How to Stay Focused and Beat Distraction - Nir Eyal

So there's something about the human condition that makes us distractable, that makes us constantly look for other things. And that probably served us on the plains of the S and G 200,000 years ago when, you know, you were constantly looking out for danger, you're looking out for opportunity. But, you know, today, that's not necessarily a skill that we want to run rampant. We need to learn how to control it.

If you can remove external triggers from your environment, so for example, if people are trying to stop a substance abuse, sure, absence might be able to work for you. But how do you remove the triggers for technology? There's nothing wrong with external triggers. If an external trigger tells you, "Hey, it's time for that meeting," "It's time to go exercise," "It's time for that thing you said you were going to do that's in your calendar," wonderful, it's serving you. But if it's an external trigger that, uh, you get this notification while I was with my daughter, now it's not serving me. I was serving the notification.

Oh, by the way, before we get into this episode, I would love to tell you a little bit about Life Notes. Now, Life Notes is a weekly-ish email that I send completely for free to my subscribers, and it contains my notes from life. So, notes from books that I've read, podcasts I'm listening to, conversations I'm having, and experiences I'm having, work and in life. And around once a week, I write these up and share them in an email with my subscribers. So, if you would like to get an email from me that contains the stuff that I'm learning almost in real time as I'm learning it, you might like to subscribe. There is a link down in the show notes or in the video description.

Near are welcome to the podcast. How you doing? I'm doing great. It's so great to be with you. We've been talking about this for a while now. Thank you so much for coming to London. For pleasure. Experiencing the vibe on this lovely summer's day.

All right, so what does it mean to be indistractable? Being indistractable means that you are as honest with yourself as you are with others. Meaning, one of the worst things you can be called in life is a liar, right? That is a horrible put down about your character. And so we never want to be a liar. That's, that would be a horrible thing for, for someone to call us. And yet, we lie to ourselves every day. We say we're going to exercise, but we don't. We say we're going to eat right, but we skip. We say we're going to be fully present with our loved ones, but we're not really. We say we're going to work on that big project, we're not going to, we're not going to procrastinate, but somehow we delay and we delay. So we constantly lie to ourselves. And what that means is that we look back on our lives and we are full of regret. We said we should have done that thing. We should have started the business. We should have written the book. We should have started the podcast. We should have started YouTubing, whatever the case might be. But we didn't do it. We got distracted. So being indistractable is about doing what you say you're going to do.

So what prompted you to write the book, Indistractable? Okay, so for me, um, there was one inciting incident for me that really kind of started me down this path where I had to reassess my relationship with distraction. I was with my da, one afternoon, and, um, we just had some daddy-daughter time planned. And we had this book of activities that dads and daughters could do together. You know, make a paper airplane, throwing contest, do a Sudoku puzzle. But one of the activities in this book was to ask each other this question. The question was, "If you could have any superpower, what superpower would you want?" And I remember that question verbatim, but I can't tell you what my daughter said because in that moment, for whatever reason, I just thought, "It was a good time. Let me just check this one thing, honey." And by the time I looked up from my phone, she got the cue that whatever was on my phone was more important than she was. And she left the room to go play with some toy outside. And I knew I blew it. And so that's when I realized that I had to reassess my relationship with distraction. Because if I'm honest with you, it wasn't just with my daughter. It would happen when I would say I was going to do one thing. I was going to exercise. I was going to work on a big project. And yet, one thing or another came up, and I didn't do what I said I was going to do. And so that's when I decided that if I could have any superpower, it would be the power to become indistractable, simply to follow through on the things I know I want to do. Right? I don't need convincing. I know I need to do this. And yet, somehow, I didn't do it. And so that's why I think becoming indistractable is the skill of the century. That there's no facet of your mental health, your physical well-being, uh, your, your career, all of these things require us to be able to harness our attention. This is truly how we choose our life.

Nice. So why do so many of us struggle with distraction? What's going on there? I think it's a product of, uh, two things. One, it's human nature. We know that Plato, the Greek philosopher, talked about this struggle with akrasia, the tendency to do things against our better interest. He talked about this 2500 years ago. So there's something about the human condition that makes us distractable, that makes us constantly look for for other things. And that probably served us on the plains of the S and G 200,000 years ago when, you know, you were constantly looking out for danger, you're looking out for opportunity. But you know today that that's not necessarily a skill that we want to run rampant. We need to learn how to control it. So that's reason number one. Reason number two is that we have this, this abundance of so many good things in our life, right? We live in an age where, for the first time in human history, there are more people dying of diseases of excess than of, of, of scarcity. So it used to be that human beings would die of starvation when there was a famine. Well, today, more people die of diabetes and obesity than they do of famine. So we have this excess. We have abundance. The same that goes with information. We don't ever have to be bored anymore because there's instant entertainment at all times of day or night, right here in our pockets, found with our phones. And that's a good thing. A lot of people like to diss this stuff. They say, "Oh, it's technology, it's the modern world, it's all these bad things." Well, number one, these distractions have always been with us. Right? Plato talked about it 2500 years ago. And two, getting rid of these things are not going to solve the problem because distraction is part of the human condition. And furthermore, the fact that these devices are so engaging, that they're, uh, so fun to use, that's not a problem, that's progress. Right? What are we gonna say, "Hey, Apple, your phones are too user-friendly. H, stop making them. I want to use them too much." Hey, hey, Netflix, your shows are too entertaining. Please stop making such good shows. No, that's ridiculous. We want these good things in our life. So the price of all that progress, the price of living in an age with so much abundance, is that we have to learn a new skill set. We have to learn how to live with these technologies, how to get the best of them so they don't get the best of us.

Um, you, in the book, you talk about the idea of internal triggers. What are internal triggers and how do they cause us to get distracted? Yeah, so many people when it comes to distraction, they blame the things outside of us. We blame the pings, the dings, the rings, all of the things in our outside environment that can lead us towards distraction. Now, they, those things can be a trigger for distraction. Those are called external triggers. But we know from time studies that those external triggers only account for about 10% of our distractions. So 10% of the time that you check your phone is it because of a ping, a ding, or a ring? But that's what we tend to blame. What we don't remember, what we don't think about, is that 90% of our distractions, 90% begin from within. These are called internal triggers. What are internal triggers? Internal triggers are uncomfortable emotional states that we seek to escape. Boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety. These are these uncomfortable sensations that we look to escape, many times with distraction. So whether it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, you are always going to get distracted from, from one thing or another unless you understand the root cause of the problem. So if we just keep blaming the external triggers when they account for such a small share of the reason for our distractions, we don't get to the real cause of the problem.

Solid. That surprises me. I would have thought that, like, the reason I get distracted by my phone is the fact that I get all these notifications. But we're saying it's, it's not actually because... Yeah, because then I think when I'm on the couch or when I'm on the toilet, it's not a notification I'm responding to, it's something. Yeah, that's right. It's a feeling. And so that's, to me, you know, this whole question of distraction and, and why don't we do what we say we're going to do, right? This ancient question that Plato asked as well. I think it's a fascinating question. If we know what to do, why don't we just do it? Right? We all know what to do. And today, you know, you could say, "Okay, well, maybe in generations past, our grandparents had a shortage of information. If you wanted to know how to do something, you had to go to the library or ask some expert." Today, it's all here. Right? Google it, it'll tell you what to do. And who doesn't basically know what to do? We know if you want to get in shape, you have to eat right and exercise. If you want to have better relationships with your family, you have to be fully present with them. If you want to, uh, do well at your job, you have to do the things that other people aren't willing to do, right? We, we know this stuff. You have to do the hard work. We know, but we don't do it. And so to me, that's a really interesting question. So in order to understand why do we get distracted, I think we have to actually go a layer deeper and ask, why do we do anything and everything? What's the nature of human motivation? Most people will tell you that motivation is about carrots and sticks. We've all heard this, right? Turns out neurologically, that's not true. That neurologically, the way the brain gets us to act is not through carrots and sticks per se, but rather everything is about the desire to escape discomfort. The way the reward system in the brain works is that the carrot is the stick, right? Think about that. The carrot is the stick. Meaning that even when we want to feel good, pleasure, desire, craving, hunger, lusting for something, the desire for pleasure is itself psychologically destabilizing. So everything we do, everything you do, is about the desire to escape discomfort. So that means if everything you do is about the desire to escape discomfort, that must therefore mean that time management is pain management, money management is pain management, weight management is pain management. And so that's why these internal triggers are so important. If you don't master these internal triggers, they will become your master.

