction so i implore everyone if your job requires some level of reflection which almost everyone's job does give yourself that 30 minutes 45 minutes heck an hour a day to work without distraction and put it on your calendar and keep it sacred okay so now we have these three life domains we have our time box calendar the final step is to do what we call a schedule sync and this is what's been missing i think from everyone else who's been taught who's uh you know espouses this technique of tom boxing and it's been around again for decades and decades is uh well what happens when uh in reality i have a boss and a spouse and i have kids and i have other people who demand my time that schedule gets blown to bits and the reason it gets blown to bits is because we don't do what's called a schedule sync here's what a schedule sync looks like let me let me destroy yet another piece of bad productivity advice which is we've all heard that you know if you want to stay focused if you want to be productive the best thing you can do is learn how to say no right have we all heard this advice learn how to say no to people what kind of stupid advice is that louis you're going to look at your boss the guy who pays or the guy or gal who pays your bills and you're going to tell them you know what boss no are you serious who wha who would give that kind of advice if you've actually had a job you know you can't tell your boss no you'll get fired so instead of asking telling your boss no what you're going to do instead is to say hey boss look can we sit down once a week okay monday morning it's going to take 15 minutes max and you're going to show them your schedule okay now that you've made a time box schedule you're going to show them right you have a physical artifact you can share with them and you say hey boss here's my schedule for the week here's all the stuff i'm doing okay per per you know the priorities at work okay here's how i'm spending my time during the work day now you see this other list here okay i wrote down on this other list here on this piece of paper all the stuff i couldn't fit into my schedule for the week can you help me re-prioritize that's your boss's number one job okay a boss's job number one is to prioritize yeah what's the most important thing right now that you need me to do exactly and can you have someone else support with these other tasks can we delegate to some other things if you want me to do this right now absolutely so if you say look if there's something on this list that's not in my calendar no problem what should i swap out right help me understand how to reproduce exactly schedule syncing right schedule synchronization so that exactly so that and let me tell you your boss will worship the ground you walk on i've started two startups most bosses have no idea how their employees are spending their time zero ideas we are hiring more and more people and uh you know luckily we're pretty good at it because we we use slack and monday.com so we have projects that are managed and you know project managers and all that but i'm not looking in those things so i have no idea actually what's being done unless i ask my project manager my ceo and say are people even working today i don't even know you know so it's it's luckily we have some of those tools but if you were if you were like hey this is my calendar for the week the things that i'm planning to create this week uh time yeah and and you they were like hey what can we eliminate or how can i delegate this then i'm sure would make that that person pretty excited right or re-prioritize or here's the thing the boss is thinking what the heck are people doing all day right why aren't things happening faster employees are thinking oh my god doesn't my boss know how much is on my plate right now right right i'm overwhelmed i'm overworked yeah yeah exactly and and this of course because there's no visibility into our schedules and i'm telling you it's 10 minutes a week it's you know 15 minutes max if you sit down and say here's my schedule okay here's how i plan to spend my time help me reprioritize if you do this your boss will say actually you know what that one thing you know you really don't need to be at that meeting but that other thing is super important can we swap that out this is how we get on the same page this is how we synchronize our schedules we can do this with our boss we can do this with our spouses let me tell you i used to my wife and i used to get in so many fights because of household responsibilities right because of misunderstandings of oh i thought you were going to do this and i thought you're going to do that now we sit down and now we involve my daughter too we do it every week the three of us sit down together and we synchronize our schedules miraculous it's clarity that's made our life yeah it's clarity i i've been a big fan of uh promoting the the scheduling technique of your goals your dreams your values all those things for a long time because i learned this from my football coach in football we would have a goal as a team start of the season what is our goal team what do we want to accomplish do we want to win the championship do we want to go to the playoffs how many games we want to win do we want to become better in each position all these things and we would come up with the goals and then i remember the first day of practice i ever went to football i had a schedule in my locker and so did every person in the locker room i was 15 years old this first time i ever saw this i was like oh there's like there's a calendar from every minute with intentional actions to help us reach the goal for that day and there's a schedule for the week and for the season we had a game every week to kind of measure the goals and how far how close we are how far away but every i mean there was a five minute break for water there was a ten minute stretching break there was an offense section a defense section a coach's talk there was every place was scheduled and that's when i said oh i need to do this in my life after sports i was like why would you do anything but schedule in what you want and actually follow through on this so i've used this sports kind of i didn't know it was scientifically backed