Transcription
Fundamentally, if we don't face the fact that everything we do is about a desire to escape discomfort, we will always become distracted by something. If we don't understand the root cause of distraction, why we get distracted in the first place, what internal triggers we are trying to satiate, then it's a lost cause. We have to start there.
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Welcome to London and welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. Appreciate it. Thank you. So, Nia, as I said, I can't stop reading this book at the moment, and I think you're, I think you're talking about a topic that many of us know is a problem, but until we give a name to it, as you have done, I'm not sure we actually look for solutions. So, I wonder if you could start off by saying, why is being indistractible so important?
Right. So, maybe I should start with describing what it means to be indistractible. Becoming indistractible means you are the kind of person who strives to do what they say they're going to do. You value personal integrity. You know, we, we all know how terrible it is to lie to someone else. We would never want to be accused of being a liar to our children, to our family, to our friends. And yet, the fact of the matter is, we lie to ourselves all the time. We say we're going to do one thing and we do something else. We say we're going to exercise, we don't. We say we're going to do that big project at work, we procrastinate. We say we're going to be fully present with our loved ones, and we're not.
And so, this was a very personal challenge, uh, that I took on because I had this problem. I was patient zero, where I found that I was getting distracted from the things that I wanted to do with my time, my attention, to my life. And so that's really what started me down this journey.
Yeah, I mean, I've spoken about stress a lot in the past, and there are many sources of stress in the modern world. But I think the fact that we're constantly distracted is a huge source of stress. And the way I've looked at it before is, I talk about micro-stress doses and macro-stress doses. Micro-stress doses are little hits of stress that, in isolation, we can handle. But when you mount them up on top of one another, they start to get you closer and closer to your own stress threshold.
An example I give is that many of us wake up in the morning these days, and before we've left the house, we've been exposed to 10 or 15 of these micro-stress doses. So, someone's gone to bed late because they were up binge-watching Netflix, and they wake up at, well, they know they have to go to work. So, at 6:30, their alarm goes off and pings them out of a deep sleep. So, I call that micro-stressor number one. They realize then that actually, you know what, I've got a bit more time. Let me put this on snooze for another six minutes. Six minutes later, another alarm, micro-stress, so it's number two. Then you realize, actually, you know, I should be getting up now. So, you quickly look at your phone because that's where your alarm is, right? And you have a look and you see, oh, there's three work emails I didn't do yesterday. Oh, you know, that adds to your stress in the morning. Then you think, actually, let me have a quick look on social media, and someone's been mean to you on your last post. And a few nodding heads here. So, um, the point I try and make is that actually, many of us have left the house having been exposed to multiple of these micro hits of stress. And I'm, I think I talk about it in terms of stress, but you could just as easily make the case that all those micro-stress doses are distraction.
Well, so maybe it's useful, it's a good point to maybe, um, kind of share this framework that's the backbone of indistractible and define what do I mean by distraction. So, the best way to understand what distraction is, is to understand what it is not. The opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction is traction. That, in fact, both words come from the same Latin root, trajare, which means to pull. And you'll notice that both words end in the same six letters, A-C-T-I-O-N. That spells action. So, traction is any action that pulls you towards what you want to do with your time. Things that you do with intent. The opposite of traction is distraction. Anything that pulls you away from what you plan to do with intent.
So, this is, this is important for a few reasons. Uh, one, I think it frees us from this ridiculous moral hierarchy that a lot of people have, that, you know, what you do with your time, that's, that's frivolous, right? Checking Facebook or Candy Crush, whatever, that's frivolous. But me spending three hours watching football, that's somehow okay in my book. Anything you do with intent, no matter what it is that you do, even checking social media, even doing those things that you, you choose to do, as long as you are doing them with intent because you want to, as opposed to somebody else is influencing you to do those things, there's nothing wrong with it. It's still an act of traction.
The other thing that I think is really important about this is that we oftentimes trick ourselves into thinking that something is traction even when it's distraction. So, you know, this would happen to me all the time. I would sit down on my desk and I'd say, okay, now I'm going to do that big project. I'm going to do that thing I've been finally, you know, think procrastinating on. I'm finally going to do that thing, right after I check email, right after I check my Slack channels, or do some research on Google. And I would still not do the thing that I had planned to do. And so that is just as much of a pernicious distraction.
So, we've got traction, we've got distraction. Now, it's important to understand what influences us, what prods us to either traction or distraction. Is one of two things. We have our external triggers. Many of them, you've mentioned. These are the pings and dings and rings, these things in our environment that prompt us to either traction or distraction. And those are kind of the usual suspects. Everybody knows those things. We love to blame those, those external triggers, our devices, our computers, all of these potential, uh, triggers towards traction or distraction. But it turns out that a much more common source of distraction, what I learned in my five years of research writing this book, is that while some distraction starts outside of this, it turns out most distraction starts from within. And so, it's not just the external triggers we need to think about. It's what we call the internal triggers. Internal triggers are these uncomfortable sensations that we seek to escape.
So, you know, one thing that we need to understand about distraction is that it is not a new problem. And in fact, Plato talked about it 2500 years ago. He called it acrasia, this tendency that we all have to do things against our better interest. And it's, it's a fascinating question. If we think about it, why do we do things we know we shouldn't do? And why don't we do the things we know we want to do? Why do we do things against our better interests? But I think in order to answer Plato's question, we have to dig a layer deeper to understand why do we do anything and everything. What's the driver of all human behavior? What's the nature of motivation?
Most people will tell you that motivation is about some version of carrots and sticks. This is called Freud's pleasure principle. And so, Freud says that everything is about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. That's kind of most people's conception of what drives human motivation. But it turns out that from a neurological perspective, it's not exactly right. Turns out that human motivation is not spurred by the desire to pursue pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Neurologically speaking, turns out that all behavior is spurred by one thing, and that is the desire to escape discomfort.
Everything we do is about a desire to escape discomfort. Even the pursuit of pleasurable sensations, even the pursuit of pleasure is itself psychologically destabilizing. We call this the homeostatic response. So, we know this is true physiologically, that when we feel cold, for example, we go outside, we feel cold, we put on a jacket, right? We put on a coat because that's not comfortable to feel cold. And if we walk back inside now, we're too hot, we take it off. And if we're hungry, our, you know, our belly starts to rumble, we feel hunger pangs, we eat. And when we're stuffed, that doesn't feel good, we stop eating. So, that's physiologically how this homeostatic response works. The same is true psychologically, that when we feel an uncomfortable emotional state, we also turn to some kind of emotional pacification device to help us cope with that discomfort. So, when we're feeling lonely, where do we go? We go to Facebook. When we're feeling uncertain about something, we Google it. When we're bored, we, uh, check sports, uh, news, uh, Reddit, Pinterest. All of these products and services cater to these uncomfortable emotional sensations.
So, this means that fundamentally, if all human behavior is spurred by a desire to escape discomfort, that means that time management is pain management. That doesn't matter what kind of life hacks or the latest gurus techniques around how to manage your time in your life. Fundamentally, if we don't face the fact that everything we do is about a desire to escape discomfort, we will always become distracted by something.