Nice. Um, how do we master these internal triggers? Yeah, so this is the most important part. I think a lot of people gloss over. Uh, they look for the tips, the tricks, the hacks, right? Show me the app, show me the secret solution, give me the nootropic that's going to fix this problem. But at the end of the day, if 90% of our distractions begin from within, we have to figure out these strategies to master internal triggers. So there's a dozen different tactics in my book, Indistractable, on how to do this. And you have to experiment, you have to see what works for you. I'll tell you what works for me. So a couple techniques that work really well that I, I use literally every single day, uh, come from acceptance and commitment therapy. I didn't make them up, they've been around for decades. One of them is called the 10-minute rule. The 10-minute rule says that you can give in to any distraction, whatever that distraction might be. Whether you're on a diet and you're trying to resist that chocolate cake, whether you're trying to quit smoking, whether you're trying to not check your phone every five minutes when you're trying to be with your family or do a work project. You can give into that distraction, but not right now. In 10 minutes. And if 10 minutes is too long, make it the five-minute rule. It doesn't really matter. What you want to do is a couple things. Number one, this shows you that you have agency, that you can actually do what you say you're going to do. You can resist anything for just five minutes. So by showing to yourself, "Hey, you know what? I, I'm not controlled by these distractions. I can wait a few minutes. I will do that thing, but a little bit later, in 10 minutes." The other thing that I think is super important, a lot of people forget, is that they think that the right path to stop a behavior is abstinence. And for some behaviors, that can be the case, right? If you can remove external triggers from your environment. So, for example, if people are trying to, uh, stop a substance abuse, if you can remove those triggers from your environment, sure, abstinence might be able to work for you. But how do you remove the triggers for technology? Right? It's, it's all, it's all over the place, right? We, we need our devices in order to stay connected to work, to family, to loved ones. That is part of the modern experience. Food, same way. You can't just stop eating food. You need food to survive. So in those cases, strict abstinence, telling yourself no, can backfire. It's called psychological reactant. Psychological reactant says that when you are told what to do, when your agency is threatened, the natural human response is to rebel. So when your mom told you, "Oh, it's raining outside, put on a coat," and you said, "Don't tell me what to do." Or your boss tries to micromanage you, that feeling of being controlled, that's reactants. Now, the crazy thing is that the human brain will elicit reactants even when we are telling ourselves what to do. So when you tell yourself, "Don't check TikTok, don't watch YouTube," you are literally making yourself want it more. So instead, to disarm psychological reactants, a much better approach is to say, "Hey, I can do whatever I want. I'm a grown human being. I can, I can make my own choices. I choose to delay this by 10 minutes. I will do that thing in 10 minutes." Now, what's the next step? When you do that, you want to explore that internal trigger with curiosity rather than contempt. A lot of people, they beat themselves up. So when people, uh, think about distraction, we find that they fall into two buckets, two categories. We have what we call the blamers, and then we have what's called the shamers. The blamers, they blame things outside themselves. They blame technology, they blame the news, they blame the modern world, they blame all this stuff outside of them. Those are the blamers. And that's feudal because you're not going to change that stuff, right? People have always been distracted by things happening outside them. So that's not, that's not an effective strategy. The other category is what we call the shamers. They take it on the inside. That's what I used to do. "Oh, there must be something wrong with me. Uh, if I was a real writer, I wouldn't have this urge to constantly get distracted. Maybe I'm, my brain is broken somehow." I would shame myself into thinking there was something broken about me. And of course, shame is a very uncomfortable internal trigger. So what do we do in response to shame? We're more likely to look for distraction to escape the shame that we're feeling. So we don't want to be a blamer, we don't want to be a shamer. We want to be what's called a claimer. A claimer claims responsibility, not for how they feel. So this is, this was a big one for me. Turns out we don't control our urges. We don't control our urges. People try to control their urges. You cannot control your urges. Think about the urge to sneeze. When you feel the urge to sneeze, it's too late. You already felt the urge. All you can do is to decide what you will do in response to that urge, right? Hence, we can claim responsibility. Responsibility comes from how you will respond to that urge. So what do you do when you feel the urge to sneeze? Do you sneeze all over everyone and get them sick? No, you, you take out a handkerchief and you cover your face, right? That's the responsible thing to do. And the same goes for our urges around getting distracted, right? It's not about claiming and blame, it's not about shaming and blaming, it's about claiming responsibility for having a plan for what we will do when we feel that discomfort. So the 10-minute rule allows us to say, "Okay, I will give into that distraction in 10 minutes." Now, what do you do for those 10 minutes? What I do is I do, I use this technique called surfing the urge. Surfing the urge acknowledges that these emotions are like waves. They crest and then they subside. But that's not how it feels in the moment. In the moment, when you feel bored or anxious or uncertain or lonely, you feel like you're always going to experience that emotion. But that's not true, right? That if you acknowledge that in a short, very short period of time, that emotion will crest and subside, you can ride it like a surfer on a surfboard until it's gone. And so what I do, uh, you know, I write every single day, uh, and writing never gets easier. Like there's no such thing as a writing habit, by the way. You know, people try and make everything into a habit these days. And by definition, that, you can't, right? A habit is defined as a behavior done with little or no conscious thought. How exactly do you write with little or no conscious thought? Right? I, I don't know how to do that, right? How, how do you, an exercise habit, that's a misnomer because habit requires little or no conscious thought. If you're trying to break your PR, that requires effort, that requires thought, uh, so, so you can't just, you know, habit it away. You have to put effort towards these things. These are the things that people tend to get distracted from. So while I'm writing, often times when I'm about to say, "Oh, let me just check email real quick," or "Let me just Google something," right? What I'm doing is I'm trying to find an excuse for me to to get away from that internal trigger of, "Is this writing going to be any good?" And, uh, uh, it's kind of boring, and I'm not sure where it's going to go, and is anybody going to read this? All this doubt and uncertainty. What I do, what I do is I, I take a pause. I set a timer for 10 minutes. I put my phone down. I say, "Okay, I close my eyes and I just surf that urge." And so for me, a useful technique, another one that I talk about in the book, is to have a personal mantra. And so you can create your own mantra. I'll share with you my mantra. So in those 10 minutes, I have a choice to make. I can either get back to the task at hand, and whenever I'm ready to get back to the task at hand, get right back to the writing, or I can surf that urge by just taking a few seconds to repeat my mantra. My mantra sounds like this: I close my eyes and I say, "This is what it feels like to get better." "This is what it feels like to get better." That's just my, my personal mantra. You can create your own. To me, that reminds my, reminds me that it's supposed to be difficult, right? If it was easy, everyone would do it. That's part of the struggle, that's part of a craft, is, is, is pushing through that discomfort. And what I find, nine times out of 10, is that before those 10 minutes are up, I'm right back at that task at hand. And what, what happens over time is that the 10-minute rule becomes the 12-minute rule, becomes the 15-minute rule, becomes the 20-minute rule. And now you're proving to yourself that you actually do have control, you do have agency over these distractions.

Man, you're so good at this. Like, [ __ ] sick. I'm like, damn, I wish I was this like prepared when I was doing podcasts. My like, really? Your conviction, such confidence. I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about. I've always admired like how you can get in front of a camera and and do what you do. Wait, so you don't, you don't do it like this? No, how you... I feel like I'm all over the... It feels like you've got the talking points down. You've nailed it. The, the blamer or the shamer, the this, you've got your, your football, Facebook thing. It's like your, the, the rings, the dings, the pings, the thing. I was like, it's just so well done. I guess you've done so many of these that you've gotten in the reps. Or, but when you, when you, your YouTube videos sound this, sound just as good, if not better. Yeah, maybe. Do you edit them? Like, we do a lot of editing in the YouTube videos. I'm not very, uh, spontan... Well, I don't know. Maybe it sounds like you're just spouting off genius. Like, yeah, okay. Nice. I'm glad to hear it because it's... Sounds like you were spouting off genius right now. Anyway, um, is willpower a resource that runs out? Okay, so there is this popular notion that willpower is a limited resource. And this came out of some research, uh, done several years ago now, uh, around this concept called ego depletion. Ego depletion says that we run out of willpower just like we would run out of battery charge on our phone or gas in our gas tank. That it's a depletable resource. And this got a lot of, of, of press because it's kind of a concept people want to believe, right? We want to think like, "I used to, I'd get home from work and say, 'Oh, what a rough day. Give me that pint of ice cream. I'm going to sit in front of the TV and just chill out, right? I'm out of willpower. I'm spent.' I used to say, 'I'm spent.'" And so it's kind of a comforting thought. Turns out, uh, it was a little too good to be true. So, as happens in the social sciences, when something sounds a little bit fishy, what do we do? We rerun the study, we try and replicate the study. And it turns out that this idea of ego depletion, that we run out of willpower like gas in a gas tank, turns out not to be true, except in one group of people. There is actually one group of people who really do run out of willpower. They really do spend it up. And those people, and only those people, and this work was done by Carol Dweck, I'm sure you know her work, uh, wonderful book, uh, called Mindset. And she found that the only group of people who run out of willpower are people who believe that willpower is a depletable resource. And so I talk about this in the book, uh, in, in Indistractable, as a way that we have to reimagine our temperament. That if you believe you are spent, you are. As Henry Ford said, "Whether you believe you can or you cannot, you're right." And so when you hear people saying things like, "We're all addicted to technology, and there's nothing we can do. It's hacking our brains." If you believe that stuff, of course, that's the case. And of course, that is exactly what the tech companies want. The tech companies want you to believe you're addicted. The word addiction comes from the Latin, *addico*, which means slave. So when you say to yourself, "I am a slave. I am addicted. I have no more willpower. I'm spent," you're making it true. And so we have to be very, very careful about these labels and make sure that we only adopt the labels that serve us rather than the ones that hurt us.

Interesting. So, um, I very much vibe with this. Um, a pushback to this might be, okay, like, one of my team members, for example, comes to mind. She always says to me that, like, "Oh, you know, Ali, I don't have time to work on my YouTube channel because after a day of work, I have no energy, and I just have to watch Netflix to recharge." And I've always found that a bit fishy. I'm like, "Do you really? Like, I mean, the work that we do is, it's not like we're coal miners or something. It's not, it's not that physically demanding." She's like, "No, but I'm, I'm, I'm just like, mentally, I'm mentally drained of energy." And she says she has to watch Netflix for three hours or whatever it is to... Okay, I love it when people say, "I hear this all the time. They say, 'You don't understand. I can't, or I have to, or I must, or there's no way.'" Right? I hear it all the time. I've heard, the book is published 2019. I've heard literally every excuse you could possibly come up with. And whenever I hear one of these definitive statements of "I can't" or "I must" or "I have to," I would say, "Okay, well, let's test that a bit. Let's, let's test this. What would happen if, when you got home, instead of watching Netflix, which you say you have to watch because you're spent, I told you that if you don't do whatever it is you said you're going to do, go to the gym, play with my kid, read a book, work on a project, if you don't do that, you're going to have to pay me $110,000?" Are you gonna do that thing? Of course, I am. I'm going to go to the gym. Of course, I'm going to work on the video. Of course, I'm going to do that thing. Of course, I'm not going to pay $10,000. Okay, well, what does that tell us? That tells us we've established you can. Now, we're just negotiating the price. And so when you do that, this is, this is step four, becoming indistractable, making a PCT. And this is something that, that I actually did with a friend of mine, with, with Mark Manson, actually, when we were writing. We were both working on our books. And I had, I, it took me five years to write Indistractable. Took me five years to write Indistractable because I kept getting distracted. Right? It wasn't until I figured out these techniques, starting from first principles, and adopted them into my own life, that I could actually change my life. And today, I'm in the best shape of my life. I've better relationships with my family than ever before. I'm more productive than ever before because I've adopted these techniques. But it took me a long time to dig through all the garbage out there that doesn't work. So once I finally figured out how to become indistractable, now was time to actually write the book. And I, I had to practice what I preach. I looked at this technique called making a commitment PCT. And I told Mark, I said, "Look, if I don't finish my manuscript by January 1st, I will owe you $20,000." And we shook on it. You think I paid him the $20,000? Of course not. I finished my damn book. And think about, right? We pay coaches and trainers and fitness and diets. We pay all this money, which, which is gone, we'll never get that money back, in order for other people to hold us accountable. Well, we can do this to ourselves, right? By making this commitment PCT. What, what I call a price pack. That's one of several different kinds of packs we can make. Turns out we can have our cake and eat it too, except if you're on a diet. You can have the goal, you can get to that accomplishment, you can finish that book, you can do whatever it is you said you're going to do, and you get to keep your money. So as the fourth step, by the way, I do have to give a disclaimer. That technique of setting this pact, you have to do it last. Many people have heard of a similar technique, but if you don't do it in the right order, it will absolutely backfire. If you don't first do step number one, master internal triggers, make time for traction, hack back external triggers, then prevent distraction with pacts as a fourth and final step. If you don't do it in the right order, it will backfire. But having that type of commitment PCT, right? When someone says, "I can't, I won't, it's impossible," always shows you that actually, you can. There's just a matter of a price to be negotiated.

