Edu: Eliminating Distraction - Life-changing Techniques to Turbocharge Your Traction w/ Nir Eyal

Nir Eyal: I'm a big advocate for getting people's input. We definitely wanna get people's input. It's how we do it. So the problem with getting people, bunch of people in a room and hashing out an idea and brainstorming is that what happens is when you have more than.

The requisite number of two people in a brainstorm session the loudest, the highest paid, and the most male person dominates the conversation. And so even when you think you're getting people's buy-in, you're not, and look, hey, we're three white dudes here talking. But the fact of the matter is that a lot of people, in various organizations, they don't feel they can speak up.

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Chris: Hey, I'm Chris.

Yaniv: And I'm yanev. today we have bestselling author and behavioral design expert Neal, back on the show to talk about how founders and startup operators can master distraction so they can work more effectively on the things that are important to their startup. sometimes I think startups are one of the most distracting environments in the world. So I can't wait to dive into this critically under-discussed topic with a world expert Neir. Thanks so much for coming back on the show.

Nir Eyal: My pleasure. Great to be back. I'm honored.

Yaniv: Let's just jump right in. your previous book Hooked was all about how to build habit formation loops into your product and. I've read Hooked, and then I read Indestructable and I actually found it really interesting intractable as a type of sequel companion document to hooked where it's nearly taking the, opposite angle where it's like, okay, we live in a world full of distractions.

How do we make sure that we masters of our own attention? So I'd love to get your thoughts a little bit on, the journey and the narrative arc and how you see these two books fitting together.

Nir Eyal: Yeah, absolutely. It's a continuation, not a negation. so Hooked was about how to build habit forming products, how we can build good habits into the products that our users use every day. And that's a, book that's been used by. Pretty much every conceivable industry that needs repeat engagement. So health tech, FinTech, EdTech, anywhere where you need continuous engagement, or the business goes outta business and customers can't be served.

So that's what Hooked was all about good habits. Intractable is about how do we break the bad habits? And of course, it's not the same habits, right? It's not hooked and unhooked because we're not breaking the habits that we so, carefully put so much effort into creating. We want to maintain. The habits with our exercise app or our language learning app, or our enterprise software, we want those good habits to remain, but we wanna break the bad habits that don't serve us, particularly those around distraction. And we can get it more into what is distraction. Exactly.

Yaniv: Well, let's tell us about distraction.

Nir Eyal: Absolutely. So it's one of those words that. I thought I understood until I really went into the origin of the word, what I discovered. one of the best ways to know if you understand something is to see if you can name the antonym.

Do you know the opposite? And if you ask most people, what's the opposite of distraction? They'll tell you the opposite. Distraction is focus, right? I don't wanna be distracted, I wanna be focused, but that's not exactly right. you look at the, origin of the word, the opposite of distraction is not focus.

The opposite of distraction is. traction. And of course that makes very obvious sense when you think about it. Traction and dis traction. Both words come from the same Latin root tahare, which means to pull, and you'll notice they both end in the same six letters, A C T I O N, that spells traction So traction by definition is any action pulls you what you said you were going to do, things that you do with intent, things that move you closer to your values and help you become the kind of person you want to become.

Those are acts of traction. The opposite. Dis traction is any action that moves you away from what you plan to do away from your values, away from accomplishing the things that you said you were going to accomplish away from becoming the kind of person you wanna become. So this is a really important dichotomy because.

I would argue that any traction can be traction or distraction based on one word, and that one word is intent. As Dorothy Parker said, the time you plan to waste is not wasted time. So I am on a crusade to tell people that they should not feel guilty. About going on social media or YouTube or playing checkers or whatever they wanna do at their time.

There's nothing wrong with any of that stuff. And I think we need to stop moralizing and medicalizing. You see this, you know, video games melt your brain. This moral panic around, social media. It's ridiculous. It's by and large total BS because anything you plan to do with your time and attention is fine.

Why is watching YouTube videos or playing a video game somehow morally inferior to watching football on tv? There's no difference as long as it's what you do according to your schedule and your values. Enjoy it without guilt. conversely, just because something is a work related task doesn't mean it can't become a distraction.

So this was my regular routine for years when I was running my startups, I would. Get to my desk and I would say, okay, I've got that big important project I need to work on, this thing that I really need to focus on. Here I go, I'm gonna get started right now. Nothing's gonna get in my way.

I'm not gonna get distracted. But first, let me check some email. Let me just scroll that Slack channel real quick. Let me just do that thing on my to-do list, just to get some momentum we can talk about later. Why to-do lists are one of the worst things you can do for your personal productivity.

But I would do all this stuff thinking, well, this is a work related task. I gotta check email at some point, right? It's part of my job. I gotta stay up, to date on what's going on when I didn't realize that as is the most. Dangerous form of distraction, particularly when it comes to the startup environment.