And I think what you're noticing is a very interesting phenomenon, because these micro doses of stress, in fact, are spurred by stress in the first place, or some type of uncomfortable sensation, right? So, when we get up in the morning, we have that desire to check our devices, there's always a preceding emotion that we are trying to pacify. Like babies sucking on thumbs, right? We don't want to feel something. So, the closest thing we can grab to alleviate discomfort, we form a habit around. And that becomes what we turn to for psychological relief. And sometimes it spurs us into this vicious cycle, where the more we check, the more stress we get, and the more stress we get, the more discomfort we feel, and the more desire we have to keep checking or distract ourselves in one way or another. So, I think your insight is, is right on.
The good news is, and this is a very, I think, optimistic book, because I think, uh, every other book on this on this topic, and I didn't originally plan to write this book, I wanted a solution for myself. And so, I read every book I could find on, uh, distraction and tech overuse. And every book basically said that it's all about technology, that the technology is at fault. Stop using your technologies. Technology is doing this to you. It's rotting your brain. It's hijacking your brain. It's addicting everyone. And so, I took their advice. I, I got rid of my, uh, iPhone and I bought a flip phone that only sent and received phone calls and text messages, no apps. I got a word processor from the 1990s, they don't even make these anymore, no internet connection, all you could do is type on it. And I thought, okay, great. I got rid of all the, the modern technology that apparently is so bad for us. And I thought, okay, now I'm finally going to do what I said I'm going to do. Now I'm not going to be distracted anymore. And I would sit down on my desk and I would say, okay, now I'm gonna get to work. Right after I, you know, there's that book that I've been meaning to read on my bookshelf. And, uh, my desk, I've been meaning to organize my desk. Let me just do that real quick. Or let me take out the trash. The trash needs taking out right now. And I kept getting distracted, even when it wasn't the technology that it was doing it to me.
And so, that's really when I came upon this insight. If we don't understand the root cause of distraction, why we get distracted in the first place, what internal triggers we are trying to, to, uh, to satiate, then that, then it's a lost cause. We have to start there.
Yeah, and Nia, I've got to say, I think that's one of the things to me that I, I literally love about this book. And I wasn't expecting this, actually. I was expecting, um, I was supposing a lot of tips and strategies on how you manage the distraction from technology. And of course, that is there as well. But I love this thing about internal triggers and this whole idea that we are using distraction to escape discomfort. I think it's very profound. And it reminds me a little bit of a speaker who I've interviewed on the podcast before, who I've actually seen speak in this auditorium, Gabor Maté. When he says, all addiction comes from childhood trauma. And he defines childhood trauma as being either something bad has happened to you, or not enough good things have happened to you. So, essentially, there's something missing. We don't feel completely whole. And so we look to certain behavior, certain addictive behaviors, to sort of fill that hole in many ways. Um, and it, for me, it was really, it was really gratifying to see your view on this. And how, yes, it's about putting in strategies into our daily lives that actually can help reduce distraction. But ultimately, at its core, you're talking about, you talk about human behavior. What is it that makes us human? Is, you know, as many people say, you know, being alive is pain. Pain, you know, life is suffering. And actually, you're making the case very beautifully that everything we do in life, on some level, is to alleviate suffering.
Right. I think, I think that's exactly the point I'm making. And in fact, I, I don't like, you know, sometimes we hear folks that give us the impression that somehow, if we're not happy all the time, if we're not satisfied, if everything in life isn't great, then there's something wrong with us. And nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, we have evolved as a species to be perpetually perturbed. That's what makes us survive so well. I mean, if there was ever a branch of Homo sapiens that was happy all the time, that was satisfied, that never wanted for more, those people were probably killed and eaten by our ancestors, okay? They're not with us anymore. And in fact, I think we need to, to, uh, to accept the fact that discomfort is okay. It's all right. Uh, it doesn't mean there's something wrong with you necessarily. It doesn't mean that we're somehow broken or deficient.
And, you know, I, I've talked to many people in researching this book over the years, and most people tend to fall into these two categories of what I call blamers or shamers. The blamers, when they become distracted, when they go off track, they say, "Oh, you see, it's my iPhone that did it to me. It's, uh, it's Slack, it's Facebook. It's, that's, that's who did it to me." The shamers, this is the category I used to fall in. They say, "I'm deficient somehow. You see, I, I, I'm lazy. I, I, I have a short attention span. Maybe I'm not cut out for this. Maybe I'm not good enough." And we shame ourselves. And of course, this also leads to this terrible, uh, shame cycle, this, this, this vicious cycle of causing more discomfort and then, of course, more need to escape that very discomfort.
And so, the way we, we short-circuit that process so that it doesn't continue is through many methods. I talk about in the book, it's about mastering these internal triggers. There are things that we can do to stop that chain, to stop that cycle, to get control over these internal triggers. You know, you can't control how you feel, per se, but you can control how you respond to those feelings. And instead of these behavior, these feelings leading to automatic, uh, distraction, we can actually channel these uncomfortable sensations like stress, like anxiety, like uncertainty, for good. We can channel that disquiet too, towards traction, towards acts that move us forward.
So, in terms of some of those actionable tools for people, if there is that deep level of discomfort that we're trying to hide from with, you know, spending too much time on Facebook, spending too much time on Netflix, constantly checking email, eating sugar at every opportunity, you know, it's all actually, many of these behaviors are rooted in the same, same way. And I appreciate you saying that, because it's, you know, the book has, I think people are, at least I was, looking for solutions, particularly for this tech problem. But you're absolutely right. I mean, distraction comes in all shapes and forms, right? It can be the fact that you said you were going to go to the gym and you didn't, or you said you were going to eat healthy, as I used to say, and I didn't. And spending time with your family or loved ones, and your, your mind is somewhere else. Distraction takes many, many forms. It's not just about technology, for sure.
And for me, what you're writing about in "Indistractible" is a universal issue. This, yes, affects your work, it affects your productivity, but it also affects your health. And probably most importantly of all, I think it's affecting our relationships. I think distraction in our relationships is, it's become very erosive, um, corrosive, I should say. It's causing so many problems in relationships that I don't think we're taking seriously enough. So, on the subject of relationships, do you, do you feel, do you see distraction being an important issue to tackle?
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think we are, uh, the, the science is pretty conclusive that we know we need quality relationships in our life. Uh, one of the, the self-determination theory is a, is a body of research I quite, I quote quite a bit in in the book. And this is, you know, 40, 50-year-old research. Deci and Ryan. This is the most widely accepted theory of human motivation and psychological well-being. And basically, the, there's these three tenets of, uh, that every human being on the face of the earth needs these three psychological nutrients. So, just like our bodies need carbohydrates, fat, and protein, those are the three macronutrients for our body. Our mind and our psychological well-being, turns out, is dependent on receiving sufficient doses of competency, autonomy, and relatedness.