Why, why does it backfire? How does it backfire if you do it first? Because the, the most common cause of distraction are these internal triggers. So if you don't first deal with the internal triggers, for example, um, so I used to be clinically obese, and, uh, exercise has always been a struggle for me. I, I still to this day, I'm in the best shape of my life at 46 years old, but I, uh, I, I've always disliked it. So one of the things I did after I did the research for the book is I, I utilized the technique of making a price pact. And I, um, still to this day, I have a calendar in, in my dresser, next to my dresser, that on this calendar is taped a fresh, crisp $100 bill. And above that, that the calendar, there's a little shelf, and on that shelf, there's a Bic lighter. And every day I have a choice to make. It's called the burn or burn technique. I can either burn some calories by doing some push-ups, going for a walk around the block, going for a swim, doing some kind of exercise every day to burn calories, or I have to burn the $100 bill. The burn or burn technique. Now, I've been doing this for five years now. I've never had to burn the $100 bill because I just do the damn exercise, right? Because my personal integrity is worth more than the $100 bill. Now, if I hadn't done the first three steps, if I didn't know how to deal with those internal triggers of, "I don't really feel like working out right now," if I didn't plan the time, if I didn't remove the external triggers that don't serve me, then this technique wouldn't work. So you have to do it last.

Nice. So it sounds like you don't buy the idea that, uh, mental energy is like a thing. I get to the, I get home from the day of work, I've been like productive all day at work, and now I feel mentally drained. Dot, dot, dot. Yeah, I mean, I can prove it to you right now. If you had something interesting, yeah, all of a sudden you have energy. How could that be if the brain is drained of, you know, the, the theory was that, that Baumeister, the guy who did the research on, uh, ego depletion, was that it's a depletable resource because you're glucose is somehow depleted, right? And he's had these studies which we can't replicate, that if you give people lemonade, somehow they were boosted. Well, it turns out that if you think about it, if the brain is drained of, of energy, well, then why are interesting and fun things suddenly possible to do, right? So it turns out, I think it's, it's what we call a nocebo effect, like the opposite of a placebo is a nocebo effect. That when you think something is, is going to happen, right? When you have an expectation that you're spent, when you have an expectation that you're tired, when you have an expectation that you can't, it's true.

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That's really good. I found myself so yesterday, um, I had like a, I had like a big session at the gym with a personal trainer. I got home and I was meant to be going on this, like, nice restaurant with a few friends, friends for dinner. And there was like an hour to wait between kind of coming back home from the gym and the dinner. And the story I told myself was, "Oh man, I'm so tired. Oh, I just want to blob out." And then I ended up just like scrolling Instagram or something for like an hour until the dinner. And then the dinner rolled around, and I was like, "Pokey and fresh." There was no sign of the tightness, right? And I was kind of thinking, "Hmm, that's, that's a bit suspicious." It's like, there's no law of physics really that's like, I wasn't running out of glucose and ATP and stuff like, realistic, right? I, I had just told myself the story that, "Oh, I, I'm, I'm mentally fatigued right now, therefore I'm just going to blob out and watch random memes on Instagram." Right? And of course, the more you, you do that in the past, the more you abide by that expectation, the more likely you are to expect it to occur. Yeah, so the more you come home and say, "Oh, I can't, I can't, I can't," well, now it becomes a pattern, right? Now you're, it's becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What is a distraction notebook? Uh, so a distraction notebook is a way for, for you to keep track of what took you off track, right? So when you, uh, so, so one of the things we have to do in order to become indistractable is to be able to identify those internal triggers. Again, that's 90% of our distractions. So most people have no sense of why they got distracted. They all of a sudden find the cigarettes in their hand. They all of a sudden find the phone, you know, they're scrolling on TikTok or whatever, without realizing what was the preceding internal trigger. So a distraction notebook is a way for you to start bringing awareness to what is that preceding emotion that you are trying to escape? Because every distraction, every distraction only has three potential causes, right? If you're doing something that is not what you said you were going to do, it's only because of three reasons: either it's an internal trigger, some kind of feeling, an external trigger, some kind of external prompt in outside environment, or a planning problem. That's it. There's only three potential reasons. So when you have a distraction journal, when you start keeping track of, "Okay, I said I was going to do this, but I did something else," you can start identifying why. Now, why is this so important? There's a wonderful quote by Pogo, who said, "A mistake repeated more than once is a decision." Such a good quote. A mistake repeated more than once is a decision. So good, right? So the problem is that for distractible people, they keep getting distracted by the same things again and again. How many times are we going to complain about YouTube and TikTok and Facebook before we do something? Okay, we got it. You distracted me once. I'm not going to let it happen again. So an indistractable person looks at why they got distracted the first time, and they make sure they take steps today to to prevent getting distracted again tomorrow. One of the things that I found really helpful, um, and that, and that we recommend for our students in productivity lab, is at the end of every focused hour, every focused hour of work, you just do a little like 30-second reflection to reflect on how focused was I really during that time? And were there any distractions that came up? And then if you have that written down, like for me, the other day, I noticed that like in the middle of the work session, I got up and went to the bathroom, but while I was there, I, uh, opened up my phone and just habitually went on Instagram. And then I ended up there for like 15 minutes longer than I really should have been. I was like, "Oh, that's interesting. It's interesting that I did that." And I just said, "Okay, my app blocking thing to be like, 'Okay, let me just block Instagram during working hours.'" And now that problem is gone, right? So now when I'm on the toilet, it's like the only thing I have the option of opening is the Kindle app. And that is just a lot less dopamine-inducing than Instagram, for example. So I, okay, cool. I may as well get off the toilet and get back to work. And if it gets you once, okay, distraction can get anybody once. But you took action about that. You noted what happened and you did something about it. So you can't complain about it. If you know the cause, you know the solution. You can't just keep complaining. You got to do something about it. And that's exactly what you did. Yeah. The, the other thing I found when, when doing the strategy was, I'd be like, "Oh, you know, there, there's a thing on my desk, like a piece of paper I've just taken a note on." And then, "Oh, I, I don't have a bin next to me." So let me just get up and go downstairs to the kitchen. And I realized, "You know what? Let me just spend $3 on Amazon, just buy a bin and just have it next to my desk." Solved that problem. So that's exactly the purpose of this distraction journal is that when you write down, "Oh, I wanted to take down the trash downstairs," and then you look back and say, "Like, okay, that wasn't necessary. What can I do to prevent it from happening tomorrow?" So if you want to boil down my work over the past decade now on distraction, it's, it's this: the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. That's the summary of my work. The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. That procrastination, distraction, it's not a character flaw. There's nothing wrong with you. It's not a moral failing. For the vast majority of people, they don't have ADHD. It's way overdiagnosed. Very, very few people actually have clinical-level ADHD, I believe. But we, we believe that there's, you know, there's something wrong with us. But rather, what, what it means is simply that if we can take steps today to prevent distraction tomorrow. So the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. That if you leave it to the last moment, if you wait till the cigarette's in your hand, you're going to smoke it. If the chocolate cake is on the fork on the way to your mouth, you're going to eat it. If you leave your cell phone on your nightstand every, every night, it's going to be the first thing you reach for in the morning before you say hello to your loved one. It's too late, right? If you leave it to the last minute, they're going to get you. But if you take steps, if you prevent it from happening by taking steps today, there's no distraction we can't overcome tomorrow.

One thing that my, uh, my fitness coach swears by is that whenever you're going to a restaurant, look up the menu online and decide before you get there what you're going to eat. Love it. And I still don't do that, but, but I really should. Yeah. Or, or like, for example, one rule that I have. So for a while, I, I stopped drinking altogether. And then I, I brought it back because it was, I missed it, frankly. And so now I have a rule. I say, I only drink alcohol when I don't pay for it. So if I'm going to a function, if it's a corporate event, okay, fine. You know, if it's, if I'm, I don't know, flying somewhere and they offer it, okay, great. But I have these rules, these heuristics. I'm going to do well. One of my favorite rules that I've had since I started university was, I never watch TV on my own. Nice. It has to be a social activity, otherwise I'm not going to do it. Oh, that's a great. That has saved years of my life. Absolutely. The last 10 years. And probably, I would argue, probably made the TV watching you do do even more enjoyable. Doing with somebody, like doing a Game of Thrones night, inviting people over, ordering pizza. It's like, yeah, that's the one TV show that I watch in a five-year period, you know, that kind of thing. Isn't it amazing how we are so, uh, generous with our time? Like we give it to all these forms of media, right? We just throw it away. Whoever wants it takes it, right? Whatever stupid things happening in the news, some war that has nothing to do with us, thousands of miles away. So, you know, whatever drama or whatever is happening, gossip at work. And yet, when it comes to our time, we give it away. But our money, we're so cheap with, right? How much time do people spend? How much effort people spend protecting their money? We put it in vaults and we, uh, clip coupons and we split checks to save every penny. But that's a renewable resource, right? You can always make more money. You can always make more money. You can't make more time. And yet somehow, we're, we're very cheap with our time. Uh, sorry, we, we're very generous with our time and cheap with our money. And I think it should be the exact opposite. We should be generous with our money and cheap with our time. Love that.