You're absolutely right. It's an incredibly distracting environment to work at a startup because there's so many competing priorities and everything needs to get done. And so this is what, so difficult about these distractions is that just because it's a work related task mean it's not a distraction.

In fact, that's the worst kind of distraction because you don't even realize. You're getting distracted. So when you're checking email thinking, oh, that's a work related task, but you said you were gonna work on that big project, that is just as bad of a distraction as playing a video game because that's not what you said you were gonna do with your time and attention.

So we've got traction, we've got distraction. So my goal with intractable is to help people do what they say they're going to do. It's not a book about, oh, you need to exercise more, sleep more, or eat better. That's not what it's about. It's about whatever you wanna do with your time and attention. So if you wanna spend 60 hours a week working on your startup, that's fine, right?

I'm not gonna tell you not to. I'm gonna help you make sure you do whatever it is that you say is important to you based on your values.

Chris: Yeah, I absolutely love this. you blew my mind a couple of times just then, and I also feel like we're brothers from another mother, because I wasn't on the episode where you joined us about habit forming loops. But, I really appreciated and resonated when you pushed back on this moral panic against social medium.

I've actually done that a few times myself in various forums, including this podcast, so I really feel like we're simpatico on a few things here and I love this idea of distraction being in anathema to traction and being the opposite of traction. And of course, you're mostly talking about.

 Personal distraction and choosing the right things to work on. but I'm also reminded of our episode around alignment and a form of, I guess you might call it institutional distraction, where different people are pulling in different directions and creating distraction for each other.

we talked about that also as this kind of mental model of everyone trying to pull a boulder to get traction in a certain direction. And so I guess there's. two levels of distraction and traction here. There's you personally working on the right things, in the right order to achieve your intent, and I love the way that you connected that to intent and then making sure that the rest of the company is not, creating distraction for each other and for the overall mission.

Nir Eyal: Yeah, absolutely. So there's a whole section in the book on how to create an intractable workplace. And I think it's incredibly important because an individual can use all these tactics, right? There's four big strategies to becoming intractable that we can, go through. But even if the individual does that, which is the first step, you know, I'm a big proponent of personal responsibility and, control and agency where you have it. So that's the first step. Of course, do everything you can do first, But then of course we operate in various social spheres. We have our family, we have our work, we have the greater society, and so those. environments we know can shape our behavior.

So if you do everything I tell you to do in the book and you become intractable, but you work in a job where your boss insists on, coming by your desk and asking about those TPS reports every five minutes, it's gonna be really hard to focus. And so what I want, this book to do is to make it okay for us to say, Hey, look, I need time to focus.

I need time to work I think we are. Way too output driven, and we don't consider the input that's required to do great work. let's say you go to a baker, right? And you say, Hey, my kid's birthday party is coming up. I'm gonna need a hundred cupcakes. Well, the baker's gonna sit there and is gonna think, okay, well I need butter, I need flour.

I need sugar. I need all these ingredients in order to make the output, in order to make the cupcakes. But for knowledge workers, We don't do this, we only think about the output. By the way, this is one of the reasons that to-do lists on their own are such terrible productivity killers, because it's all about the output.

I need to do this. I need to do that. I need to do this. It's all about checking off those cute little boxes, whereas an intractable person realizes that in order to get the output, in order to make those sales calls, in order to do that big presentation, in order to code up whatever you're working on, whatever the case might be.

As knowledge workers, our input is not flour, sugar, and butter. Our input is just two things, time and attention. That's it. Time and attention. It's all we need. Right, but we don't budget in those inputs, and we just measure ourselves by ticking off cute little productivity boxes in our, to-do list, which is terrible.

 So rather what an intractable person does is that they learn how to put in the right input. In order to get the output. So that's what the individual does. Now as an organization, we need to create an environment where we facilitate and reward and recognize, and most importantly, exemplify what it means to be intractable.

 You know, I get called in to boardrooms all over the world. to these big expensive presentations on how to become intractable for companies where the boss calls me up and says, oh, you know, people here are so distracted and they can't stay focused on their work, and they're constantly doing stuff that is not increasing the bottom line.

Come in here near, teach everybody how to become intractable. You know what happens? I go into this big boardroom and there's a hundred people waiting to hear this presentation, and let me ask you guess who's on their phone. In the middle of my presentation. Is it the millennial? Is it the Gen X? Is it the Gen Z?

No, it's the boss. It's the boomer boss who hasn't gotten the memo that you need to be fully present. Right? And they wanna show everybody, I'm so important, I need to constantly be on my device. Everybody needs to see, I'm so busy, right?

Chris: And it's likely, the boomer boss who's sending in distracting messages about, we should do this and we should go there, and I just sold this account. Good luck supporting it.

Nir Eyal: That's exactly right. And look, culture. Culture is like water. It flows downhill. And so when you have a boss who's constantly distracted, People look to the boss and say, well, whatever the boss is doing. If the boss is up 24 7 sending email messages all day long and on Slack all day long, well then that's what is expected on me.