And so, when we are deficient in these three things, a couple of interesting things happen. One, we don't flourish. This leads to all kinds of of negative psychological outcomes. But we also, this is called the needs displacement hypothesis. When we don't get enough of these things offline, guess what we do? We look for them online. And of course, the tech companies are more than happy to give it to us, right? So, when you don't feel sufficient amounts of connectedness, relatedness, uh, competency, autonomy offline, you're going to go looking for it. Uh, and I think, I'm, I'm not anti-social media. I think I'm not one of these, um, Luddites that thinks we, we, we have to stop using these things and that they're melting our brain. I don't agree with that. I think that we can get the best of these technologies without letting them get the best of us, principally by realizing that these things should supplement, not, uh, replace real-life interactions.
You know, we know that this is a 40-year trend, uh, where, where people are suffering from this epidemic of loneliness. Robert Putnam wrote about this in the 1990s with his book "Bowling Alone." This is way before the iPhone or Facebook. This trend of, of increasing secularization, uh, where there are less regular occasions to get together with members of your community, and the decline of civic organizations, uh, that there are fewer people who are joining the bowling league and joining Kiwanis Club and joining civic organizations. And so, this has really led to this loneliness epidemic. That researchers tell us that loneliness is as detrimental to our health as smoking and obesity. And I, I think that this is certainly something that we, we need to reverse. And the good news is, I think that we can reverse this. And part of how we reverse this is that we begin to prioritize it.
There are basically these four steps to becoming indistractible. The first is to master the internal triggers. And we touched on a little bit. The second step is to make time for traction. So, you know, we talked about traction and distraction. So, one of the most basic things that we can do, and this is backed with a lot of research, literally thousands of studies have shown the effectiveness of this technique, it's called making an implementation intention, which is just a fancy way of saying you plan out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it, right? So, basically making a calendar, making a schedule. But researchers tell us that about two-thirds of people don't keep a calendar. We spend so much time and money protecting our stuff, right? We put our money in bank accounts and safes, we have home security systems, we have alarms on our cars. Uh, and yet, when it comes to our time, sure, come on over, take as much of it as you want. And the fact of the matter is, we cannot call something a distraction unless we know what it distracted us from. What is the traction? So, the fact matters, we have to start keeping calendars. We have to make time for traction by turning our values into time.
So, a big principle in this book is that whatever your values are, and it's not up to me to tell you what your values should be, that's only for you to decide. But I talk about these three life domains of you, your relationships, and your work, that we can use to fill our days. So, if you know, many people start with the ends, they start with the big goals in mind. And I think that's a, that's a problematic technique because it's very difficult to know, okay, what's my five-year plan? How about, what's your plan for next week? Right? How do you want to spend next week to live out your values, to turn your values into time? So, if personal health and wellness is important to you, if that's one of your values, do you have time in your calendar for proper sleep, to exercise, to make healthy meals? Is that in your calendar? If relationships are important to you, back to this topic of loneliness, is it more than just, "Oh, we should grab coffee sometime"? Well, you know, that you've said that a million times and it doesn't happen, right? Because you haven't put that time on your calendar.
So, one of the techniques I talk about in the book that I think is, is, uh, very appropriate this discussion around around this loneliness epidemic is this group that we call the Kibbutz. Now, the Kibbutz, the word comes from the Hebrew, it means, uh, gathering. And the idea is that that every two weeks, we have these four couples that get together. And we just get together to talk, to be together. But the important thing is that it occurs every two weeks, same time, same place. Everybody brings their own food, right? So, there's no big mess, there's no big planning process. But we know we are going to get together every two weeks. And if you can't make it, no big deal, come to the next one. But everybody has it on their calendars. And this time is critical. I mean, it is, it is really food for the soul. We get together and we go around, and everybody of the eight adults has their turn, and they talk about whatever's on their mind. So, one week, somebody came up with a, a, a parenting question. Uh, the next week, somebody was struggling with her, with her job and wanted some, uh, some feedback. So, we, we rotate around the group, and people talk about whatever is pressing in their life. Now, children are in invited to listen, but they can't interrupt. Remember I said earlier, distraction doesn't just come in the form of the pings and dings from your phone. Children can be a major source of distraction themselves. So, the rule is that children can watch, they can listen, but they can't interrupt unless someone's bleeding. That's the rule. Because of two things: one, we don't want to kill the vibe, right? We have this beautiful interaction with our friends where we understand them, and they understand us. That's so important for us to, to have those friendships. And most importantly, we also want to model what an adult friendship looks like for our children. Why is it that only kids have buddies and best friends? We want to show them that no, friendships are important for the rest of our lives. And we want to do that on a regular basis, to, to show them how important this is. Which also means, sorry, I can't talk to you right now because my friends are here, and they're very important to me. And so, unless you're bleeding, go away. There's a juice box table, there's games to play, go over there, or listen, but you, but don't interrupt.
So, making time for traction, turning our values into time by putting that time on our calendar for the things that are really important to us, is, is really essential.
Yeah, I mean, there's so many points I'd like to pick up on. Um, this idea that we allow distractions to basically take us off schedule and the things that really are important to us. You know, we all know that feeling, we just don't have time to do it. We don't have time to see our friends. We don't have time, um, you know, to spend time with our kids. We're to be doing emails or checking our notifications at the weekend, whatever it is. Um, I think that whole idea of intention behind what it is we actually want from life, what is it we want out of our day, is so key. But I think in many ways, by being constantly distracted and being in reactive mode, so from the minute we wake up, we're consuming information, what other people are sort of putting into our brains, we don't have the time to start thinking about what are our intentions. I, I see this with a lot of my patients, that when they really start to get over their chronic health problems, and it really starts to make lifestyle changes, when some, that's an emotional switch that changes. They're not just doing it because I said, "Reduce your alcohol," or I said, "Reduce your sugar intake," because those things are serving a purpose for them. They are alleviating something. And that's why I think you're really at the heart of something very, very important here.
But story, you mentioned that, that you shared, it also reminded me of, um, a Jewish family who I, uh, went around for Sunday lunch at about six months ago. And they have always, they've got teenage kids, husband and wife. And it was really striking for me that they have, um, they observe the Sabbath religiously, you know, they're very strict. And from a young age, was talking to their kids about this and what they do. And it was really incredible to me because I didn't grow up with in this environment. And their kids love it. You know, they've never, they never go out and they don't go on social media. They can't even do sports classes or anything that is family connection time. And I, I found that incredible. And I thought, did we actually have some of these systems in place before? Did society, whether it's, you know, a variety of different religions, did we have these systems in place? As we become more secular, actually, these things that are so, so important have vanished from our daily lives.
Absolutely. I, I couldn't agree more. And I consider myself a secular person. I'm, I don't believe in the supernatural, per se. Uh, but I'm jealous, frankly. I'm jealous of the benefits of, uh, of instituting, of how institutionalized religion brings people together. There's a lot of good there that unfortunately, people who don't attend these, these type of ritualized institutional settings, we really miss out on to a large degree. That, that need that we have to understand others and to be understood, only comes from regular interactions. And it doesn't mean we all have to, you know, uh, necessarily go to an institution where we don't believe in the, in the ideology. I think it necessitates us facilitating new ways to have regular interactions with the important people in our lives, not only our friendships, but I think even our closest relationships.