Um, do you ever get accused of like, toxic productivity with all of these like rules and stuff? What does that mean? Oh, oh, oh, it's a, it's like a, I think it's like a Gen Z thing. One thing, you know, I've often mentioned this, like, you know, I have this rule that I

Don't watch TV on my own. And people will say, "That's toxic productivity." You're like, being toxic in the way that you're telling people that they shouldn't be able to chill out and they shouldn't be able to relax, and in fact, they should be working all the time. Yeah. And I think it's a bit of a dumb kind of criticism. Like, no, it's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that productivity is when you're using your time intentionally. If you intend to watch TV, watch the damn TV. If you intend to scroll TikTok, scroll TikTok. But just do what you intended to do. That's right. And by the way, you're sharing what works for you. It may not work for somebody else. They don't have to adopt this technique. But I think my goal is to help people do whatever they say they want to do, right? So if you want to play video games all day, do it, right? You have that right. Who am I to judge how you spend your time? But do it with intent. It's about forethought. If that's what you said you're going to do, do it, and do it without guilt, right? So one of the things I tell people to do is, I want you to schedule time for social media. If you find you're using too much social media, that becomes a distraction, right? You're checking TikTok when you, or Instagram when you didn't intend to. It's because it's not in your calendar. Put it in your schedule. I have time in my schedule to go on social media. So I'm not using it whenever I'm looking to escape boredom or insecurity or fear, uncertainty, or loneliness. I'm not using it as an escape for an internal trigger. I'm doing it because it's a planned activity, and there's nothing wrong with that. I should enjoy. So it's, it's not about me telling people what to do. It's about me helping people do the things that they themselves want to do, but aren't doing. Love that. Yeah, I've got, uh, solo evenings playing PlayStation scheduled into the calendar for Wednesday evenings. Beautiful. So good. And what's great about that, I think, very few people have actually experienced what true leisure feels like. Because even when they're supposed to be having fun, right? This is why I hate to-do lists. I'm a, I, I hate to-do lists. Because even when you are spending time with your kids, or, you know, having a nice dinner, or playing a video game, you're thinking about all the things you still haven't left undone. As opposed to a person who time boxes, who says, "This is my time to do what I said I was going to do." Whether that's playing a video game, or meditating, or being with my kids, or whatever. That's exactly what I said I'm going to do. And everything else becomes a distraction. Nice. Okay, I feel like that segues nicely into method number two. So traction, time boxing. What is that? Sure. Okay. So let's talk about, uh, let's start a little bit at the beginning with what is distraction, right? So this is important to understand. What does that word even mean? Um, and, and I, and I, I think this, it relates to productivity, but I, I don't know if it's exactly productivity. Because I'm trying to help people get the things out of their way, right? So much of, of behavior change is about what you should do. And I think maybe we should focus more on the things that get in our way from doing the things we know we should do. So let's start with what is distraction. So the best way to understand what distraction is, is to understand what distraction is not. What's the opposite of distraction? So most people, if you say, "What's the opposite of distraction?" they'll tell you it's focus. But that's not true. The opposite of distraction is not focus. If you look at the origin of the word, the opposite of distraction is traction, right? It makes sense when you look at them next to each other. Traction and distraction. They're opposites. They both come from the same Latin root, trahar, which means to pull. And they both end in the same six-letter word, AC T I O N. That spells action, reminding us that distraction is not something that happens to us. It is an action that we ourselves take. So traction, by definition, is any action that pulls you towards what you said you were going to do. Things that move you closer to your values, help you the kind of person you want to become. Those are acts of traction. Distraction is any action that pulls you away from what you said you were going to do, away from your values, away from becoming the kind of person you want to become. So this is, this is super important. Uh, it's not just semantics. Because the difference between traction and distraction is one word, and that one word is intent. So as Dorothy Parker said, "The time you plan to waste is not wasted time." So there's nothing wrong with scheduling time for video games. That is traction. If that's what you said you were going to do in advance. Conversely, and more dangerously, is when people don't even realize they're distracted. So my workday routine used to look like this. I would say, "Okay, I'm not going to procrastinate. I've got that big project I have to finish. Nothing's going to get in my way here. Here I go. I'm going to get started." But first, let me check some email, right? Let me just scroll that Slack channel real quick. Let me just do this, uh, easy task on my to-do list, right? Those are productive things. I'm, I'm doing work-related tasks. I'm being productive, right? But if it's not what you said you were going to do in advance, it's just as much of a distraction as, you know, plain Candy Crush or something. So it is all about what you said you were going to do in advance. That's traction and distraction. So how do you put this into practice? You cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. So if you have big open white space in your calendar, what the hell did you get distracted from? You can't tell me everything is a distraction unless you plan your time. So unlike a to-do list, which is just a register of things you want to have done, when you time box, and I didn't make up this technique, it's been around for a long time, it's called setting an implementation intention. It's the most widely studied technique that far too, too few people use. It's basically saying, "Here's what I'm going to do, and when I'm going to do it." Now, the difference is that the metric of success, what I added in my book, uh, which is, is unlike a to-do list, which is about checking cute little boxes, it's about finishing things. That's a terrible metric because you don't control the output, right? You don't control the output. How long is something going to take you? When you're doing a YouTube video, sometimes it takes you a few hours, sometimes it can take you dozens of hours, probably. You don't always know. What you do know is the input. What's your input? It's time and attention. And so when you budget those things, your time and attention, the new metric isn't, "Did I finish?" The new metric is, "Did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would, without distraction?" Whether that's being with my family, whether that's playing video games, whether that's working on a big project. Did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would, without distraction? Because that is the only way to have a feedback loop. So the reason that it takes people, on average, three times longer to finish a task than they predict, is because they have no way of knowing how long things take. So when you have a time box calendar, you say, "Okay, I'm going to work on this task for 1 hour, 30 minutes, 15 minutes, doesn't matter." And I'm going to do nothing but. Now you have a feedback loop. Now you can say, "Okay, well, I need to make this slide presentation, and it's going to be 30 slides long, and I did about three slides. That means I need a total of 10 time boxes to to finish the entire presentation." You can start being a better estimator of how long things take. As opposed to someone who uses a to-do list, say, "Okay, I'm going to, I'm going to finish that task today." Here I go. I'm going to get started for five minutes. They work on it and they say, "Oh, you know what? Uh, let me get a cup of coffee real quick." And, "Oh, Janice is at the water cooler." And, "Oh, you know what? I need to do this other thing." And, "Wait, what was I working on again?" So this is why time boxing eats to-do lists for breakfast. It's a much, much better technique because it allows you to understand, for the first time, what is traction. Anything that's actually in your calendar, and everything else is a distraction. Yeah, man, I completely agree. Um, I discovered time boxing, I think, sometime into my first year of med school, and immediately I realized, "Oh, okay, this has just unlocked so much more time for me." Because now I can time box when I'm supposed to be working on that essay based on the deadlines. I can time box all of my social events. I can time box lunch breaks. I can time box breakfast. I was rowing for that first year, so I could time box waking up at 4:00 AM and going through a rowing session in the freezing cold. But it, it helped me figure out what I wanted to do with my time, but also where the free time was. Yes. So I could be like, "Oh, got 3 hours tomorrow evening free. I wonder what I want to do with that time." "Oh, there's this long list of clubs I've been thinking of joining. Let me go try Taekwondo for like an evening or something like that." I became immediately way more intentional when I started running my life by my calendar. And this is what people forget. They think, "Oh, time boxing has to be just about the boring stuff, just about the productive, you know, the work and the, you know, the 'I have to be an automaton.'" You can schedule fun, right? I want you to schedule fun, right? If you like playing video games, you want to hang out with your friends, you, whatever it is you like to do, put that time in your schedule. In fact, uh, in the book, I talk about these three life domains of you. You have to schedule time to take care of yourself. If you can't take care of yourself, you can't take care of other people. Can't make the world a better place. You've got to schedule time for, for rest, for exercise, whatever it is that's important to take care of yourself, including video games, including Netflix, including all the stuff that you want to do for yourself to become the person you want to become. But the second domain is your relationships. That part of the reason we have a loneliness epidemic in the industrialized world is that we no longer have those pre-scheduled interactions with our friends, with our community, right? But as society became more secular, many people don't go to church or the Kiwanis Club or those, those interactions. And this is why more and more people are lonely today. And loneliness isn't just sad, it's, it's unhealthy. We know that it's as dangerous statistically as smoking and obesity. So we've got to schedule this time, whether it's our significant others, our family, our friends. That time has to be in our schedule to, to connect with other people. So that's the relationship domain. And then finally, the last life domain is the work domain. So most people go throughout their day doing what's called reactive work, reacting to notifications, reacting to emails, reacting to taps on the shoulder from their boss. That's reactive work. It's part of everyone's job. We have to have that time. The problem is that people get habituated to this reactive work. Why? Because you don't have to think. You don't have to ask yourself, "What should I be doing?" "I'll do whatever my email inbox tells me to do." "I'll do whatever, you know, the, whatever the local crisis." That's what I'll do, right? "I'll do whatever is easy." That's what I'll do. As opposed to when you do what's called reflective work, as opposed to reactive work. Reflective work is the kind of work that can only be done without distraction. So planning, strategizing, thinking, for God's sakes, can only be done without distraction. So if you're not planning that time in your day, if you're not keeping some time in your calendar for reflective work, I promise you, you're going to run real fast in the wrong direction. Mmm. Nice. Yeah, one, uh, one way I think about this is where I kind of think of tasks as falling, uh, into two categories: either it is a focus task, or it is an admin task. And I, like, I have to categorize it when one of the two. A focus task is like the goal for me is to just sit down, focus on just one thing, and just do it, ideally for as long as I can without being distracted, as long as it takes to get the thing done. An admin task is, uh, where I, where the goal is to just finish it as soon as possible because it's this random thing that has. And so I will schedule when I have enough admin tasks that pile up, I'll schedule a half-an-hour block that I call an "admin party" in my calendar to just sort of play a game with myself where the goal is to put, put on some music, maybe go to the local coffee shop, and just bang out, like, all of these different admin tasks. Yeah. And the way I think of it is that admin tasks, it's sort of like if you're, if you're a boat, the random reactive [ __ ] you have to do is like water piling onto the boat. And your admin is sort of like pinging it out. It's not actually helping you move forward. The focus tasks are helping you row the boat forward, going in a direction that you want. But like, you got to make some time to get rid of the admin because otherwise it's going to cause you to sink. You haven't paid your taxes, or haven't your bills, or whatever. So this actually, what you've done, is a fantastic demonstration of, uh, what Ian Bogost calls making things fun. Now, what's interesting about, he, he talks about play. Anything he has a wonderful book called "Play Anything." And what's so interesting about the, about his technique is that he talks about how the conventional advice of, of how do you do the things you don't want