1. So there is definitely something that we can do, not only ourselves, but that needs to take hold in the greater organization. The good news is we can manage our managers, we can manage up, you can manage that boomer boss and help them become intractable too.

Yaniv: And

there's just one thing I wanted to add, which I think harks back to what Chris was saying, one thing that I love about. Traction being the opposite of distraction as well as the, linguistic etymological thing. There is, when we are at a startup, we talk about the business having traction, and Chris mentioned alignment. And so I think the interesting thing about distraction fractal, right? It happens at multiple different levels. And so you as an individual can be distracted, but the business itself can be distracted and that's different. From just having a business full of distracted individuals.

It comes back to what you were saying, that, word intent, that's why Chris was talking about alignment. You have goals and intended outcomes as an individual, but as a startup, as a business, that business also has intended outcomes.

I think it's, really lovely because you have this layering up of intent, clearly communicated goals, action towards that intent, and then the same thing at a larger scale.

Nir Eyal: But I would add there's a special responsibility that executives have that other people don't have. I don't think everybody in your organization, or wants to. pull into the strategic priorities, I mean, it's great to take in their input, but I think it's too much to ask people what should the company priorities be?

That is the job of the C-Suite, actually, I would argue that's the only job, the chief executive's only job is to prioritize. So it doesn't matter if it's a startup or a big company. The only job of the startup founder or the ceo. Is to prioritize everything else is details, and that's the hardest job, I've been a, startup founder three times now, and it's really tough to know what comes first, what comes second, what comes third. We wanna do everything all at once, and it just doesn't work that way. So the most important job of the executive is to prioritize. Now, once you have those priorities, your job is to clear everything out of your people's way to help them accomplish those priorities.

Chris: Now, of course, the reason this is so absolutely essential is because whether you are a bootstrapped startup or a, well-funded superstar, or you're a large enterprise, you have limited resources. It doesn't matter who you are. you have some set of finite resources, money, people, time, and you need to put.

Those resources to effective action to generate action and traction, against your stated intent. Right? that's why this entire conversation is so, so essential. And if you are not moving with action and with, rapidity towards those goals your competitors are, you have a kind of global competitive landscape.

And now with, ai, it's gonna be even more interesting so near. let's get really actionable then. we've set up, I think a good set of context about what does distraction look like? why is action with intent critical. So now the question becomes how do we do this as founders, as operators, as investors?

What are your techniques for doing this? And maybe give us a little sneak peek into your book.

Nir Eyal: So the problem that we have today, is not that we don't know what to do. all of us basically know what to do. If you wanna get in shape. For the vast majority of people, it's eat right and exercise, right? Do we still need another stupid diet book to tell us that? if you want to be better at your job, you gotta do the work, especially the hard stuff that other people don't wanna do.

If you wanna have good relationships, you have to be fully present with people. We know this stuff, what we don't know. And by the way, if you don't know it, it. Right? All the information is right there at your fingertips. Therum is not that we don't know what to do. The problem is we don't know how to get out of our own way.

We don't know how to stop getting distracted. And so that's why I think becoming intractable is the skill of the century because there is no facet of your life, your mental health, your physical health, your, business wellbeing, anything that requires, you to be able to work diligently requires you to have this skill of focusing your time and attention.

It is the most important skill of the century. So how do we do that? So let's go back to what we talked about earlier. Traction is the opposite of distraction. Now we've got what we call triggers. There are two kinds of triggers the one that people blame, the most, distraction on.

It's called external triggers. External triggers. These are all the pings, the dings, the rings, anything in our outside environment that can take us off track. And so when people think about that, they got distracted. They blame their phones, they blame their kids, they blame their computers, they blame all these things outside of them.

Now it turns out that external triggers and studies have verified this external triggers only account for about 10% of our distractions. 10%. So it's not nothing, but it's not very much either. So what's the other 90%? The other 90% of the time that we get distracted, we get distracted not because of what happens outside of us, but rather 90% of our distractions begin from within. And this is a huge aha moment in the five years that it took me to write and distract all. By the way, it took me five years cuz I kept getting distracted, right? I, I was writing the book for me.

Yaniv: Deliciously ironic,

Nir Eyal: Yeah, exactly. well, that's why I wrote the book, but now that I've discovered these

Yaniv: Why don't you write a book about procrastination? But I could never get round to it.

Nir Eyal: Yeah, exactly. But the good news is that I did finish it because I learned these techniques and it's changed my life. I mean, I've, never been in better shape in my life. I'm 45 years old. I'm, never been athletic. But now I'm in the best shape of my life, because I exercise. When I say I will, I'm more productive at work because I do what I say I'm gonna do.

I'm more present with my family, my kid, because I'm there when I say I will be. So, it's absolutely changed my life. but the point being here. Back to this point around internal triggers. That's where we have to start. And that's I think if there's one big takeaway that I'd like people to remember is that the vast majority of distractions begin from within.