So, my wife and I, we've been married for 18 years. We met in college. We actually met in an undergraduate economics class. And we, I remember we, we had this term that we learned in economics, uh, that is, is called the residual. The residual beneficiary. The residual beneficiary is the person, the chump, that gets whatever is left over when a company is liquidated. So, first debt holders get their share, then equity holders, then procedural beneficiaries, they get whatever's the scraps, the pennies on the dollar. And I remember a few years ago, my wife came to me and she said, "You know, you have turned me into the residual beneficiary." Yeah, because work comes first. You know, your, your buddies come first, your writing comes first, all this stuff comes first. And I get the scraps of whatever's left over. And she was absolutely right. She, she really had me there. And so, we had to prioritize. And, you know, if this was according to my values, and again, I'm not preaching what your values should be, but if your values are like mine, where I believe that, you know, I, I want an equitable marriage, I want to be a good partner for my wife, well, that means that we have to schedule the time for those things as well. Even some of the household admin stuff. I mean, this, this literally saved my marriage. We would constantly fight about the household responsibilities. And it turns out that we're not alone. That studies find that in heterosexual, yeah, big surprise, right? That in heterosexual households, even when there is dual income, women still take on a disproportionate share of household admin duties. I see a lot of women's heads nodding. No men like this. And so, and so I thought, okay, that can't be my family, right? We, we don't do that. But of course, I was absolutely wrong. Because we were having these fights about why I wasn't pulling my weight, right? My wife couldn't understand, you know, the trash is full, take it out. Or the laundry's not done, do the laundry. And I would always say to her, "You know, look, instead of being mad at me for not mind-reading, right? How am I supposed to know what you want me to do? Just tell me what to do, right? Just tell me, and I'll do it." And of course, what I didn't realize is that asking her to be the boss, the boss is a job. And I was asking her to do work by telling me what to do, right? I'm not a child. And so, why do I need to be told what to do? And so, what I was asking her to do was, was not only infantilizing for me, it was also placing a burden on her.
Here was the solution. The magic solution was planning ahead. Was sitting down together. Took us 30 minutes. We had had hours of fights over this stuff. We sat down together and for 30 minutes, we wrote down all the stuff that needs to get done. We put those things in a calendar. It's not good enough just to write down to-dos. To-do, there's a big myth out there that if you just put stuff on a to-do list, that stuff will get done. Okay, that's not true. And let me just tell you right now, it's not true. Because that's the output, right? If you went to a baker and you said, "Hey, I need 100 loaves of bread, can you make me 100 loaves of bread?" The baker would say, "Sure. I'm going to need flour, I'm going to need yeast, I'm going to need sugar, I'm a salt." Where is all the input to make the output? But when we only put stuff on to-do lists, that's just the output. The input is our time. So, step one is making the to-do list. Step two is putting it on your calendar. So, now we do what's called a weekly schedule sync. And with this weekly schedule sync, we sit down. It takes us 15 minutes every Sunday, Sunday evening. We sit down together. We look at each other's calendars for the week. We use this technique called time boxing, where we plan out our days. Problem is gone. We do not have these fights anymore because I know exactly what I need to do and what I need to do it. And so, she's not waiting for me to do one thing so she can do the next. It literally saved my marriage.
So, this is not a tech book. It's a relationship book. That too.
Yeah, well, it generally is actually, because these problems, as you say, a lot of your relationship problems actually, sorry, let me rephrase that. You didn't say you had relationship problems. Um, some of these, um, mild disagreements, challenges, yeah, sort of went away once you'd actively prioritize what needed to get done. And I guess that's a wider point, isn't it? We, we let these distractions, um, suck up our entire day. And you're right, that our loved ones get the leftovers. They get whatever we've got left. And in many ways, I guess what you're saying is, let's look at your week and start by figuring out what are your intentions? What do you value? Get those things locked in first, and then fit everything else in around them.
Right, right, right. As opposed to starting with, you know, the big hairy goal or the big audacious plan, the five-year plan. Start with, okay, do you need time to commute? Do you need time for personal hygiene, taking a shower? Do you need time for quality sleep? This is simple stuff. And then, with whatever's left over after you've done the domain of time for you, time for your relationships, time for work. I mean, look, work takes up the greatest chunk of most people's day. And so, by planning out, even in the workplace, you know, one simple solution people talk about how distracted they are all day because of email and Slack channels and this and that. You know, planning out the time when you will check email, as opposed to using it when we're feeling stressed or anxious or uncertain. It's as opposed to letting these internal triggers guide us towards distraction. We can turn a distraction into traction by making time for it.
So, this is what happened with me with with email. Email was my emotional coping device. When I was stressed about work, check email, right? When I was bored, check email. For you, it might be social media, or who knows, something else. And so, what I did, I just planned time for it. So, in my day, in my calendar, there's a specific time when I'm going to do that, when I'm going to check email, when I'm going to check social media. There's nothing wrong with the technology. What's wrong is that we use it without intent. We let these products use us as opposed to us using them.
Well, that was the topic of your first book, wasn't it? It's how you create products that, you know, keep people hooked in many ways. Um, so, I guess in some ways, it's, it's quite striking that you've gone from writing the book on how to create products that keep us hooked, to writing the book on how we, I guess it's not just about technology, but how we actually, um, you know, cope with all these tips and tools and and strategies that these big tech companies are using to keep us hooked to their products. It's kind of, I mean, how did you get from, you know, in those five years, how did you get from one book to the next?
Yeah. So, I, I think what's important to understand is that maybe this is best phrased by Paul Virilio, the philosopher, who said that when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. Every new technology has a downside. Of course, there's a downside to a technological revolution of the scale of the internet. There will be lots of problems. But of course, there's a lot of benefits and solutions. So, my goal with writing "Hooked," and this was five years ago, it's hard to remember, but five years ago, believe it or not, people were complaining about how technology only geeks know how to use technology because it's so difficult to use tech, right? That before the iPhone, uh, and the iPad, my mom never touched a computer before the iPad. That was her first computing device. She was, she was not on the internet in any shape or form before the iPad made it usable. And so, the fact that these products have now, you know, now we're not complaining about products not being usable, we complain about them being too good, products that we overuse.
But the idea, you know, I really do think that we can, we can have our cake and eat it too. That we can get the best out of technology without letting it get the best of us. And the goal for "Hooked" was not for the benefit of the social media companies or for the gaming companies. They've been using these techniques for years. That's where I learned these techniques. The idea was, can we use the same psychology that makes a game habit-forming, that makes it engaging, that makes it fun, to make all sorts of other products more engaging? So, Kahoot is the world's largest educational software. If you have school-age kids, chances are your kids are on Kahoot. And the goal of Kahoot is to get kids hooked to in-classroom learning. Uh, the goal of Fitbod is to get people hooked to exercising in the gym. My clients have included the New York Times, which wants to get people hooked to consuming the news. Apps like Calm or Headspace want to get people hooked to the daily meditation practice. So, the book is not about how to addict people. That, that's not the title. The title is not "How to Build Addictive Products." The book is about how to build habit-forming products. Because addictions are always bad, right? Addictions, by definition, are these persistent, compulsive dependencies on a behavior or substance that harms the user. So, we would never want to do that to a user, at least not intentionally. Sometimes addiction is an unfortunate byproduct. But we would never intentionally want to do that. However, habits are just defined as impulses to do a behavior with little or no conscious thought. And of course, we have many good habits that help us live better lives. So, "Hooked" was about how do we build those healthy habits into people's lives. But "Indistractible" looks at the other side, the products that we sometimes overuse.