to do? Just to back up everything we're talking about now is about the things you don't want to do, right? People talk about flow as a solution to our productivity problems. "Just get into flow." Well, how do I get into flow doing my taxes? That's no fun, right? Like, you'll never get into flow with taxes. Flow is about, you know, Csikszentmihalyi when he wrote flow, it's about athletes playing basketball and painters painting. It's fun things. It's the things you want to do. The, the part that people have trouble with are the things that are not fun to do. So, so how do you, how do you get those things done? So, uh, Ian Bogost talks about how you can add fun to a task. And that fun doesn't have to be enjoyable. It's kind of counterintuitive. You don't have to enjoy play. Why? Because play can be a tool to focus our attention long enough to help us complete the task. So how do you do that? How do you make something into play? You do two things: you add constraints, which is exactly what you did. You said, "Okay, I got a bunch of things. I want to see how many I can do in this hour at this coffee shop without distraction." Right? "How many can I bang out?" That's a constraint, right? The time constraint. And the other is to add, add variability, to look for the, uh, the, the, the uncertainty in that situation and kind of peel back the onion and find what's interesting about it. So when I write, the only thing that drives me is that curiosity, right? What might I find? What's the answer to this problem? So if you can find what's interesting about that task, you can learn to play it. And again, it doesn't have to be enjoyable. It just has to hold your attention long enough to get the task done. Nice. You talk about building a schedule around your values. What do you mean by that? So values. What are values? I define values as attributes of the person you want to become. So the way you do that is that you turn your values into time. If you want to know what someone's values are, you don't look at what they say. You don't. What you do is you look at two things: you look at their calendar and you look at their pocketbook, right? You look at how they spend their money and how they spend their time. That's someone's values. So what you want to do is to turn your values into time by asking yourself, "How would the person I want to become spend their time?" And that's where those three life domains come in handy, right? How would the person you want to become spend their time taking care of themselves, taking care of their relationships, and taking care of their work? And so what that's going to invariably do is it's going to force you to make tradeoffs. Because unlike a to-do list that has no constraints, right? You can always add more to a to-do list. By the way, I'm not against taking things out of your brain and putting on a piece of paper. That's a great idea. But most people end there. So they've got a million things on their on their to-do list and they never accomplish half of them. And then they get home from work every day and they say, "Oh man, I, I was, I was so busy today. I did so much." But look at all these things I still haven't done. And so what does that do to your psyche? If day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, you have this list of things that you said you were going to do and you didn't do, loser. So you start this script in your head of, "Oh, I must not be good at time management." Or, "It's because I'm a Sagittarius." Or, "Maybe I have some kind of disorder." It's not that you're broken. It's that this stupid time management technique doesn't work. So what we have to do instead is to turn our values into time by asking ourselves, "With the limited time we have, how would the person I want to become spend their time?" So you're always going to have more things that you want to do in that day than you have time for. And that forces you to make the tradeoffs to say, "Well, well, how bad do I want to watch sports on TV versus being with my kids?" "How much do I want to spend an extra hour of work versus going to the gym?" You have to make those tradeoffs. But that's the only way to live a life without regret. Because if you don't do that, if you don't decide how you're going to spend your time, somebody's going to decide for you: your boss, your kids, the media, distraction is going to take you off track unless you decide in advance what tradeoffs you're going to make based on your values. Nice. What apps do you use to help build this schedule or like the to-do list? Do you have like a special stack or what's, what's your take on the apps? Yeah, a very, very special stack. It's, uh, Google Calendar. Any calendar. Look, the best, and I get this question a lot, like, "What's the secret app? What's the secret solution?" The best solution is the one you use, right? This is what I call talking protein. So you ever go to the gym and you see those two guys, typically guys, and they're in the corner, uh, they're not in particularly good shape, and instead of exercise, they're talking about, "Bro, should we use the whey protein isolate? We use the soy protein?" Or, you know, they're arguing about details, right? What really matters is to do the exercise. Work out if you want to get in shape. Protein, what kind of protein you use? That's details. So what kind of tool you use is not as, as important, right? Uh, tactics are what we do. Strategies, why we do it. So it's much more important that you understand traction, distraction, internal triggers, external triggers, the indistractable model. That picture. If you can engrave that in your brain to understand, "Hey, if I'm not doing what I say I'm going to do, why?" Right? Which one of these four steps is missing? Did is there an internal trigger? Uh, is it a planning problem? Is it that hacking back external triggers? Or is it, uh, having a pack in place? Using those four tactics, anyone can become indistractable. Nice. Um, to what extent do you recommend, uh, I should have 24/7 time-boxed? Yeah, I think that's a great idea. Yeah, I mean, that's what I do. I'm just wondering like, I think it's a great idea. I mean, I, I think it helps you enjoy every moment more. Yeah, it's like, I've got my wake-up time time-boxed, my sleep time. It's like, walking, walk at the park first thing in the morning, do the podcast. Everything. Me too. And, and by the way, it's, it's, you can absolutely change it. You just can't change it in the day. I think people sometimes resist making a time box counter, say, "Oh, it's too rigid." And, "What if I can't follow it?" That's fine. Because they, they have this mentality that we have to be like drill sergeants. But that's not the right mindset. The right mindset is not being a drill sergeant, it's being a scientist. What's the job of a scientist? A scientist makes a hypothesis, runs an experiment, and then looks at the results, and then runs new experiments based on those results. So what I, what I've done, I change my calendar constantly. I just don't change it in the day. So I can change tomorrow's schedule. That's fine. If I say, "Oh, I'm going to meet my friend Ali," or "I'm going to do this task or that task." That's fine. There's no problem with that. But once that calendar is set, once I know what I, I plan to do, that's it. Now I have to leave it alone. So that the, the tools I use, I use Google Calendar, uh, that's, you know, but you can use a spreadsheet, you can use a piece of paper, whatever works for you to make, make a time box calendar. Uh, there's a schedule planner on my site that, that people ask this so much that I, I created one that they can download. Uh, I'll tell you some other tools that I really like, uh, for what, what's called multi-channel multitasking. Because there, there's a myth that we can't multitask, and that's not true. We absolutely can multitask if we do it correctly. That, you know, it's kind of a productivity device. Don't try and multitask. If you do it correctly, you absolutely can. How do you multitask? You do what I call multi-channel multitasking. So it is true that you can't multitask on the same input channel. You can't do two math problems at the same time. You can't watch two, uh, television shows at the same time. You can't listen to two podcasts at the same time. It's impossible. Your brain will have to switch attention between the two. But what you can do is you can mix the channels. So, for example, uh, when I'm in the gym, the reward for going to the gym is that I get to listen to podcasts. Or in my case, I use an app called Pocket that reads articles to me. They have this wonderful text-to-speech service. I'm not affiliated with them. Wonderful way to, to, you know, kill two birds with one stone. I'm not reading articles online. I have a very strict rule: I never, ever read articles on my desktop. I only read them through this Pocket app, and it reads it to me so that I can do something else healthy, like taking a walk or exercise. Yeah. So it's like doing a walking meeting. Absolutely. A phone call with Ang, my general manager, while walking around the park. And it's like multi-channel multitasking. Um, but if I was trying to have two meetings at once, that's, that's right. That's right. A bit tricky. Um, what is schedule synchronization? Okay, so this is a fantastic technique. It's one of my favorite techniques. A schedule sync solves this problem that I hear all the time, which is, "Okay, I'm indistractable. I read the book. I'm doing the techniques. I'm indistractable. But my boss is not. What do I do now?" Right? "My boss is constantly pinging and digging me, asking me for all kinds of stuff. What do I do then? How do I, how do I let them know I need my time to do my work?" So this, this process of, of schedule syncing helps you with that. And it helps you avoid the worst piece of personal productivity advice that we hear all the time. It drives me crazy. The worst piece of personal productivity advice is, "If you want to be more productive, you have to learn how to say no." How many times have we heard that? That is the worst piece of productivity. You're going to tell your boss, the guy who pays your bills, you're going to tell that person no? You're going to get fired. That's terrible advice. You don't tell them no. Instead, what you tell them is, "Let's look at the schedule, right?" Let's, you don't, not in this way. Let me tell you how you do it. You sit down with them and you say, "Look, can I have 15 minutes with you Monday morning, whenever time, 15 minutes? I want to show you something." And what you do is you take, you print out your time-boxed calendar. Part of the beauty of a time-boxed calendar is that now you have a physical manifestation of how you spend your time. You print that out, you show them your time-boxed calendar. "Okay, boss, here's how I'm going to spend my working hours. Here's this meeting you asked me to attend. Here's what I'm going to spend time doing email. Here's time when I'm going to work on that big project you asked me to do." And then you say, "Okay, boss, here's this other list of things you asked me to do. Okay, okay, here's all the things you asked me to do that I'm having trouble fitting into my schedule." And now you're asking your boss to do their most important job. Your boss's most important job is to help you prioritize. That is the most important job of a manager, right? So you're not saying no, you're saying, "Please help me prioritize. What on this list is more important than what I currently scheduled?" And your boss will kiss the ground you walk on. 100% right. Yeah, I'm just like, right, everybody's fresh, right? We're all wondering, "What are you doing all day? How are you spending your time?" And we don't want to ask you what your schedule is because we don't want you to think like we're, we're micromanaging you. So if you proactively do this, if you manage up, if you manage your manager by doing the schedule sync every time, they're going to say, "You know what? That meeting, that's actually not that important. But this task over here, that's super important. Can we swap that out?" So by having that transparency, by doing this weekly schedule sync, it's, it's incredible. It solves so many problems. By the way, it also works really well in the home. So, uh, my wife and I have been married now for 23 years, and we used to have these terrible fights, uh, a few years ago before I wrote "Indistractable," around how I wasn't pulling my weight. And by the way, this is something statistically is very common. This is going to be no surprise to any married woman, but it turns out that women, even in 2024, take on a disproportionate share of household responsibilities. Okay? Even in marriages where both people work outside the home, that's still the case. And that was certainly the case in my household. I didn't realize it, but my wife would tell me, "Hey, you know, chores need to get done, right? You got to feed our daughter, we got to take out the trash, we got to, we got to do all this stuff. Like, you need to help out more." To which I would say, "Honey, if you need me to do something, just ask. What's the problem? If you need it, you know, don't get all upset, right? Don't get emotional. Just tell me what you need." And I didn't realize that what I was asking her to do was yet another job. Now she had to be my camp counselor, right? Telling me to clean up. So now what we do, we never have these fights anymore. This has been such a game-changer for our marriage. Now, every week, Sunday nights, 8:00 PM, it's in our calendar. We have a schedule sync. We sit down together. She brings out her time-boxed calendar. I bring out my time-boxed calendar. Takes us maybe 10 minutes. And now we know, okay, who has to do what when? Okay, my daughter needs to be taken here then, and we need to make sure that dinner is made by this time. 10 minutes. Now we're in sync. And now, exactly. I can live out my values of being in an equitable marriage because we know where the responsibilities lie. I know what I need to do. She knows what she needs to do. Nice. Um, what other productivity techniques have helped you in your marriage? In my marriage, per, um, so I, I talk, okay, this is kind of personal, but, uh, you