We can't blame things outside of us, cuz they only account for about 10% of our distractions. 90% of our distractions are internal triggers. What are internal triggers? Internal triggers are uncomfortable emotional states that we seek to escape. Boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety, stress.

These are the source of 90% of our distractions because what is human motivation? This is another mind-blowing revelation that I had during writing this book. And again, this isn't my research. This is, going back into the psychology literature most people believe that motivation is about carrots and sticks, right?

The pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Sigmund Freud said this. Jeremy Bentham said this, turns out it's not true. Neurologically speaking, it's not about carrots and sticks. It's not about pleasure and pain, but rather neurologically, the brain gets us to act for one thing and one thing only, and that is the desire to escape discomfort.

That's it. Everything you do, everything you do is about the desire to escape discomfort. And then people say, well, what about, you know, I want to feel good, right? Aren't I motivated to go get a reward? Yes, but the way the brain gets you to act, the way it spurs you to action. Is by craving, lusting, desire, hunger.

These things are psychologically destabilizing. So even the pursuit of pleasure is itself uncomfortable. It's kinda like, in the matrix and you know that scene in the matrix where Neo discovers that there is no spoon? here's the thing. Here's the revelation. Here's what's gonna blow your mind.

The carrot is the stick. The care is the stick. The pursuit of pleasurable sensations is itself psychologically destabilizing. So when you realize this fact that everything we do is about minimizing pain, it's about minimizing discomfort, either psychological or physiological. What that therefore means is that time management pain management.

I'll say it again. Time management is pain management. Go further. Weight management. If you struggle with your weight, I used to be clinically obese. Was I eating because I was hungry? Very rarely I was eating because I felt bad. I would eat. When I felt bored. I would eat, when I felt lonely, I would eat.

When I was feeling ashamed about how much I had just eaten, it was the fact that time management. Weight management is pain management. Money management. Have you ever had problems managing your money? Same point, because all human behaviors desire to escape discomfort. So this leads me to the first and most important step to becoming intractable.

Which is master your internal triggers or they will become your master. What I learned in my five years writing this book is that high performers in every field business, the arts, sports, doesn't matter. High performers in their field, they feel the same internal triggers we do. Loneliness, boredom, anxiety, stress.

They feel those things too. But high performers have learned how to take those internal triggers and as opposed to escaping them like distractable people do when they feel uncomfortable. Ooh, I don't wanna feel this. Let me go turn on the tv. Let me go check email. Let me go check Slack. Let me go check social media.

Distractable people escape these uncomfortable sensations. Intractable people have learned how to turn those uncomfortable emotions into rocket fuel, to propel them towards traction. And that's what you see across the board in high performers, especially in business. They relish that discomfort and they use it to their advantage.

And so we can all do that. We can all learn to master our internal triggers, and if we don't, those emotions become our masters.

Chris: It's so interesting because as you were talking, I wrote, a note for myself, which is to say, when you talk about mastering your triggers, perhaps the answer then is a higher threshold for pain or a higher, discipline around, delayed gratification, labeled that here in my notes as grit. But then want to immediately disagree with myself because by increasing your tolerance for pain, you're almost dampening your ability to act in your best interest. So I like your answer better, which is to convert the pain into rocket fuel for some positive action.

Nir Eyal: There are circumstances where it's good to build that muscle to show yourself, eh, I can delay a little bit.

And there's some tactics around that. But it's a little bit more nuanced in that what we find is that high performers, they actually see the discomfort differently, and that's a really big revelation. It's not that they can bear the pain longer, Even though that is a useful trait, that's not exactly what I'm talking about.

It's that they actually see the discomfort differently. Imagine, think about in your head the thing that you know you should be doing more of. That you're not making time for, should exercise more. I should eat right. I should spend more time with my kids. I should work more on my business.

I should write that book. I've been always dreaming. I would write whatever it is that you know, you should be doing more of, but you're not doing the people who do do it know, it's humanly possible, not talking about, you know, doing something supernatural. It's something somebody on earth has done and is doing a lot.

What is happening in those people's brains? Is that the thing that you see as painful? They see as pleasurable. That's crazy. Think about that. They just view it differently. Now, that's much easier said than done, but there are methods that we can use to, do what's called reimagining the trigger. And there's a whole chapter in the book on how to do this.

I'll give you one quick example. So, today I'm a public speaker. I'm, semi-retired, but what I do for fun and, money is public speaking. I really enjoy it, but I didn't always used to enjoy it. the reason I didn't always enjoy it was because when I first got started, I had terrible stage fright.

And that is not a trait you want in a public speaker, but here's what would happen. I'm about to go on stage. I would feel my, heartbeat racing. I'd get, really dry throat. My armpits would start sweating and I would get really self-conscious and start telling myself this narrative that what I'm experiencing, this discomfort, these internal triggers are signs of my deficiency.