If people listen to this, and, you know, I saw a lot of nodding heads when you mentioned, you know, when you feel a bit uncertain or a bit stressed, you'll turn to your emails. Other people may turn to social media. I think we all know that feeling when, you know, we've sort of got nothing better to do, we're feeling a little bit angsty, we pull out our phones, and, you know, we might get that reward we're seeking on Instagram. But if not, we'll flick on to something else. And you will keep searching on these endless feeds for something to distract us. So, if someone is nodding their head to that, as many people were, um, what practical tips can you give them? How can they start the process of actually becoming indistractible?
Sure. Yeah. So, there's basically, so remember we had traction, distraction, we had external triggers, and we had internal triggers prompting us to these. It's, it's very difficult to do this in sign language and hand motions here, but you kind of get the idea. It's, there's a picture in the book. It's a beautiful graphic. But the idea here is that we're basically working around these four points of, of this model, starting with mastering the internal triggers. That if we don't master the internal triggers, we will always be distracted by something. So, how do we do that? There's three big techniques. And the three big techniques are to first, reimagine the trigger, reimagine the task, and reimagine our temperament.
So, reimagining the trigger is about responding to discomfort in a new way. Is, so, there's a few techniques that I draw mostly upon from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. And one of the, so, one of the, uh, tools I provide is to start by noting the sensation. We use what's called a distraction tracker. And what we want to do is to identify the preceding emotion to that distraction. What were you feeling before you reached for your phone? Before you ate that chocolate cake? Before you procrastinated? What was the preceding sensation that prompted you to want to get distracted? Just writing that down has been shown to be incredibly empowering. Just the act of writing it down. The next step is to explore that sensation with curiosity rather than contempt. Most people, as we talked about earlier, the blamers and the shamers, right? They get contemptuous with that feeling, as opposed to just identifying it. And then, what we want to do is to surf the urge. Surfing this er, surfing the urge is this idea, again, from Acceptance of Commitment Therapy, that recognizes that emotions, when we experience an emotion in the moment, it feels like it's going to last forever. When we're upset, we feel like we're always going to be upset. When we're happy, we feel like we're always going to be happy. But of course, that's never true. That emotions crest and subside like a wave, and we can ride that wave like a surfer on a surfboard.
One technique I use almost every day is called the 10-minute rule. The 10-minute rule tells us that we can have anything we want. We can give in to that temptation in 10 minutes. And this technique has been shown to be much more effective than strict abstinence. Strict abstinence says, "Nope, I can't have it." And of course, this oftentimes backfires, particularly with something that you can't completely abstain from, right? It's, it's one thing to abstain from, from hard drugs, and you can remove yourself from the environment, for example. But how do you abstain completely from technology? It's very difficult. How do you abstain completely from food? We need it to survive, right? So, instead of strict abstinence, which often times backfires, and let me, let me tell you an example of how, I want everyone listening, whatever you do, do not think about a white bear. Don't do it. What are you all thinking about? Of course, you're all thinking about a white bear. It's impossible not to think about a white bear. And so, what we find when it comes to these, this idea of strict abstinence, it's almost like pulling a rubber band. That if you pull a rubber band, you pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, and then you release it, the rubber band doesn't go to where you started to pull it. No, it bounces further. And so, this is what happens when we try and do use strict abstinence. When we pull, we say, "No, don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it." Okay, fine. Do it. Releasing that tension is registered in the brain as pleasurable. Because remember what we said earlier, that if all behavior is prompted by a desire to escape discomfort, if smoking that cigarette, if giving in to that chocolate cake, if checking, uh, my news feed is something that I've been telling myself, "Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it." Now, it feels good just to relieve the tension of not telling myself to not do it anymore. And so, instead of that strict abstinence approach, we can use this 10-minute rule, where we tell ourselves that when we feel that the temptation to give into distraction, we can give into it in 10 minutes of surfing the urge. And we have a choice to make. We can either get back to the task at hand, or spend those 10 minutes getting curious about that sensation.
So, sometimes I'll pick up my phone, I'll say, "Set a timer for 10 minutes." I'll put my phone down, and I'll just be with that sensation. And the goal is to reimagine that sensation in a way that serves us as opposed to hurts us. So, what we find is that self-compassion is a very effective technique. That when many people berate themselves, as I used to do, I would tell myself how I'm, you know, this blaming mantra of, "Oh, I'm not good enough," and, "I maybe I'm not cut out for this," and, "Oh, nobody's gonna like this." And, you know, that shaming cycle, or that, that we, that we go through. Instead, we try and talk to ourselves the way we would talk to a good friend, right? We would ask ourselves, "Well, maybe I'm feeling discomfort, maybe I'm feeling bored, anxious, stress, whatever it be, and whatever it might be, because this is the process of getting better, right? Getting better at something is effortful. It's part of the process." Stress is not, you know, when I came on stage here, I was getting kind of nervous. There was a
A little bit of strange stage fright. And I used to say to myself, "Oh, this is terrible. I'm going to do really poorly, and everybody's going to know that, you know, maybe I'll mess up and I'll screw it up." But instead, now I reframe that internal trigger to tell myself, "Wait a minute. This stress is my body getting ready to perform. My heart is pumping, not because I'm nervous and I'm going to screw up, but because my brain needs more oxygen in order to know these words I'm telling you right now." And so that process of reframing those internal triggers goes a long way to help us reimagine them so that we can gain great, greater control, greater control over the response.
Yeah, and reframing our stress. You, you also mentioned the story of Bruce Springsteen. Day in the book, and how he reframes the stress in terms of, he, before he goes on stage, when he's feeling palpitations, when he's feeling pins and needles, he reframes to go, "Right, you know, I'm ready to give a legendary performance now. My body is priming me for that." So it's, I love that whole idea about reframing our stress. I think it's very, very powerful.
Um, now I want to talk about relationships, but particularly with our children. Um, there's a story you share, um, in Indistractable, that really reminded me of the story that I've spoken about before. And that story is when my daughter was four years old, and I was alone with her. It was a Sunday. And, you know, I thought, you know, I'm quite conscious of my tech use in front of the kids. So I put my phone in a different room, in the dining room, when I was actually in the living room playing with her. I can't remember what was going on, something was going on in the world or on social media, something. So I kept disappearing every few minutes, you know, just to have a quick look. Um, I'm sure no one in here has ever done anything like that before. Um, but it was quite interesting. Cause I kept doing that and I thought, "Hey, it's not in front of us, so I'm, I'm being present." And she, she said to me at one point, said, "Daddy, you're not really here, are you?"