asked, so let's talk about our sex life. Why not? Um, so we found a few years ago, again, been married for, married for 23 years now, and, uh, a few years ago, we found that our sex life was really suffering. And the reason it was suffering was not for a lack of, of not loving each other or lack of intimacy. It was that every night we were going to bed later and later, and we were just exhausted. And part of that was that every night I would go to bed, and I was caressing my iPhone, and she was fondling her iPad. And we weren't being intimate. Yeah. And so it wasn't until I started writing "Indistractable" that I decided to take on this challenge. And one of the best things we did was that I went to the hardware store and I bought us this outlet timer. And this outlet timer will turn on or off anything you plug into it at a set time of day or night. So in my household, till this very day, every night at 10:00 PM, our internet router shuts off. So, we probably don't even need it anymore because we've been doing it for so long. But what that means is that everybody knows, no internet past 10:00 PM. My daughter knows that, my wife knows that, I certainly know that. So as opposed to, uh, checking email to the wee hours, or scrolling social media, or watching YouTube videos, or whatever. Hey, got to wrap everything up because 10:00 PM, the internet's going to shut off. And so that, that, that's called an effort pact. Now, it's called an effort pact because it takes a bit of effort. It puts some friction in between you and the distraction. Now, could I still get on the internet? Of course I could. I could use my cell phone. I could unplug the internet and then, you know, take out this timer and replug it in. But that takes work. That takes effort. It, it proposes this minute of mindfulness when I say, "Wait a minute, do I really need to stay online here, or is it time to go to bed and maybe be intimate with my wife?" Love that. That's, that's great. Um, one of the things that people often say in response to the whole, like, time box everything is that, "But, but doesn't that take the joy out of life? Doesn't it remove any, uh, spontaneity?" Yeah. Well, the beauty of it is, I've heard this one before. The beauty is that you can plan spontaneity. That's literally what I do. So, uh, every Saturday, I have time with my daughter, and we have this big swath of time. We have a three-hour chunk of time where it's literally called "Planned Spontaneity." Why? I don't know what we're going to do. Maybe we're going to go surfing. Maybe we're going to go get some ice cream. Maybe we're going to take a walk. I don't know what we're going to do. But I know what I will not be doing. I will not be checking social media. I will not be responding to work emails because that time has been apportioned for someone I love very much, and I want to be fully present. So you can still be spontaneous, right? You can still plan that time. But by booking that time, you're blocking out all the things that you don't want to be doing. Nice. All right, good stuff. Let's talk about external triggers. Yeah. So external triggers, all these pings, dings, and rings, they only account for about 10% of our distractions. But there's all kinds of things we can do, uh, to prevent them. And this is where it kind of gets nuts and bolts. So of course, we can do stuff with our phone. Right? I, there's maybe one page in my book about how to make your phone indistractable. It's not very hard. You know, you just need to use some of the settings that come pre-installed with everyone's phone, uh, to do that. That's kind of the kindergarten stuff, right? Because we all know that those are external triggers. Uh, so just simply following the rule, the best rule is asking yourself, for all those notifications, which are serving you, and which are you serving? Fun. Yeah. If the notification is serving you, for example, if you get a, there's nothing wrong with external triggers. If an external trigger tells you, "Hey, it's time for that meeting. It's time to go exercise. It's time for that thing you said you were going to do that's in your calendar." Wonderful. It's serving you. But if it's an external trigger that, you get this notification while I was with my daughter, now it's not serving me. I was serving the notification. So having that rule is, is, is, is a great step. Turns out, two-thirds of people with a smartphone, two-thirds of people with a smartphone never change their notification settings. Can we honestly say that that technology is addicting us? It's hijacking our brains when we haven't taken five minutes to change the notification settings? That's kindergarten stuff. The more I think that the, the, the stuff that people don't think about are the external triggers, uh, that, that we don't give enough attention for. For example, meetings. How many stupid meetings did we not need to attend that could have just been an email? Right? Why do we have to meet synchronously? Huge waste of time. How many of those emails that we get in our inbox are a complete waste of time? Those can be external triggers that we need didn't need to receive or send. Turns out, uh, there was an article in the Harvard Business Review that found that 50% of the emails that the average white-collar worker receives, they didn't need to receive. And 50% of the emails they sent, they didn't need to send. So email can be a huge source of distraction. Our kids, we love our kids, right? Family members are great, but they can be a huge source of distraction. So we have to go through and hack back each and every one of those external triggers. And there's a, a way to conquer each one of them. How, how do you hack back your kids? Like, how do you think about that? Yeah. So how do you hack back the external trigger caused by, uh, your kids? So we love them to death. They're fantastic. We love our kids, but they can be a distraction when you're trying to focus on a task and your kid needs you. So what do you do? First thing is to make sure you schedule your time appropriately. I, I talk to a lot of people who somehow think they can do it all at the same time, right? You can do it all, you just can't do it at the same time. So if your primary responsibility is to take care of the kids, take care of the kids. But if the primary responsibility is to work on something, work on something. So what do you do while you're working, working on something? Don't, don't try and do both. So when my daughter was only six years old, and my wife and I both work from home, when my daughter was was six years old, we sat down with her and we said, "Look, honey, uh, Mommy and Daddy need time in the day to do their work." And, uh, so we, we went to Amazon and we bought what we call in our household, the "Concentration Crown." The Concentration Crown. There's a picture of it in the book. It's this little wreath that, that my wife puts on her head, and it has this little LED, it lights up. You can't miss it. And what we told our daughter, we said, "Look, when Mommy is wearing the Concentration Crown, that means you can't interrupt her unless you're bleeding, right? If you're bleeding, it's okay to interrupt. But unless you're bleeding, go figure something out." And it will never be more than 30 minutes. We promised her the time block will never be more than 30 minutes. So what we're doing is interrupting the interruption, right? Frankly, if you're on your computer, your kid doesn't know what you're doing. Are you watching a YouTube video and you can be interrupted, or are you doing a work call and you can't be interrupted? Right? So by interrupting that interruption, we're giving them that, that grace to, to give them a cue to not interrupt you, right? So if you have, if you're lucky enough to have a, a door in your room that you, in your house that you can close, so I got a little, uh, thing that I, a little label that I put on the hook for the door so that she knows, "Okay, I'm indistractable at the moment." But my wife wears the indistractable crown, the concentration crown, and it's surprisingly effective. Not only with children, but also with husbands. That when I see her, you know, I used to inter, when she's doing work, it's really effective now. When she wears a concentration crown, she says, "Okay, I can't be bothered." We all know it's time to leave her alone. Yeah. It's so, it's interesting you say that because another way of thinking about that might be that like, "Hey, you know, the kid's only going to be six years old once. There's nothing on my work that's more important than being distracted by the kid." And this is, in fact, a welcome distraction. I love for the kid to distract me. How do you, but I guess, yeah, how do you think about that versus balancing with, "I want to grind on this work task?" Well, for that time when you're with them, absolutely be 100% available. If they want you, be 100% available. But, and, and that could be your entire day. If that, if your value system, and if you have enough money in the bank to not have to work, good for you. You're in a very privileged place. Most of us, got to get some work done, yeah. Right? And so it's a reality that we need that time and space. And so as opposed to say, "Here's what happens." People don't drop everything and play with their kids. They yell at their kids, right? They say, "Honey, I'm working right now. Get out." That's, that's really unfair because they don't know. They can't see. So you have to make some kind of very clear cue. By the way, this is also very effective in the workplace. So in every copy of my book, there is a, what's called a "Screen Sign." It's this piece of card stock. You pull it out of the book, you fold it into thirds, and you put it on your computer monitor. So everybody who walks by sees this big red sign that says, "I'm indistractable at the moment. Please come back later." So by having that explicit message that says, "Hey, I need to work without distraction for a bit," not all day. You can't, you know, go in some cave like a monk and and not be. Of course, some of your day is going to be spent doing that reflective, reactive work as well. But for that time when you're, when you need to work without distraction, particularly if you're working in an open floor plan office, incredibly distracting, incredibly hard to get work done. You need some kind of external cue. And frankly, putting on headphones, nobody knows what you're doing when you're wearing headphones. Are you listening to music? Can you be interrupted? Can you not? No. We need to make it so socially acceptable. And and increasingly it has been since I published the book. Having that screen sign that says, "I can't be distracted right now" is very effective. Nice. What is temptation bundling? So temptation bundling is when we take, uh, a reward from one area of our life and we use it to incentivize us to do something in another area of our life. So this was, uh, work done by Katy Milkman. And it's what I use when I do this multi-channel multitasking. So listening to a podcast episode while I'm exercising, right? Uh, in my case, it's oftentimes it's articles that I, I have a hard rule: I never read an article on my computer. I only listen to an article when I'm doing something healthy. So that would be temptation bundling. Nice. Yeah, I really like that. Um, back when I didn't have a personal trainer, I would listen to fiction audiobooks at the gym. I would find that for me, I would get so engrossed in the audiobook, I would half-ass the workout. How, how, how do you not half-ass the workout if you're like, "A great point." I find, uh, short-form articles, yeah, you can only get so engrossed because they're max, what, five minutes? So, uh, even if I miss something, I don't miss that much because it's only one article's worth. So worst case, I'll just listen to the article again. Nice. Good idea. Um, let's talk about the three different types of pacts. Pacts. Okay. So we have price pacts, effort pacts, and identity pacts. So price pacts is when there's some kind of monetary disincentive for going off track. So if you're making a bet with someone and saying, "Okay, uh, I'm going to finish my book, and if I don't finish my book, I'm going to pay you a certain amount of money." The "Burner Burn Pack" I made with myself that I'm going to burn that $100 bill unless I decide to to do some form of exercise. That would be an an example of a price pact. An effort pact is when there's some bit of effort, some friction in between you and the distraction. So some kind of effort, something that that is, is, is, uh, makes you pause and reflect on whether that task is something you really want to go off track, or whether you want to, like, unplugging the PlayStation or something like that. Well, the, the, the timer, for example, right? Unplugging the, the outlet timer. And then an identity pact is actually the, the most powerful of the three. An identity pact is when you give yourself some kind of moniker. And this came out of some amazing work done by Nelson and all. And he found that the most effective, uh, way to increase voting, you know, in an election, was this very simple technique whereby he called participants in the study and he changed one variable. He asked them, "Are you a voter?" or "Are you planning to vote?" It's the only difference, noun versus verb form. And he found that people who were asked, "Are you a voter?" were much more likely to vote. He actually went later and looked at the voter roles to see how they voted. Well, if they voted, you didn't know how they voted, but whether they voted or not. And by simply asking, "Are you a voter?" they were much more likely to go ahead and head to the polls. So using that technique to our advantage, by actually having a moniker, by having an identity, this is why the book is called "Indistractable." Indistractable is meant to sound like indestructible. It's who you are. So when you have that, this, this identity makes you much more likely to follow through. This comes from the psychology of religion, in fact, that when someone calls themselves a member of a particular faith, they're much more likely to to act in accordance. That's very good. Um, this is going to be a very first-world.