Was a real public speaker, I wouldn't be feeling this way. Maybe I should go do something else because obviously I'm just not very good at this because why would I be feeling this way? Right? Real public speakers don't get nervous like this do they? Turns out they do, but they deal with the discomfort differently.

So when I uncover this research on re-imagining the internal trigger, now before I go on stage, I still get the same physiological response. I still get the sweaty pits and the heart racing, but now I reimagine the trigger. So when I feel that same exact reaction, In my body, which I can't control. You can't control these urges.

You can't control the internal triggers. All you can do is learn how to respond to them appropriately. Hence the term responsibility, so now when I feel that discomfort, tell myself a different narrative. The narrative now is, ah, you see, my body is preparing me give the best possible talk by pumping more oxygen into my brain so I can deliver on point.

So by changing that narrative in all the different forms of our life, and again, this is one of dozens of techniques, this is just one technique. So what I want people to have is a quiver full of arrows that they can use to master these internal triggers. And that's one of them is, reimagining the trigger.

There are, all kinds of other things. You reimagine the task. There's the 10 minute rule, there's acceptance of commitment therapy. It's all kinds of other things that I tell people how to do in the book. But this is just one of the techniques. And what we find is, something that, people at top of their game do is that they're able to reimagine that trigger in a way that serves them as opposed to them serving the trigger.

Chris: I also have stage fright and just massive social anxiety about being on stage or being in the big meeting, which is kind of weird and ironic considering we're running this podcast. live right live is, always, is a panic for me.

And yeah, the, best advice I ever received was to reframe. The panic from anxiety to excitement.

Nir Eyal: Exactly.

Chris: A version of what you were saying, but you are much more precise and specific about the advice you're giving there, and I like that very, very much.

Yaniv: I think there were two things that were popping into my mind, and one of them, you, just labelled it Chris, was anxiety. from my reading and my personal experiences, anxiety is something that Is very prevalent in the modern world you could call it an epidemic of anxiety, but in particular, when we talk about founders and people who work at startups, anxiety is very prevalent there.

I think a lot founders suffer from anxiety to a greater or lesser, but usually a, greater extent. Anxiety can lead to a lot of drive. which founders need. but to your point, in Chris's point, it can either be used as a fuel or as, a trigger for distraction.

Do you feel that founders. Particularly prone to distraction.

Nir Eyal: First, have to nitpick a little bit we oftentimes hear a narrative around things are worse than ever, right? We're going through a mental health crisis and an anxiety epidemic, and. we need to be careful about that kind of stuff because one of the things that we know is absolutely critical for psychological wellbeing is what's called an internal locus of control.

An internal locus of control says that you believe that you are able to change. Your lot, You're able to change things versus an external locus of control says that things change you as opposed to you change things. and we know that on every metric of wellbeing, physical health, number of friends, net worth, longevity, everything is better for who have an internal locus of control.

Interesting. Whether they are right to have an internal locus of control or not, doesn't matter. You know, we see people who are in terrible circumstances, people in third world countries who are really struggling hand to mouth, if they have an internal locus of control. I mean, you would say like, Hey, look, you're stuck in a, terrible situation in grinding poverty.

Not an internal locus of control problem. That's something based on your environment, right? But even those people who believe maybe wrongly so that they have the power to change. Do better in life. Okay, so we should all have an internal locus of control. And what I wanna nitpick with you in a little bit Y is.

Anything that makes people believe that now it's different. Now it's, something that is, out of your control. It's just the way things are today. It's the modern world. It's your circumstances. It's, the way things are doesn't lead to an internal locus of control. It brainwashes people into an external locus of control, which is my big beef around the current criticism around social media and technology and everything is terrible and it's rotting our brains.

What you're basically doing is telling people. Not you, but tech critics are telling people it's out of their control, you see this commentary, you see it in the, traditional press all the time. The traditional press hates social media cuz it's their competition. They'll tell you all the time how it's addictive and it's hijacking your brain.

Gimme a break. Hijacking is what those bastards did to us on nine 11. It's not, Ooh, I like to check an app once in a while, right? It's a whole nother ballgame and you hear dopamine squirts and, oh, we can't stop. This narrative is basically telling people there's nothing you can do. And of course, what do people do when they believe that they lack agency?

Nothing. So the most important thing you can do in life in general, this isn't just about tech distractions or stress or anxiety. The most important thing you can do and the most important thing you can teach your kids and teach your family and teach your coworkers is agency. You have the power to change because as Henry Ford said, whether you believe you can or you cannot, you're right.

Yaniv: I'm with Mick, who's part of the product team at Until Now. Mick, you say keeping your MVP as lean as possible is extremely important in the early days of your startup, but it shouldn't be at the expense of UX. What do you mean by that?

Mik: Yeah, correct. speed at the expense of good UX and ease of use for your customer could very likely result in a growth drop off. But it's probably best way to tell you an example. So let me tell you about vouch. Vouch is a SaaS product that helps businesses capture customer testimonials. it's used by the likes of Amazon, Atlassian, so quite a few big players.