And you share a very similar story, don't you?
Yeah. Yeah. So in my occurrence, and this was really the seminal moment when I, when I realized I had to do something about this. We had this beautiful afternoon planned with my daughter. And we had this "Daddy and Me" book full of different activities that daddies and daughters could do to, to feel close to one another. And, you know, one of them was make a paper airplane. And, you know, different activities. And one of the activities was to ask each other this question: "If you could have any superpower, what superpower would you want?" And I remember the question verbatim, but I can't tell you what my daughter said. Because when she was answering, I told her, "Hold on one second, honey. I got this one thing I just really need to do real quick." And she recognized that whatever was on my phone was more important than she was. And she left the room. And she started to play with some toy outside instead.
And I'll add another story to this. I told my friend this story, and we have children of a similar age. And so he asked his daughter this question. And she said that the superpower she would want would be the power to talk to animals. And he said, "Oh, the power to talk to animals? Why is that?" And she said, "So that when you and Mommy are on your phones, I'll have someone to talk to." I know.
And so, you know, we have to set the example. You know, kids are hypocrisy detection devices. They are hardwired scanning for hypocrisy wherever they find it. And so we can't tell our kids, "Get off Fortnite. Stop being on Facebook. Stop, you know, do this and do that," while we're checking email on our phones. And if there is one skill we have to teach our kids, it's the power to be indistractible. Not by stopping the use of technology. That's ridiculous. We know the jobs of the future require our kids to be tech-literate. We can't tell them to be scared of technology. We can't tell them it's going to hijack their brains. It's going to melt their, their synapses. That's ridiculous. We don't want them to be technophobes. We want them to be comfortable with technology. So we have to teach them how to be indistractible. And that starts. There's a lot, there's a whole section in the book around how we raise indistractible kids. But the first step is really to become indistractible ourselves as adults.
Yeah, I mean, that's the common theme in parenting. Wherever you look, I spoke to Philippa Perry recently. He's written a book about parenting. And it, it comes down to the same thing. You want to sort your kids out? Sort yourself out first. Uh, it's the kind of uncomfortable truth for many of us parents. Or we can do it together. I think a lot of parents, they feel like sharing vulnerability about their struggle somehow makes them weak in their kids' eyes. And I don't think so. I think when it comes to this problem of, of distraction, I think it's a good idea to tell our kids, "Look, you know, these products are designed to be engaging, right? They are built to hack our attention." I'm telling you this as an industry insider. That, of course, they are. We, and we want them to be. We want these products to be engaging. That's why we use them, right? We don't want to tell Netflix, "Netflix, stop making your show so interesting." I want to watch them. Uh, Apple, please make your device less, less user-friendly. We want these things to be engaging. That's what, that's what they're meant to do. But we can hack back. And our kids need to know that this isn't something that, that we should give up on or, or excise from our life. We should learn tactics to use these products in, in the right way. And we should tell them that we ourselves are struggling. And how can we work together to make sure that we can put them in their place?
It seems that one of the most important skills that we can possibly teach the younger generation and teach our children is how to be indistractible. But that's not really what schools are teaching our kids today, is it?
Yeah, I think so. There's, there's a really interesting, um, body of research. I mentioned earlier, self-determination theory, that really opened my eyes to, I think, what's really going on with our kids these days. And so I think what we have to do is to ask ourselves, "Why do kids overuse technology?" Then the root cause is that children are deficient in those three psychological nutrients. Let me walk through them real quick. Competency. This idea of competency, that all of us need the sense that we are getting better at something. You know, how good it feels when you're good at something, right? Whether it's giving a talk or parallel parking, whatever it might be. That skill that you have, that you're good at something, that feels good. And it turns out for psychological flourishing, according to Deci and Ryan, this 50-year-old research that is the most widely accepted theory of human motivation and flourishing, that we all need that feeling. But one thing that has occurred synchronously with the rise of, of cell phones, the, the increasing use of cell phones, is the, the rise of teachers teaching towards tests. I'm not as familiar with what's going on in the UK. I suspect it's similar. But in the U.S., we have this very high emphasis on standardized testing that started rolling out around 2006, 2007. And we teach our kids towards the test. Teachers get paid based on the kids' test results. Many kids, starting in kindergarten, are subjected to standardized tests multiple times per year. And so they are told repeatedly, "You're not competent." Not all kids, right? Not all kids struggle with too much technology use. But a subset of children is constantly told, "You're not competent." And so, back to that needs displacement hypothesis, if we don't get our needs met offline, where do we go? Well, the tech companies are very happy to give our kids products that make them feel competent. Minecraft makes you feel amazing, right? You can master it. You can build your own universe. It feels great.
Now let's look at autonomy. Autonomy is this feeling that we have agency and control over our environment. It's freedom. We all crave it. We need the feeling of freedom. We hate being told what to do. But this is the most regulated generation in history. A study by Peter Gray found that children today have 10 times as many restrictions placed on them as the average adult, twice as many as an incarcerated felon. There are two places in society where you are allowed to tell people where to go, what to think, what to wear, who to be friends with, what to eat. And that's prison and school. That's it. And so, is it any surprise when the school system puts kids through this regimented system and treats them like chattel and tells them what to do all day long? Is it any surprise when they come home, they want freedom? They want to do what they want to do, which, by the way, kids have been doing for a very long time.
Now let's talk about the third point here about relatedness. Again, relatedness is this idea that, you know, every human being on the face of the earth, we want to be understood by others and have others understand us. We need this. This is part of our, of what helps us flourish psychologically. But kids today are deficient in this psychological nutrient of relatedness because they have no time for what's called free play. Since statistics were collected, kids today have less time for free play than ever before. Free play is when kids can interact with each other without the supervision of coaches and parents and teachers telling them what to do. It's kids being kids. And unfortunately, today, kids have less time for free play than ever. The economically advantaged schedule the hell out of their kids. They send them to tutoring and swimming and ballet and Mandarin, and they have no time to just play anymore. Those that are, don't have the means, many of them are so terrified by the media telling us that kids will get abducted in stranger danger, even though that's ridiculous. This is the safest time in history to be a child. That many of these parents are so scared, they keep their kids indoors under lock and key. And what the heck are kids supposed to do, right? They're looking for something, a way to interact with their friends. So where do they go? If you don't get relatedness offline, well, you use Twitter, you use Instagram, you use TikTok, you use Snapchat, because they're desperate to have that sense of relatedness met. They need that interaction with their friends, just like we used to do in our generation, talking on the phone until the wee hours of the night. We were interacting with our friends. We just wanted to relate to people. And they're desperate for it.