and i think it was just like good planning by him and i was like i've just used that for the last 20 years where everything i want to do it's got to be in the calendar if i want to talk to my mom it's in the calendar if i want to go on a workout it's in the calendar if i'm working on writing it's in the calendar it's not just i'm going to do this today and then getting distracted i've always done that but i'm glad to hear that there's a lot of research and science backed by this and you've created even more strategies for us to to use this is this called the schedule maker tool is that something you developed yeah so i have i have a a very simple tool i put on my website to help people make these schedules um and i can put i give you the link for the show notes um but but you know the best tool i get often asked you know what's the best tool should i use this should i use that what's the best app the best tool is the one you use right the one that you consistently use so you can use the tool i made it's free you don't to sign up for anything but frankly you can do it with a pen and paper and a calendar you know paper calendar you can do it with google calendar whatever you use to keep that schedule and to revise it from week to week you never revise it during the day right you would never say oh i don't want to do this anymore let me change it during the day no no once it's set it's set for the day but you're going to look at it once a week is is you know 80 of people out there that i've worked with uh they have pretty good visibility to what the week ahead will look like so they can make that calendar for the week ahead takes again 15 minutes a week you're gonna revise that calendar it's not something that's set in stone wants forever and ever no no you're gonna look at it for you know for me it's every sunday night i sit down i look at the calendar from the week that passed i look at the calendar for the week ahead and i try and make the week ahead easier to follow and i make adjustments right so if i say oh you know what i really didn't have enough time for writing i want more or i didn't have enough time for email i really need to adjust it or i have this meeting that i can't move so where am i going to move something else around that process of sitting down and forming that schedule you know your schedule is not set in stone forever and ever it's a dynamic process because the right attitude is not a drill sergeant a lot of people resist making schedules in their life because they feel like it's too restrictive it's you know it doesn't leave them time to be spontaneous no you know freedom comes from these constraints by allowing yourself to adapt that calendar in advance to help you live your values to make sure that your calendar becomes easier and easier to follow over time because i mean the simple mantra here is you can't call something a distraction unless you know what it is distracting you from everything on your schedule is traction everything on your schedule is traction even if it's video games that's fine if you say i want an hour to play video games or go on social media or do whatever that's traction suddenly everything else is a distraction and this is by the way uh the the one more reason why running your life on a to-do list sucks is because when people get home at the end of the day okay and they use the the to-do list technique to run their life and again i'm not talking about simply writing down tasks i'm totally cool with that what i'm not cool with is running your life on a to-do list you get home at the end of the day this used to happen to me every day and i still wouldn't finish everything on my to-do list right but i'm exhausted all i want to do is just relax play with my daughter watch a movie on netflix just chill but then you see your list that you didn't complete it and you're like well i'm not an integrity to myself exactly and you feel like crap so even when we have leisure time even when we are relaxing we're thinking about work and then you add more to the to-do list for the next day and the next day and it's like it never gets finished right exactly exactly and let me tell you i bet 90 of your listeners 99 of your listeners have never experienced the bliss of what it feels like to have real leisure we don't many people have not experienced what does real leisure feels like real leisure is freedom right when i am playing video games it's awesome because that's all i need to be doing right if i checked email while i'm playing a video game the email becomes a distraction right if i get a work phone call while i'm with my daughter that becomes a distraction because i planned to do x and that is all i'm going to do that is what real leisure feels like the freedom to know i don't care what's on my to-do list nothing else matters but what i'm doing right now because that is what i planned and scheduled to do what else should we be thinking about in setting ourselves up to win with our big goals and how should we set these goals you mentioned you shouldn't think about the smart goals what should we be thinking about on how to set our goals and dreams for our life yeah so so goals are tricky i would say that you know there's nothing inherently wrong with the smart goals technique etc there is definitely a lot wrong with the visioning of oh this is what i you know i let me sit here and and make a vision board and a mood board about like my five-year plan the the my best piece of advice is let's just start with tomorrow okay let's just start with tomorrow as opposed to oh what do i want to do in five years and my vision board and my mood board and all that stuff how would the person you want to become again it's about living according to your values and nobody can tell you what your values are how would the person you want to become spend their time and by blocking out that time to say you know what uh yes i have a dream that someday i'll write a novel i have a dream that i'll get my phd i'll get a dream a dream that i'll have a successful business okay but how much time are you going to invest in that and knowing that constraint to the same 24 hours with everything else that you want to do and that you dream of forces you to prioritize and