So the founders had shipped an MVP that early adopters were using, but they noticed that growth had hit a wall. The UX of recording a testimonial was kind of clunky, which resulted in suboptimal conversion rates. we got involved to redesign that flow entirely, focusing on making that core experience for customers really seamless, simple and easy.

And the results were staggering. the conversion rate doubled, unlocking a step change in growth that really helped vouch raise their next round.

And today, they're a leader in their product category and we are pretty proud to have played a part in their growth.

Yaniv: Head to their website for more examples and to get in touch.

Chris: So I think we've, pretty thoroughly discussed, technique one, in your book, what is the second technique, in the list?

Nir Eyal: So step number one, master the internal triggers. And there's about a dozen different tools that anybody can. Used to master these internal triggers. That's step number one. Step number two is making time for traction. So we talked about the opposite of distraction is traction.

Now what we have to do here is turn our values into time, What are values, values or attributes of the person you want to become, what you've gotta do is to ask yourself, how would the person I want to become spend their time?

So this is a radical, change from what most people do when they read their first productivity book, is they start keeping to-do lists. And there's nothing wrong with taking things outta your brain and putting them on to-do lists. The problem is you stop there, to-do lists, are terrible.

When most people do, they write things down on to-do list, and then they have this never ending list of things that they're supposed to get done. They don't get them done. They come home from work, they're exhausted. They look at this list of things that they still haven't accomplished for the day. They look at it day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, and they say, well, I must not be very good at time management, right?

Here I am lying to myself every day. I said I was gonna do all these things and I didn't do them. Loser. And so it starts encoding this pattern of people actually believing this stuff. Like, oh, I'm no good at time management. I have a short attention span. I'm very distractable. They start believing this cockamamie narrative thinking that they're broken.

 It's not that they're broken, it's that this stupid antiquated to-do list method is broken. So what I do is I give people an alternative. Two to-do list, which is actually backed by thousands of peer reviewed studies. It's called setting an Implementation Intention, which is just a fancy way of saying, planning out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it, and so I teach people exactly how to turn their values.

Into time by using what's called a time box calendar. I didn't invent time boxing. It's been around for decades, but it is absolutely the best way to make sure that you live according to your values, is planning out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it.

Chris: I love that very much, and particularly the part where you said, you need to ask yourself what would someone admire or someone who's achieving the result you want be doing?

And it reminded me of three analogous metaphors, which was live your life as if you were on your deathbed and kind of work. Backwards, or the other one is, be the author of your own story. And it's more of a movie analogy. And the final one was, don't sweat the small stuff.

Will this matter in five years? And if not, set it aside and, allow yourself to focus on the big things that really matter to you.

Nir Eyal: Would add one more, which is, Jeff Bezos regret minimization framework. is really how I run my life, that I don't want to look back and regret. Not having done the things I know I should have. If something's a surprise. How could I know? Oh, the stock market crashed. Oh, somebody got sick.

It's horrible right There's things that happen that you can't predict that are absolutely out of your control, but there's a whole hell of a lot of stuff that is in your control, right? Getting enough sleep, spending quality time with your family, being with your friends, working on a project, exercising, eating, all these things we know we should do.

But we don't do, I don't wanna look back in my life and say, damnit, I knew what I was supposed to do. Why didn't I do it right then? I'll feel like an idiot. So it's about minimizing regret, and the only way you can do that is to plan ahead. fundamentally, distraction is an impulse control problem.

It's all it is. It's an impulse control, problem mostly, as we talked about earlier from these emotions. So once you do step one of mastering the internal triggers, the second step is to plan out, wait a minute, how do I wanna spend my day? I can't tell you how many people I, I've worked with over the years, thousands at this point, who tell me how distracted they are and how they can't get this done because their boss wants this and their kids want this, and did you see what happened on Twitter?

Blah, blah, blah. And then I say, wait, wait, wait, wait. What did you get distracted from? Exactly? What did you get distracted from? Show me your calendar. And they say, oh, but look at my to-do list. I have a million to-dos. I'm never gonna get them all done. I said, that's not the question. The question was, show me your calendar.

What did you wanna do with your time? What did you get distracted from? And you know what's on their calendar? A meeting, you maybe one meeting for the day, the rest of the day's. Open blank. Lots of big blank spots in their day. And so here's the rule, you can't say you got distracted if you don't know what you got distracted from.

I'll say it again. You can't say you got distracted if you don't know what you got distracted from. So if you look at your calendar and there's an open space, what the hell did you get distracted from? You didn't plan what you were gonna do. So unless you're a child or a retiree, you have to plan your day down to the minute.

And I used to get a lot of flack for this. In fact, mark Andreessen, you know Mark Andreessen from Andreessen Horowitz, he used to famously say he doesn't plan his day. If someone needs him, they'll come get him. He doesn't plan his time. Big blank. Open calendar. And people used to say this to me like, Hey, look, you know, mark Andreesen is one of the most successful VCs ever.