problem, but I've been thinking a lot about like, what do I call myself on my Instagram bio? Do I go, like, "Dr. Turned YouTuber"? Do I go, "Doctor Turned Entrepreneur Plus YouTuber"? Do I put "writer" in there somewhere?

And like, two days ago, I was thinking, "Huh, you know, I want to make start, I I want to make a start on my next book." Cuz I feel like that would be kind of fun. You know what? Let me just add "writer" into my Instagram bio and on my kind of website, sort of thing. Be like, "Hey, I'm, I'm a doctor turned YouTuber, entrepreneur, and writer." It's like, "Ah, now I feel like I can really embody the identity of writer." And what does a writer do? Well, a writer writes. And now it's like I've almost given myself permission that like, "Oh, this is the thing I'm going to do with some hours of the day." Yeah. And it's, it's weird how adding that as an Instagram, Instagram bio thing has actually made me feel a lot better about like, "Oh, I can do my writing."

Absolutely. And and we we see people using it uh in a way that serves them, many times in a way that hurts them. So when someone says uh that I'm a Sagittarius and a Sagittarius has certain things that I'm bad at or I'm good at, you act in accordance with that, right? Or if you think you have some kind of diagnosis and that's incurable, and you know, there's all kinds of things that we label ourselves that many times are not pro, are not actually helpful. So if you say, "Oh, you hear this all the time, I'm bad at time management," or "I have a short attention span." Well, yeah, again, if you label yourself as that, it'll be true. Versus someone who says, "I'm indistractable." It's who I am, right? And and is it that different from someone who says, "I'm a vegetarian"? Is it so different? Not really, right? You go to lunch with someone who's a vegetarian, they order what they order, you order what you order. It's who they are. It's part of their identity. The fact that, you know, "I am a vegetarian" means that that person isn't contemplating, "Oh, should I have a bacon sandwich for breakfast?" No, it's who they are. And so they act in accordance with that. And so it should be the same when it comes to being indistractable. You know what? I'm, I'm sorry, I don't respond to notifications every 30 seconds because I'm indistractable. Or, you know what? If we're going to have lunch together, let's be both present in body and mind. Let's put our phones away. I because I'm indistractable.

That's really cool. I remember a few, a few years ago, um, there was a friend of mine who, who, who asked something. We were talking about like learning languages or something, and I just sort of threw out the phrase, "Oh, I'm not very good at languages." And then I was like, "Hold the [ __ ] up. Who says? Who? How did how did that thought come into my?" And I was like, "Oh, it's because when I was in like year eight, I got like, when the the groups were set in terms of ability, I was like in the middle group. And I was in the top group for everything else, but I was in the middle group for French." And I realized, like, 15 years later, that that had come back to give me this narrative that I'm bad at languages. I was like, "No, I'm, I'm not going to accept that. Of course I'm not. But like, if I wanted to learn a language, I'd learn a freaking language. Of course." And and it's true. You may not have been very good, but that doesn't mean you can't practice any better. Yeah. Right? And so it's the same when it comes to our focus and attention. And unfortunately, I think a a lot of people almost want the label, right? Want to think that we're somehow deficient in some way because then we don't have to try anymore. "I'm no good at languages," so then I, I don't have to learn, right? I can bow out of it. Uh, which is fine if that's if that's your value system. But if there's something that you know you are capable of and you have this self-limiting belief that's keeping you from accomplishing that goal, that's sad. It's, it's a disaster of your human potential.

We have a bunch of students in our YouTuber Academy, uh, often beginners, often slightly older, I.E. in their 40s, but slightly older, who will say, "Oh, I'm very bad at tech." And that is just a sure-fire sign that we need to work on some like emotional issues here. Because like, they're telling themselves they're bad at tech, and then they need the hand-holding from our team about like the cameras and the settings. And then they have this narrative that they're bad at tech. And like, you can't do anything on YouTube if you have the self-professed belief that you are bad at tech, right? Um, and so that's a big part of what we're trying to work on. We're doing like accountability calls, like, "No, Johnny, like, I don't think you're bad at tech. Like, you know, you managed to figure out how to do your job, you managed to figure out how to drive, you can figure out how to operate a camera. Here's some tutorial." You know, that kind of thing. Yeah.

Absolutely, absolutely. And it's, it's again, it's through practice, just like any other skill. We somehow think that, uh, we're supposed to miraculously have these skills embedded. We're supposed to know how to deal with these internal triggers. I never took a class on how to deal with my emotions. No. We never sat down and said, "Okay, how do you react to uncomfortable emotional sensations?" It's a learned skill. It's a learned behavior.

What do you feel on ADHD overdiagnosis and stuff? Yeah. Uh, so this is pretty controversial, um, and not very popular, but I think it's way, way overdiagnosed. I mean, just the fact that, you know, there's apps on here that I, that I could, um, download and basically get a diagnosis in less than 30 minutes tells you something. And everybody gets a diagnosis if you know what to say, you're, you're going to get that diagnosis. And, uh, it's not that I don't think ADHD is real. ADHD is absolutely real. There are particularly children who do suffer from it. I think it's way overdiagnosed. How can it be the case that 1% of European children have ADHD and 10% of American children? Something's going on here. Um, and part of it is that, uh, it's very, it's a very convenient diagnosis, right? If little Johnny can't sit still and, uh, he's six years old, I don't think little boys were meant to sit still for very long at six years old. And in our generation, we were just rambunctious, right? And we accepted it, and we grew out of it. Today, it's just very inconvenient for teachers and parents to to find other means. And so what do you do? You medicate. And I think not only is that very dangerous from potential side effects, uh, it's also, it, it, it casts a die of saying that to solve my problems, uh, a pill is a solution. And I think that that's potentially, uh, very dangerous. So it's not that I'm against meditation, medication. It's not that I'm against ADHD. I think though, we always need to try skills before pills. That pills should be what we do after we've tried the non-pharmaceutical interventions, right? Simple things like learning to deal with uncomfortable emotional states, planning our day, removing external triggers. This is not rocket science, right? We can all do this. And then if that stuff doesn't work, okay, now let's look at some perhaps pharmaceutical interventions. Particularly when I think it comes to adults. I mean, there's a lot of controversy around adult ADHD that it turns out that, uh, uh, particularly when it comes to, uh, thinking that it's incurable, that it's a state you'll have for the rest of your life. Well, look, if I can fix the symptoms, haven't I cured the disease, right? If you're no longer, you're a doctor, right? Like, if you're not exhibiting any symptoms, uh, it's at least in remission, you could say, right? And so wouldn't we want to try that? Wouldn't we first want to say, like, look, let's use these these techniques? And I, I, many ADHD coaches now use my book, Indistractable, in their coaching practice. The book wasn't written for people with ADHD, but it's been very helpful to those folks as well. And if they are able to reduce their medication, stop their medication altogether, and their symptoms, uh, are alleviated, well, it can be, I think, a curable disease. Yeah.

This is something I really want to look into, cuz I, I've, every single psychiatrist I've ever spoken to, and and asked this question too, says, "Oh yeah, way overblown in terms of overdiagnosis." I like, "That's interesting, but the public hates hearing that." That's, they never want to say it like on the record. You, you get, I'm sure if you, if you post this, you will get, I'm not sure it's even worth posting because you're going to get so much hate because it's not a diagnosis, it's an identity. It's an identity. People think that having ADHD is like being a particular race, uh, that it's, it's your, you're born within that. That's what I am. And I don't, for, I don't know if that's true. I'm not going to claim to know if that's true. But even if it is true, why would you believe that's an inhibiting factor? Why would you, why would you succumb to that? Because what happens is when you think, "Oh, uh, I, I, I can't focus, it's because of my ADHD." You're focusing on the ADHD rather than getting back on the task. So it's like, you know, this idea of a senior moment. Someone loses their keys and they think, "Oh my gosh, it's a senior moment." Well, it's because you're thinking about the senior moment that you're not finding your keys. So you're taking up that cognitive bandwidth to actually pay attention to the thing you, you should think through. Uh, so it's just not a helpful for most people. Uh, I think it oftentimes hurts rather than helps. Not, not that we shouldn't try and, uh, you know, if, if it is a problem, if it is something that that is is a challenge, the worst thing you can do is to say, "Oh, I probably have undiagnosed ADHD." At least go get a diagnosis to know one way or the other, rather than, you know, carrying around this belief that really may not even be true.