and that is essential uh you know consistency over intensity uh that is essential to getting to that long-term goal is to work on it day or over day after day after day relentless forward momentum this is how we accomplish these big goals not just dreaming about them so dreaming about them is is not bad it's not wrong it can set an intention of what you want to create but what i'm hearing you say is who's the person i want to be today and what are those what can i schedule my calendar that will support me in that goal and in that dream today tomorrow and doing it consistently over time is what i'm hearing you saying and understanding what's in your way you know so for example you know i had this dream of learning and visualizing the distractions and thinking about the distractions in your way and what you're going to do in response to those exactly and having having these strategies ready to go so that when you go off track so if it's something you really prioritize right and you say okay this is this is what i want to do with my time i know the difference between traction and distraction for that minute of my day what am i going to do when i feel bored lonely and decisive do i have those tactics ready do i know how to reimagine the task the trigger my temperament you know these are the three big tactics around mastering internal triggers am i ready with that right do i have those techniques ready do i have that time on my calendar the second big step of making time for traction the third step that we didn't get to yet is uh is hacking back the external triggers maybe this is a good time to move to the next big strategy hacking back external triggers remember in our model we talked about traction distraction internal triggers external triggers we talked about internal triggers just a bit there's a lot more that we didn't get to we talked about making time for traction about how we make sure we schedule that time we do those schedule syncs now the third step is hacking back the external triggers so external triggers we talked about earlier a little bit the pings the dings the rings everything in the outside environment that can move you away from what you plan to do can lead you towards distraction rather than traction and the reason i call it hacking back the external triggers is because you know i use that word very deliberately so to hack means to gain unauthorized access to something so a computer hacker would hack into your bank account to gain unauthorized access now the reason i use this term is because there is no doubt that all sorts of interests want to hack your attention okay whether it's the social media companies whether it's the television news companies whether it's the newspapers whether it's uh all kinds of people your kids they want to gain unauthorized access to your attention okay but here's the thing we are not helpless victims there is nothing that says we can't hack back okay what is mark zuckerberg going to do if you turn off those goddamn notification settings can he reach into your phone and turn it back on no he can't do that and so instead of complaining and moaning and groaning about oh these people are doing it to me they're hacking my attention they're making me do these things they're hijacking my brain they've addicted me which is all rubbish we can hack back so this is the part of the book that's the most nuts and bolts right i tell you specific technologies that you can use to hack back let me give you a few examples um i love youtube okay youtube i have learned so much i've watched your videos on youtube i've watched so many smart people uh give amazingly good uh advice sometimes not so good advice but for the most part this there's great stuff on youtube and i love it i think it's it's it's an amazing world changing platform my my daughter is homeschooled uh half of what she learns she learns from people who have posted these incredible videos on youtube it's amazing now do i have to use youtube the way that google designed it no i can hack back so one aspect of youtube that i don't like that i don't appreciate are all of these external triggers okay the external triggers that come in the form of the auto play videos well you know you can turn those off there's a very easy setting you can you can find it they don't make it super easy to find but it's there you can turn off autoplay here's one that you can't turn off but i'll show you how to hack you know all those videos on the side yep okay all those recommended videos that include the ads right you don't have to see those those are external triggers they are there to get you to watch the next video in the next video in the next video right we all know that right does anybody is anybody tricked by what those are there for they want you to spend time on their site that's pretty obvious that's how they make money but we don't have to stand for it so when i use youtube i only go on to youtube using a chrome extension called youtube df okay it's a free chrome extension anyone can go go download it youtube df stands for distraction free so every time i see one of your videos lewis on youtube i just see you right i don't see all those stupid videos on the side i don't need to see all those ads they've been scrubbed out by this technology that hacked back the external triggers for free doesn't cost me anything to do that and that's just the tip of the iceberg so on on facebook for example i love facebook it's great but i don't want to see the facebook news feed that news feed is algorithmically generated garbage okay so what did i do i went onto the chrome store and i got another free chrome extension that's called facebook news feed eradicator and it does exactly what it says whenever i go and i check facebook i see a nice inspirational quote where my news feed used to be guess what zuckerberg can't do anything about it yeah that's great and so these are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of different things that we can do for our our technology we can hack back i show you techniques around email you know email is kind of the bane of everyone's existence these days it's one of these habit-forming technologies that we hate but we can't stop using i show you how to save