He doesn't plan his day right. In fact, he says nobody should plan their day. And recently I won. He recently wrote a blog post about a year ago now it's been where he says, I was completely wrong. Here's my time box calendar. And he does exactly the technique I now espouse.

Chris: Connecting this back to this idea of the whole company being intractable. It reminds me again our episode around context setting and alignment, and the idea that you need to decide. What the company is gonna be at its deathbed, what is it aiming to do when a founder comes to me and says, you know, the team is moving too slow, or sales cycles are too long, or Our product isn't polished, I always go straight up to the top and say, What are you trying to deliver and how do you eliminate optionality and vagueness up there because it all flows from the top.

And you know, there's a planning technique called big rocks, right? Where you put the big boulders into the plan first so that the little things that death by a thousand cuts can't dissuade you or distract you from those big achievements you absolutely need to do first. And so this is, this is huge.

You block out big parts of the calendar

Yaniv: And while you're taking inspiration from, Jeff Bezos, he's famous for the whole working backwards concept. Right. And I think a big problem with alignment, with lack of intent that leads to distraction is. we don't know what we're working backwards from, right? We don't have a goal.

People talk about goals a lot, but the goal is really, specifying your intent of what you're working towards, and then you can break things down and say, this is where we need to be spending our time, which is our most valuable resource, both as humans, but also as a startup organization especially.

How do we spend that time and narrow it? You're completely right, like your calendar is in a sense how you're allocating your most valuable resource. Your time, and if you haven't put intention into that, then how do you expect to actually get traction?

Nir Eyal: It kills me when people let their inbox become their boss. I know why. Now I know why. It's because we check our inbox, we check those Slack channels thinking that it's work. And when we feel discomfort around the hard task, right? We need to write that presentation or we need to make those sales calls, whatever it is, when we don't feel like doing it.

Well, let me just check my messages. Right. That'll tell me what to do next. I don't wanna prioritize. I don't wanna think, Thinking is hard work. Let me let my inbox tell me what to do. And of course, that's horrible. there's a whole section in the book on how to hack back the external trigger of, distraction through email.

It's such a waste of time. mean, the amount of time we spend on responding to useless messages and sending useless messages, It's just, billions of dollars of lost productivity that doesn't have to be wasted, let alone stupid meetings that don't need to be called or slack messages that we can't get out of.

All these come under the, third section of hacking back these external triggers where we go one by one by one, email meetings, slack channels, all these things that can lead us towards distraction. And I show you how to hack back every single one of them.

Yaniv: Let's dive into that a little bit more.

Nir Eyal: Yeah. So, depending on what the external trigger is, that is, distracting you. So again, it's only 10% of the source of distraction, but there's very practical things that we can do. So how do we hack back our phones? How do we hack back our computer? How do we hack back meetings? Kids, we love our kids, but they can be incredibly distracting.

Yaniv: How do we  hack back our kids?

Nir Eyal: You know, I'm the father of a 14 year old, and, when she was little, she could be very distracting. But thankfully, there are a lot of techniques that we can use to hack back all of these external triggers. Probably the, most relevant for a startup context, I think is, meetings.

There's a lot of misperceptions around meetings, particularly around brainstorming, It turns out the optimal number of people for a brainstorming session. And guess what? The optimal number, what do you think.

Chris: I'm a verbal thinker, so I need at least one other person or two other people.

Nir Eyal: Okay. So yeah, okay. You're in the right. Most of the time people say like, you know, a, two pizza team, like eight people is good for brainstorming. Nu-uh, the optimal number for brainstorming is one or two. That's a dyad is the optimal number for brainstorming. Or you can brainstorm on your own. What tends to happen though, people call meetings because they don't wanna do the work.

A boss will say, “Hey, everybody, let's get together. I wanna talk things out”. Whereas what they really should be doing is go do your stupid homework. go be a responsible person, and you do the thinking and come to us when you need our input. And they don't understand the number one reason, actually the only reason for a meeting in a business context.

It's not for socializing. Socializing our, different matter. Right? that's a social function. The only purpose for a meeting. Is to gain consensus. That's it. That is the only purpose for a business meeting. It's not to brainstorm, it's to gain consensus. Brainstorming is best done on people's time, on their own And then they send their, insights to the stakeholder so that when we meet, we can gain consensus around what to do next. So I show you exactly I'm, shortening this. You know, a ton. This is a whole chapter in the but basically, you know, teaching people how to have better meetings is incredibly important because we waste so much time because it's becomes so easy, Used to be to have a meeting, we had to be in the same physical place. Well, now with Zoom, we can meet anywhere, anytime, and so people are calling a lot more, superfluous meetings, which are nothing but distractions.