Nice. Um, final thing I wanted to ask you about. It's a bit more of a sort of selfish question. Um, how do you make time for writing amidst the other things that you want to do with your life? Yeah, is is something that I'm currently struggling with with like business commitments and all this stuff. It's like the videos and the podcast and the business stuff, and it's like carving out time for writing, which always feels like it is, it's, it's never urgent because it's like, "I don't need to write another book like, ever." But like, I kind of want to. It's like one of those projects that's like, "I don't know, important but not urgent in the slightest." Any, any tips?

So I think there's different seasons to writing a book. Um, and I think the best, so I have a friend in Hollywood, uh, who I went to college with, who's been in Hollywood forever. And he, uh, he, he never made his big break, he's never gotten any, you know, super famous roles. Um, and I, I asked him, you know, I told him, I was like, "You know, you've been doing this for like 20 years now. Like, at at what point do you find a different profession?" And he says, "The only reason you become an actor is because you can't do anything else." And I think that applies to book writing for most authors. It's not going to be profitable, right? It's not a good idea if you think you're going to make lots of money being an author. Uh, the same with a startup, right? If you think you're going to get rich on your startup, you're just bad at math, right? You have to do these things because you want the thing to exist. You want to birth this. So if you're going to start a company, do it because you want a certain product to exist in the world, you want to use that product. If you're going to write a book, it's because you want the answer to this question that's burning. Don't write a book because of what you know, write a book because of what you want to know. That's what, that's why I write. I mean, personally, that that's my experience. I always write books because of what I want to know. I never have the answer in advance. It's a journey. And sometimes I don't write the book because I find, uh, the answers not that interesting. But if I do publish a book, it's because I have this this brain desire. So in that early stage, only do it because you have to, right? Because it keeps gnawing at you to get the answer to this question. Um, so with Indistractable, you know, I read, I, I read everybody else's book on the topic, and it still didn't solve my problem, right? Saying, "Well, get rid of your technology, stop using email." It was not really practical. It didn't work for me. So I, I needed to to really start with with, uh, uh, bare bones on what is distraction and dive into the psychology of the problem to really fix it for myself. Um, then at some point, after you have tons and tons and tons of information, tons of research, at least again, this is all autobiographical, your mileage may vary. I had so much information, so many anecdotes, so much research, so many things. Then the stage, uh, I think is the most fun, where you're starting to connect dots, right? You see this constellation of stars, and now you're trying to figure out, are there any patterns here? So that's why both my books, there's always a central picture. Yeah.

It's really nice. Well, that, that to me is actually, that must have been very satisfying. It's very satisfying. It's also the hardest part. Like, I spend more time on that picture than the writing, because that's actually the hard part, cuz that's when you have to figure out what goes in and what goes out. Because it's really easy to write a book full of anecdotes, right? You can fill out, you can, in a week, uh, write a bunch of anecdotes around successful people and, you know, cockamamy, uh, case studies, and okay, you got a book. But to imprint an image in someone's mind, says, "When I have this problem, here's the picture." Here's traction, distraction, internal, external. That's, to me, that's what's valuable when I read a book. Um, so that's what I wanted to give my readers. So that's, that's the second stage. And then the third stage is the cranking stage, where, okay, now you, you understand the outline, you understand the the major, uh, uh, points of the book, you understand the big picture message that you want to get across. That's where I find, uh, monk mode is quite helpful. Uh, monk mode is not helpful in stage one or two. It's really helpful in stage three, where you go away for, you know, full days at a time, sometimes like, uh, wasn't it Tony Morris, uh, uh, uh, who was who the author who would like lock herself at a hotel? Maya Angelou. Maya Angelou, that's right. Maya Angelou would do that. That's that final stage, right? I think in the beginning stage, I think it's very hard, uh, to force yourself. Uh, I mean, you could do it for, you know, that in those stages, I would do, in stage one, it's more time boxing the research time, right? I need to read these studies, I need to, you know, finish that book and take notes on it. Uh, uh, that's more where you can time box. But then when you, when you just got to crank, to me, I, I like having the big chunks of time.

Okay, so this is very reassuring because I've been, I'm in stage one, and I'm still not sure what book two will be. But there's like two or three ideas that I'm sort of intrigued by, and when I am procrastinating, I'll research them and occasionally just tinker away on a notes file, and over time they're just sort of slowly getting fleshed out. And I guess I've been thinking, "Oh, I don't have my time booked for writing," but actually, at this stage, I don't really need it. I'm just sort of exploring and assembling things together, and maybe something will come of it, but I'm in no rush. In some ways, the writing, I think writing prematurely can be really demoralizing because if you start writing before you understand the big picture, you're probably going to trash that, right? I can't tell you how many words I've tossed out, probably 10 times as many words that have been tossed out versus what's been published because I thought it was going to go one way and then it was a dead end, didn't work at all. Whereas if I had just collected tons of research, tried to make a picture out of it, tried to make something that that is is novel and is helpful, then write about it, that would be, I think, order than I wish I would have told myself that two books ago. Same. I wish I would have told myself this four years ago.

Final thing is, so I've just turned 30. Thank you. And you very kindly gave me, uh, one piece of life advice, which is going to feature in a video very soon. Any other tips? Any, any other advice you would give, uh, a 30-year-old dude who is kind of doing a similar ish career than as you are and seem we have seem to have similar values? I mean, I feel like I need to take advice from you. I don't need to ask you that question.

Um, I think something that's served me as an author, and it's, it's a real privilege to be an author, right? I think I think it's such a great job, right? We get paid to learn. Um, so one thing that's always, uh, I've tried to follow is, is follow my curiosity. That whenever I don't do that, whenever I worry too much about, "Is this book going to sell?" and "What are people going to think?" and, I don't know, like all the other stuff that all the insecurities that come from writing, whereas if I just remind myself, "I want to know the answer. Follow the curiosity." And the second thing, I think a lot of people get impostor syndrome when they write, thinking, "Well, who am I to say this thing?" Um, and I, I, I, I, uh, took a class in college on jazz. And because this this teacher, Dwight Andrews, was just a legendary teacher. And I never, like, never paid attention to jazz before. What I really loved about jazz is that it's the mixing of these various genres, right? It's, it's, uh, European instruments with African syncopation, right? It's like all this this mishmash, this purely American, uh, amalgamation. And I remember thinking much later on, how, how what a wonderful metaphor that is for overcoming impostor syndrome. That yes, the topic you're writing about may have been written about before, but nobody's written about it in your way, with your background, with your experience. You're making jazz, right? You're taking maybe some stuff that's already been out there, but invariably, when it's mixed with your story and your perspective, it has to be novel. And so that helps me always when I'm like, "Well, who am I to say this?" So, well, it's, it's going to be different. It's going to be nice. It's not going to be the same.

That's cool. Thank you. And finally, uh, any fiction book recommendations? Fiction recommendations? H or books, TV shows, movies? I'm trying to, I'm trying to more intentionally use some of my time for like downtime, and I'm like, "Oh, like, what recommendations can I get from friends for like interesting media?"

Well, non-non-fiction book that I always recommend that I think deserved more attention is, uh, Rory Sutherland's book, Alchemy. Oh, I started reading that. Great book. I had him on the pod a few years ago, so I sort of skimmed through it to to do the research, but should read it properly. It's a great book. I really like that book if you're interested in marketing and, uh, uh, yeah, he's a fantastic book. Trying to think what some favorite fiction books. Um, oh, what was that book I just finished that Derek Thompson actually recommended in New York? I just finished it. Wellness. It was a pretty good book. It was okay. I, I don't know if it was a great book. It's pretty good. That was the last fiction book I read. Oh, perfect. Nice. Great. Yeah, sorry, maybe that wasn't a great recommendation. I don't read that much fiction. I most read non-fiction.

Breathe was really good. You read Breathe, uh, by James Nestor, I think so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was that was that was that was scary. I've started taping my mouth since. Does it work? Uh, yeah, I think like my Whoop sleep scores seem marginally higher when I do. Really. Uh, I mean, I don't have enough data because when I tape my mouth, I'm also going to bed at a decent hour, putting the phone away, taking the freaking magnesium supplement, because I'm like, "Take care of my sleep." So I haven't isolated the variables particularly. Yeah, but you try and do it every night to tape your mouth. Yeah. Did you snore before? Uh, yes, but also I would breathe a lot through my mouth, and so I'd wake up in the middle of the night with a very dry mouth, and then I'd be, I'd wake up and be like, "Okay, well, I might as well use the bathroom now," and it would just sort of interrupt my sleep. So, yeah, for me, it's been, it's just been more about, it's a thing that stops me from waking up at night with a dry mouth, which is kind of nice.

That, um, there's a, there's actually insomnia was something that I, I helped, uh, that the research I did for Indistractable helped me overcome. I used to have like, get up in the middle of the night and have a really tough time falling asleep. And it kind of brings up a point you brought up earlier of, what do you do when you say you're going to do something and then it doesn't go, doesn't go the way you want? So if I say I'm going to sleep, I timebox sleep, but I'm not sleeping. What do I do? And, um, I started repeating this mantra that, uh, at night, that the body gets what the body needs. The body gets what the body needs. That I should, I should postulate, if you let it, uh, so because because it turns out the number one cause of insomnia is worry about having insomnia. Y. And so this, you, I would enter this rumination loop of, "Oh, you know, if I don't get to sleep soon, then tomorrow's going to be wrecked, and I gotta go. Why am I not sleeping? I'm not sleeping." I would stay for hours. As opposed to now, whenever I can't sleep, I say to myself, "The body gets what the body needs, if you let it." So as long as I went to bed on time, and then repeated this mantra whenever I would wake up, turns out my body would relax, chill out, and I'd fall back asleep.

Fantastic. Yeah. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Yeah. Thank you. All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes Store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode that would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode. So thanks for watching. Uh, do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already, and I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.