up to 90 of the time you spend on email by hacking back meetings oh my god how much time do we spend in pointless meetings especially now that we're doing so many over zoom i show you how to hack back meetings i show you how to hack back the distractions that come from your kids you know so many of us we work from home we're working away we're trying to stay focused and yet our kid comes into the room and becomes a source of distraction so we systematically go through uh these these various different external triggers and you were gonna mention you were mentioning something about wanting to learn chinese i think you're saying that yeah yeah that was uh back earlier when we were talking about different priorities you know i had this goal of oh i really want to learn chinese that'd be so cool but because you know before i wrote in distracted by i would have just added it to my to-do list learn chinese it would have just never happened it would have never happened never happened it's just always been on the bottom yeah exactly by forcing myself to say okay where is that time going to come from how much time am i willing to invest in this how you know it's part of my values for myself to invest in growth learning development great but what is that going to come at the expense of and because i only have so many hours in a day putting that in my calendar made me prioritize to say okay well if i want to you know write my next book and if i want to have time with my daughter and if i want to you know work out if i want to do this i want to do that something's got to give and so that process of prioritizing means you know what i can't do everything at the same time maybe that's a goal for you know 2022 i don't know but that process of putting it on your calendar forces you to prioritize because there are constraints are you studying chinese nope well not really i i i'm still experimenting to see so i started with an hour a day and then i thought that i it just didn't work for me because you know again from week to week i would experiment with it and found it didn't work so now i'm going to try 15 minutes a day and see maybe that's uh i i made it for 20 years i'm more like 15 for real but for 20 years i was like i'd really love to learn another language i barely feel like i know english but i was like i would love to learn another language and spanish has always been the one that's been the most interesting to me i'm a very passionate salsa dancer i used to go out two three times a week for i don't know five to ten years salsa dancing and i'd hear the latin music and i'd be around uh latin individuals who were speaking spanish all the time and i just appreciated the language and every year i would say okay i'm going to get the app i'm going to study this and then it would never happen i'd do it for a day then it would be so hard on my brain that i was just like it's too hard right you can't form a habit around something that's really this hard you have to be intentional around it and schedule it and uh and so finally last year i said enough is enough i've been thinking about for 20 years i keep losing confidence and integrity with myself i either need to say this is not something i care about anymore and let it off my uh you know set of goals and dreams and values or i need to actually do something about it and schedule it in my calendar so i actually found a one-on-one tutor to help me we do it three times a week at first i was gonna do five days a week and i tried that and i was like i can't do five days a week it's just it's not gonna happen and then now we're doing three days a week and originally it was 60 minutes of session but my brain was hurting so much the whole time that i was like okay let me do 45 minutes and i feel like that has been the sweet spot now three days a week 45 minute sessions i've got a session here in about 20 minutes actually and uh and it's figuring out what's the best time of day to do this and you know and also making sure i work out in the mornings spanish class at night run a business train people hire you know all this stuff is it takes time but when you when you focus on values first like you said and you you create those values for yourself and you determine what they are and you schedule the action steps to support those values then you can see how you want to live your life and what's working for you right exactly and iterate i think what what you're doing which is super important is that you are learning from this process uh of time boxing and scheduling to see what works for you you know we know that humans succumb to what we call the planning fallacy that on average a task will take you three times longer than you think it will that's on average okay on average three times longer why because so few of our tasks in life uh provide any feedback right we work in that big report uh it took us three times longer to do that rfp or that blog post or that chapter in the book we're writing or or whatever it is but there's no feedback loop there for us to reassess wait how long did that take how did i feel how hard was it and so there because there's no feedback loop we don't we don't learn from that experience and we keep making the same mistake again and again and again and again for the rest of our lives as opposed to when we make a time box calendar we say okay you know what i budgeted an hour a day every day to write the blog post and actually it takes way more time than i thought well is that still a priority is that still part of my values uh or should i make more time for it if so great let's make more time for it or let's dump it or let's re-prioritize so that's why the schedule sync of once a week sitting down with that schedule is so important because you're a scientist here not a drill sergeant a scientist and a scientist collects evidence you know makes hypotheses and readjusts based on what they're learning to make their schedule and the experiment more successful oh man i feel like i could go on and on about this for for a long time and hopefully we'll have you back on in the future but i want to i want to wrap things up here with a few final questions um before i ask these final questions i want to make sure people get your book both