So one of the best things that you can do to raise an indistractible child is to plan time for free play. It's one of the most psychologically nourishing things you can do for them. And I think this is part of why we see such a fragile generation of, of kids growing up these days, that they haven't had that experience of free play. I mean, free play is where we learn our place in the world. It's one thing if a teacher or a parent tells you what to do. It's a whole other story if one of your friends says, "Hey, if you act like a jerk to me, I'm not going to be friends with you. We're not going to play." Right? That's where you learn your place in the world. And kids need more of it. So we have to schedule it. Just like we talk about making time for our own traction, one of the things we can do is make time for traction for our kids. You know, it involves in finding another parent who understands how important it is to give kids this psychological nourishment of free play. And we schedule time for play. Unfortunately, that's what's become. I mean, it used to be a kid, you know, my generation, we just walked outside and we could find our friends because they'd all be playing. You don't see that anymore. You know, the neighborhoods don't sing with the sound of kids playing anymore. They don't do it. And so unfortunately, but this is, this is our salvation. We have to make time for that as well.
Yeah, I mean, as you're sort of talking through that, I'm reflecting on many of my own, uh, patterns as a parent. And literally just this week, my wife and I decided to cut back on how many after-school activities our kids do because we thought, "This is getting a bit ridiculous now." And the tricky thing is, you look around you and you see what everyone else is doing. And you know, there is this feeling sometimes that you're missing out unless you do that. But we just thought, "Come on, we've just got to stand on our own and go, look, this is getting ridiculous now. We don't feel that this is helpful." And, and I think your, your idea of actually scheduling free play and unstructured free play is probably one of the most influential things that we can do.
Right. I think this skill set, and teaching this skill set of becoming indistractible, this is the skill of the century. I mean, if you think, if the world is distracting today, just wait a few years. The world of our, that our children will inhabit when they're adults is going to be only more distracting. This trend is not reversing, folks, right?
Yeah. And so if we can raise a generation of children who are indistractible, that is the skill of the century. Something that is distracting me at the moment, a little bit, is that I was told that this would be a clock on stage, and I haven't seen one yet. And I'm looking around for it to see what time it is. It is, how much are we? Ten to eight. Ten to eight. Okay. So we have about ten minutes or so. Okay.
Um, let's sort of try and wrap this up a little bit. One of the things that I find intensely irritating is when you're out with a group of friends, um, and people are looking at their phones, okay? In terms of you're trying to connect. And we all, I'm sure, have also done it to somebody else. I'm not sort of, uh, casting blame here in any way. But it's, it is, in many ways, it's something that I think we've all got used to. And I think it's incredibly problematic. In the same way that I mentioned relations before, if we're distracted whilst we're having the interactions with our partners, I think that's that's incredibly problematic. And you do cover this in your book. And you mentioned a phrase that I've not heard before about a social contagion. I wonder if you could just expand on what it is.
Yeah. So, um, uh, we've been here before. The good news is, we've been here before. And we've made it through okay. We're still making it through. And the, the story I provide is this idea of around smoking. Uh, that in the United States, it used to be that 60% of the adult population smoked. Today, it's around 14%. Uh, and one of the phenomenal things is that even without legislation, things have really changed in particular circumstances. Let me explain further. So when I was a kid, I grew up in the 1980s. Those are some of my first memories were from the 1980s. And I remember in my household, my parents didn't smoke. My dad had given it up years ago. My mom never smoked. And yet, we had ashtrays all over our house. Why did we have ashtrays in our house? We had ashtrays because when someone came to your house in the 1980s, they just expected to light a cigarette in your living room. Can you imagine if someone came to your house and just lit up? If I, you know, I just assumed I could light a cigarette right now? That would be ridiculous, right? How awkward would that be? Why, why did that change? He said, "Okay, well, legislation changed smoking laws." Yes, but no law ever mandated that you can't smoke in someone's living room. There's no law like that. Why did people change? Well, we adopted what's called social antibodies. Social antibodies is when a society changes their behavior because they see some kind of unhealthy behavior they want to weed out of the population. So what we did, we made it socially untenable to smoke in someone's living room. We made that rude. We made that something that is now something you would never dream of doing. And so I think we see something similar happening when it comes to our tech use. And I think it's happening with or without my book, but I hope to accelerate this process. We, you know, even today, I have to say, it is what a wonderful crowd. I mean, when I started teaching this, this subject matter, not with this book, but with my first book, pretty much half the room, when I would give a public talk, would be on their phones. Maybe I used to be a very boring speaker, I don't know. But, but today, look, nobody is on their devices. Maybe one or two people, I don't know. Very, very few. Now, there's anything wrong with it, by the way. If you want to tweet, you don't feel bad. If you want to feel bad, no skills here. But we've learned. You know, I see this also with my students. I used to teach for many years at the Stanford Design School, in the business school. And my students, when I first started teaching, they'd be on their phone in the middle of class. And then they started seeing the negative repercussions that, you know, you can't be fully present and listen to the professor, uh, while you're on your device. And so today, almost none of my students do this. Uh, and so people are getting the message. There's this new word called "phubbing." Maybe you've heard it. Phubbing was a recently invented word. That's the combination of phone snubbing. If it's practiced when you're sitting with someone across the table and you're trying to have a discussion, they think it's a good time to take out their vi-, their device. That's called phubbing. And so what do we do with phubbing? How do we inoculate our population? How do we inoculate our friends and spread these social antibodies? Here's how we do it. We ask one sincere question. The question is, "I see you're on your phone. Is everything okay?" Now, what do I do? What have I done? When I asked that question, I'm not assuming that I know what's going on. If you say, "Get off your phone, I want to talk to you," "Don't be rude." That's not going to work. You're going to lose a friend. One, you don't know what's actually happening on the other end of the line. There might be really some kind of emergency. But by sincerely asking that question of, "Hey, is everything okay?" you give them an out to say, "Oh, you know what? I'm so sorry. There's just this emergency I really have to take care of right now." In which case, they'll excuse themselves and take care of that problem. Or nine times out of ten, they'll get the hint and say, "Oh, I'm so sorry," and they'll put it away. Right? So we are learning this social antibody. We're spreading the social antibody. And I'm pretty optimistic. I see this happening already. Hopefully, that process will accelerate by, by this discussion.
Yeah, I love that. I love the term "phubbing." That's, uh, that's incredible. Have you actually used that strategy with any of your friends?
All the time, really? All the time. All the time. And, and frankly, you know, look, I told you at the very beginning, when we started about when I defined the term indistractible, becoming indistractible does not mean we never get distracted. That's impossible. Becoming indistractible means we are the type of people who strive to do what we say we're going to do. And the idea is that we learn from when we get distracted. And there's this saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. So many of us, myself included, I mean, I wrote this book for me more than anyone. I would constantly get distracted day in and day out by the same thing. Well, that doesn't happen anymore. Now, when I get distracted, I know why. There are only three reasons: an external trigger, an internal trigger, or a planning problem. And I can do something about it in the future. So I'll be totally honest with you. Sometimes I get called out by my daughter, in particular, right? So if I, if I'm taking my daughter to, uh, to a class or something, and I'll, I'll be, you know, just taking her and going from one place to another, and I'll check something because my wife is texting me. And then I'll get caught in by one of these external triggers sometimes. And she'll say, "Hey, Daddy, is everything okay?" Good point. Let me put that away, right? So, and I want that. I think that's a healthy, that's a healthy thing for us all to help each other spread the social antibody.