Chris: This reminds me of this idea of like, we're gonna do an offsite to come up with our strategy. It drives me absolutely crazy cuz like they just get everyone in a room and what they're actually doing is like, Classifying and organizing their mess rather than actually coming up with a specific strategy that excludes possibilities and optionality and, is rationalized and principled.

I'm not a big fan of these giant offsite strategy sessions maybe therefore, Discussing all the universe of possibilities, but the actual development of a strategy needs to be a small group of, highly intentional people.

Yaniv: I, I agree. Most strategy offsite, absolutely. Suck. I've been guilty of organizing and participating in some of those, but we talked earlier about alignment. It's a topic that comes up a lot, and I do think that's not brainstorming. Perhaps it's a form of consensus gaining, but sometimes when you have a group of people who all need to share values, share goals, share an understanding of what an organization is about, getting them in a room.

And digging really doing the, you know, your five why's or your N Y's, until you really get to like, this is our identity, these are our goals, these are our values, this is what it's about. I do think that's perhaps an exception to what I overall agree with, you about both of you. a lot of let's get everyone in a room because we can't be bothered doing our own thinking.

But when it comes around identity and alignment, I do think. Getting people in a room for a long period is the only way to really achieve that.

Nir Eyal: I'm a big advocate for getting people's input. We definitely wanna get people's input. It's how we do it. So the problem with getting people, a bunch of people in a room and hashing out an idea and brainstorming is that what happens is when you have more than.

The requisite number of two people in a brainstorm session is that the loudest, the highest paid, and the most male person dominates the conversation. And so even when you think you're getting people's buy-in, you're not, and look, hey, we're three white dudes here talking. But the fact of the matter is that a lot of people, in various organizations, they don't feel they can speak up.

They don't feel like they can dominate the conversation. Maybe they're just introverted. Maybe they just don't feel like they can dominate. And so that's what tends to happen is we kind of. bludgeon people into thinking that we have consensus and we don't because we're like, okay, we need to develop a company culture, strategy, and implementation right now.

let's all brainstorm how to do this in the, course of this weekend. We have to leave here with all this stuff. It puts an undue amount of pressure on people. Whereas what should be done is the key stakeholder, whatever it is that you want done, okay?

The person who is in charge of that deliverable should send out. A request specifying how much time they want them to spend. So, hey, can you spend 30 minutes sometime in the next two weeks thinking about this question? Here's the question. Please send me your feedback. Please send me your input.

And then what that person does is take that feedback, up with a recommended course of action. Then send out what's called a briefing document, and I stole this from Amazon. Amazon does this all the time. When they have meetings, you can't just call a meeting, Because they realize that everybody's time on an hourly basis, if you take their salaries and put it on an hourly basis for this meeting, these meetings are costing tens of thousands of dollars.

And so if we're gonna meet in person, We better be prepared so that stakeholder has to circulate for that meeting. A briefing document that says, Hey, I took into account everybody's feedback. I did my research, I did my homework. Here is my recommended course of action at the meeting. Come prepared to poke holes in it to tell me what's, wrong with it.

And if not, we're gonna decide and we're gonna move forward. Because again, the point of a meeting is to gain consensus. But all the brainstorming, the thinking, the strategizing, the planning that should happen before the meeting so that when we're together, all we're doing is gaining consensus and making sure we didn't miss anything.

 After you've done the other three steps that we discussed, mastering the internal trigger, making time for traction, hacking back the external trigger, the last step is to prevent distraction with packs. And so a pact is what you call a pre-commitment device. It's when we decide in advance what we will do if we go off track. And so there's three type of pre-commitments, an identity pact and effort pact, and a price pact. This is the, last line of defense, the firewall against distraction. we can dive into that more next time.

Yaniv: Well, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on there. I think we've actually run out of time because we were having such a fantastic conversation. we would absolutely love to have you on again, to, continue diving deep into distraction and startups because it's, so core to what we're on about at this podcast.

But, really appreciate your time. Let's just give a little bit of space for you to talk about where people can find you online, about your books and anything else folks should know about you.

Nir Eyal: I appreciate it. Thanks. So my website is called Near and far.com. Nearest spelled like my first name, so n i r and far.com. And my first book is called Hooked How to Build Habit Forming Products. And my second book is called Intractable. How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. And they're available wherever books are sold.

Yaniv: I have read both of them more than once actually, and highly recommend them.

Just once again, folks reminding you all. The startup podcast packed If you listen to the startup podcast, and you get value from it, we are asking you to please follow us on a YouTube channel in your favorite podcast app and give us a rating where you can, that really helps new people to find us, it's only a couple of minutes out of your day, and it means so much to us.

If you wanna find us online, you can send us a tweet, Chris, sad or why Bernstein, at Twitter, or you can follow us on LinkedIn where honestly, I, spend most of my time these days.

Thanks again for coming on there and, hope you folks all got a lot out of listening to this one. I know. I did.

Chris: Yeah, that was absolutely awesome. Thank you so much neer.

Nir Eyal: My pleasure. Thank you guys.