books because they're they're both powerful hooked how to build habit-forming products uh and indistractible not distractible but indistractible how to control your attention and choose your life backed by a lot of research and science to support uh your findings which i think are really powerful so i'm gonna make sure people get that and they can also follow you if they wanna be distracted they can follow you on uh in a good way they can follow you on instagram twitter facebook i really like watching your content on linkedin the most so they can follow you there i think you've got great stuff there um and it's near ayal i believe it's how i pronounce right near ayal everywhere except for near uh any yal99 on instagram correct right right but the best place to go is my blog which is really easy to remember it's near and far dot com but near spell like my first name so nir and far.com neonfire.com lots of great content there all the information about where to find you as well your books again i highly recommend checking those out uh whether you're just looking to improve your life uh whether you're an employee somewhere or you're an entrepreneur and you're trying to develop better products that really get people to be more involved in those products this is a question what's what's a question that people should be asking you more that they don't ask you should be asking me more um yeah that's a good question i don't know if there's one question um with all the research you've done in the last eight years through these books and everything you're finding about productivity and living a better life and you know getting people bought into your products and services what what should we be asking you i i i think it's a general attitude um i think that there is a general attitude of um unfortunately more cynicism that that troubles me i think these days than skepticism you know it used to be so when i moved to silicon valley back in 2006 um skepticism was a healthy thing right that i still think skepticism is great right uh wanting to see evidence being skeptical of results you know skepticism is a good value i think today i think that there's this move towards cynicism which is very scary to me that today uh with many different fields particularly you know i see this in in the technology field uh there's this idea that it's all about power plays and if someone can manipulate and control you then they're going to and it's about uh you know there's no way they can do anything right because of who they are and we see this in many different facets you can see the subtext here um and i think that's that's troublesome because i think it leads us to this helpless mindset right i mean i think many people have seen the social dilemma movie i was actually interviewed for that film for three hours i sat down with them back in 2018 and uh they didn't include anything i had to say because in the actual film i'm in the credits but they didn't include my commentary because my message is one of empowerment right i'm not naive i know what these tech companies are doing i know how they uh manipulate you i know how they get you hooked i wrote the book on how to do it right i know exactly how they get you hooked and i can tell you their techniques are good they're not that good right this isn't this isn't mind control this is about brainwashing no and you know what the funny thing is that okay so the social dilemma movie you know the entire movie was about how powerless you are right they don't give you any techniques it's not until the final credits literally the final credits that anybody says hey what do you think about turning off notifications like it's it's the entire film is like call your senator and you know like let's you know we have to wait for the tech companies to change something or the geniuses in washington to do something about it and that's that's silly because why the heck would we wait why would we wait for them to do something about this problem we can do something about it right now i mean there's these four steps that we can take master the internal triggers make time for traction hack back external triggers we didn't talk about the last one preventing distraction with pact i mean anyone can do this and the irony here is the more we believe we are powerless the more we believe these tech critics who tell us there's nothing we can do it's hijacking our brains this leads to learned helplessness this is exactly what the tech companies want they want you to believe you are addicted right because when there's an addiction there's a pusher there's a dealer there's somebody doing this to me but when we call it what it really is not an addiction it's a distraction right and we can do something about distractions that there is no distraction that we can't overcome when we use forethought you know one of the things that makes our species so special is that we can see into the future with higher fidelity than any other animal on the face of the earth right we know what is going to happen and predict what is going to happen better than any other animal so it doesn't matter what the distraction might be right because if you wait till the last moment for sure they're going to get you if you know you wait till the chocolate cake is on the fork you're going to eat it it's too late if the cigarette's in your hand you're gonna smoke it if the phone is on your nightstand it's gonna be the first thing you reach for in the morning we know this of course they're gonna get you you already lost but if you use forethought if you plan ahead this is what separates distractible people from indistractible people is that they understand that they can overcome any distraction that might occur tomorrow by taking steps today and that's really the message i want to get out there oh and what do you call that again vision uh visualizing something the the distractions that'll come up visualizing how to handle that what is that term called right i i would summarize it with forethought that okay if you want to summarize my entire book in one mantra it's that the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought that whenever we go off track whenever we don't do what we say we're going to do whenever