Yeah, for sure. Look, I've got to say, another thank you again for actually writing the book, which I think is brilliant, but also really, I love the fact that you've given a name now to this problem. So it's not this thing that we all sort of know we're suffering from this, there's a name. You know, and we can think about how can we become indistractible. And often it's by naming a problem, but actually we start to think about solutions. So thank you for that. As you know, this conversation is going to go out on my own podcast, Feel Better, Live More. I always end it a particular way. And I wonder if we could try that here. So it's called Feel Better, Live More, because I genuinely have seen time and time again in my practice, seeing patients, that when people feel better in themselves, they get more out of life. And I guess the more indistractible we can become, the more we're going to get out of our lives. I wonder if you could leave the listeners, but also the live audience here today, with some of your most practical tips that they can think about applying into their own life immediately once they've left.
Yeah. So, uh, we only got through two of the four strategies. So maybe what I'll do is just kind of do a quick wrap-up on these four strategies. And, and I think what's more important than the tactics is the strategy. Tactics are what you do. Strategy is why you do it. And so it's very important to first understand the strategy. So frankly, you can come up with your own techniques, right? I give lots and lots of tactics that you can, that you can use. But it's more important that you develop these for yourself and customize them to your life, right? Because we all have different values, we all have different lives. We're all on this journey together. And so these four steps is first, to master these internal triggers. We talked about a little bit about how we can reimagine the triggers. We can also reimagine the task and our temperament. We don't have time to go into that now, but there's a lot more there. Then it's about making time for traction. It's about turning our values into time on our calendars and synchronizing our calendars with our loved ones, with our stakeholders, with our bosses, so that we can make sure that we're, we're, uh, we're synchronized around how we spend our time. What we didn't get to is, is around hacking back the external triggers. There's, this is a category that's very tactical. This is all about taking those, uh, those external triggers in our environment, the pings and dings, or whatever else it could be. Our children, as we talked about earlier, in the kibbutz. It could be superfluous meetings. It could be, you know, emails, Slack channels, whatever it might be. And making sure that we ask ourselves this critical question of, "Is this trigger serving me, or am I serving it?" If the external trigger is leading us towards traction, it's great. Let's keep it, right? If an external trigger on your phone is reminding you, "Hey, it's time to work out. It's time for that meeting. It's time to do whatever it is you planned to do in advance," keep it. It's wonderful. But if you're serving it, if it's leading you towards distraction, as that external trigger led me to check my phone when I wanted to be with my daughter, now it's leading me towards distraction. It's not serving me. It needs to be removed. So it turns out two-thirds of people with a smartphone, two-thirds of people with a smartphone never change their notification settings. This is simple stuff, right? We can, we can all do this. That's kindergarten stuff. What's much more important, uh, is the, is the external triggers we don't always identify. So, for example, in my research, I found that one of the most common sources of distraction in the workplace is other people, right? Especially if you work in an open floor plan office. We're kind of leaving ourselves open to someone tapping us on the shoulder and say, "Hey, do you hear that little bit of gossip?" or "Can you believe what just happened?" or, you know, whatever it might be. "Can I just talk to you for a quick sec?" It's never a quick sec. So what we can do is essentially, there's, there's a, a screen sign in the back of the book. You pull it out, you fold it into thirds. It's this red, uh, stop sign looking thing that you put on your computer monitor. And it tells your colleagues, "I'm indestructible. Please come back later." Right? And so you're sending this explicit message to your colleagues, you know, "For the next hour or whatever, 45 minutes, I need some time to focus. I need some time to think." And so you're starting to set this culture of, "It's okay to disconnect for a little bit," even if disconnecting means not being reachable all the time in the physical world, right? In an open floor plan office.
And then finally, the last technique is about preventing distraction with pacts. And pacts are these pre-commitments that we can use in this category. There are three things that we can do. We can make a price pact, an effort pact, and an identity pact. These are promises we make to ourselves, to other people, that help us stay on track, that prevent us from getting distracted. Uh, so an effort pact is something that we can do that puts a bit of work between us and something we don't want to do. So in my household, we talked about relationships earlier. Uh, you know, my wife and I found that we were going to bed later and later every night. This was impacting our relationship. It was impacting our sex life because she would fondle her iPhone and I would crest my iPad, as opposed to being with each other. And so here's what we did. We went to the hardware store and we bought ourselves this 10-outlet timer. And this outlet timer turns anything you plug into it on and off at a certain time of day or night. And what do we plug into it? Our internet router. So every night at 10 PM, our internet shuts off. Now, could I turn it back on? Of course, I could. I could fiddle with it, go under my desk, unplug it, replug it. But that takes effort. That takes work. And that bit of effort makes me insert a bit of mindfulness to ask myself, "Wait, do I really need to go online right now, or can I wait till later?" And of course, 99% of the time, there's nothing all that urgent, right? In fact, now we've trained ourselves. We all know, "Okay, 10 o'clock, the internet shuts off. Do everything you need to do so we can get to bed." Uh, and then lastly, there's there's an, uh, price pact, which is about making some kind of financial commitment. But one thing I want to leave you with is this, an idea of an identity pact. And this was one of the, the more interesting bits of research I came across. This was research around the psychology of religion. And it turns out that when we have some kind of identity, some kind of moniker that we can embrace and call ourselves and tell other people about, we become much more likely to stick with our goals. And a good example of this, if you consider someone who's, who's devout, they're not debating with themselves about their behavior every day the way we might if you don't have these type of, of beliefs, this type of moniker. So consider a devout Muslim. A devout Muslim would not say to themselves, "Hmm, I wonder if I should have that gin and tonic." No, a devout Muslim doesn't drink alcohol, period. A vegetarian doesn't say to themselves, "Oh, I wonder if I should have that bacon today." No, they're vegetarian. They don't eat meat. It's who they are. "I am a vegetarian." I'm not, but that's what they would say. And so that's why this book is called Indistractible. Indistractible should be the new moniker. It should be what we call ourselves because we know that when you have an identity, when you have some type of, of, of moniker that you can call yourself, you become much more likely to stick with your goals. So when people ask you, "Hey, how come you're not returning your emails every 30 seconds? How come you put this weird screen sign on your screen? Why do you do these strange things?" "That's who I am." And is it any more different than someone who wears unusual religious garb or who has a, a, a diet that might not be what everyone else eats? No, we don't question those things. So we need this new moniker. And I'm hoping to start this movement. I mean, with or without the book, I want people to proclaim that they are indistractible. That we are the kind of people who don't want our lives and our attention and our time controlled by others. We are the kind of people who do what we say we're going to do. We control our time and attention by becoming indistractible.
Yeah, brilliant. Just brilliant. And Nia, I'm going to tell you now, in front of a live audience, I am indistractible. Okay? That's my new identity. Okay? I'll tell my wife when I get home tomorrow. See how that goes down. Um, look, thank you for sharing your wisdom this evening. Thank you for writing such a brilliant book. Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for Mr. Near Iyal. Thanks very much. Thank you.
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