we lie to ourselves it's always a problem of impulsiveness but there is no impulsiveness that we cannot overcome if we use forethought that's the secret to our success i think it's brilliant well i uh i studied meditation about four and a half five years ago and learned a strategy where you meditate in the morning a simple 15-minute meditation you think about what you want to create for the day you visualize it you you imagine your day and what you want to create and then also as if all the things you want are going to happen seamlessly right but then you also think what if everything doesn't happen the way you envision how are you going to respond are you going to respond with a negative reaction with resentment with anger with triggers or are you going to be using a positive trigger to respond in a loving way when someone's negative or when someone drops the ball or you're missed expectation or whatever how are you going to show up when there's a distraction in your day like that as well emotionally so i think it's a great strategy to have you know to create a goal for yourself but then also have the fourth foresight for thought to plan how to respond when you get distracted in your life in any way so i think that's brilliant um this is a question i ask everyone at the end it's called the three truths i'd like you to imagine for a moment it's your final day on earth many many years away and you've accomplished everything that you want to accomplish even though you only think about the next day and you're not dreaming five ten years out you've accomplished it all you've got the great relationships everything you can imagine it's happened but for whatever reason you've got to take all of your body of work with you this interview goes with you your books no one has access to your content anymore but you get to leave behind on a piece of paper again hypothetical question you get to leave behind three things you know to be true or the three biggest lessons that you've learned that you would share with the rest of us what would you say are those three truths for you that you'd share so one of them we i just mentioned uh is the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought i think there's a lot there uh a lot of this you know i i dropped these these truths in the in the the time we had together i think another one is consistency over intensity is is a big one and then the third one i'm still working on this and i think this might be the subject of my next book something around agency there's something super important in terms of feeling control in one's life and i haven't quite figured that out one out so that one's tbd but there's something very important and special around the psychology of agency is that is that agency meaning like identity to how we identify with ourselves or the the agency meaning that we can affect outcomes so there's a lot of fascinating research coming out around uh that the brain is not a computer we used to think you know every age we think that the brain is just like our machines right during the industrial revolution they thought there was you know valves and pumps in the brain uh during the the information age with people thought it was like a processor and it's neither of those things what we're learning now is that the brain is actually more of a thermostat it's called predictive processing and what we're learning more and more is that it's really about our ability to predict our own ability to affect our outside environment there's a lot there that again i'm still chewing on and don't understand and talking to researchers and experts in this burgeoning field but the more you know you think the more you look about uh into um uh depression uh anxiety disorder the role of placebos the role of of psychosomatic disorders in all of these the common thread seems to be something around our ability to affect change uh and and that's what i mean by agency so i i don't have it encapsulated into an easy to remember mantra yet like i did with my first couple books but no worries check back with me in a few years no worries well near i want to acknowledge you for the consistent uh effort you're putting into creating this information in useful ways so that we can consume it we can be more equipped and have the understanding the complex and make it more understandable so that we can use these tools to be less distracted and have more fulfilling lives and also you know all the habit-forming strategies that you put together as well i know how challenging it is to come up to package ideas so it's consumable and understandable uh when things are very challenging for people so i acknowledge your mission and your ability to consistently create great work i love watching your stuff on linkedin and checking out your articles so thanks for showing up for yourself and showing up for the world in this mission in this pursuit uh my final question for you and i want to make sure everyone checks you out at and far calm but my final question is what's your definition of greatness um my definition of greatness is living out your values that to me is my definition of greatness and and those values as defined by you with intent with forethought my man thank you so much for being here my pleasure thank you this is great if you're looking for more greatness in your life make sure to check out this video right here and also check out our free pdf the three secrets to unlock the power of your mind to help you change your life download it right here the lesson that i learned from her is go do it now like stop talking just just go do it if you don't have an excuse then you shouldn't be wasting time

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 71,292

Keywords: Lewis Howes, Lewis Howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, success, wealth, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success principles, millionaire success habits, how to become successful, success motivation, nir eyal, Nir Eyal interview, nir eyal london real, success mindset, millonaire habits, the 1% success mindset, become a productivity master, never be lazy again

Id: v0uQkvOjVkM

Length: 88min 42sec (5322 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 21 2021