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- [00:00]
Nir Eyal
Foreign.
- [00:06]
John Evans
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the unsensor cmo. And I've got a bit of a bonus episode for you today, because I think one of the biggest problems facing us today is the amount of distraction in our lives. Social media feeds, unnecessary meetings, huge inboxes full of emails you didn't really need. All these things are grabbing our attention and taking us away from doing what we're supposed to be doing. So I've gone and caught up with Nir Eyal, who's the author of a brilliant book called Indistractable, which is all about how we can reclaim our attention to focus our energy around the things that really matter. Now, as marketers, we can have a massive impact on our brands and our business if only we can focus our time and effort on the right things. So Nia is uncovering all the tips and tricks for how to do that and how to make sure you're more productive and less distracted. Here we go. So, Nir Eyal, welcome back to Uncensored cmo.
- [00:59]
Nir Eyal
Oh, my honor. So great to be with you.
- [01:01]
John Evans
Well, it's really great for me because as I think I was telling you before we got started, it's been a couple of years since we talked to each other, and actually, if I wind back a couple of years ago, I was in a bit of a spot where I just had an accident. I was really clear about what I wanted to achieve that year, and I really needed the help. Right. So I remember reading your book over Christmas, and it was. It was really inspiring. And. And I've tried to implement as much of that as possible. So this feels like a little of a post kind of check in and how's it all going sort of thing. So I'm really pleased we've kind of set it up again.
- [01:32]
Nir Eyal
But thank you and welcome back. I'm so glad that you healed well and that you had a great year afterwards.
- [01:37]
John Evans
Thank you. Yeah. Well, as I was saying, look at the numbers, actually, and the podcast is 11 times bigger in terms of downloads than it was when we met. And the company I work for, System 1, has had two years of record growth and profit.
- [01:52]
Nir Eyal
So what you're saying is just so everybody hears it, we had the conversation and then you 11x the podcast correlation is causation. Is that all right? It is, it is.
- [02:02]
John Evans
I think we'll back that one. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. But, you know, I think, I mean, maybe it's the point, isn't it, that, you know, it's not that we don't know what to do and there's so much information out there on the Internet, isn't there, about how to do things? I mean, AI makes it super easy to go, how do I build this thing? How do I, you know? But it's how we then apply our time, isn't it, that becomes so critical to success?
- [02:25]
Nir Eyal
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I like to say that this is the skill of the century. That because of this explosion of information, so many of the problems that we used to have in past generations, we don't have anymore. We learn. We live in this world of unbelievable abundance. It doesn't feel like that way, right, because we feel time starved. But it turns out that we feel time starved because we're busy entertaining ourselves. The average American spends five hours a day watching television. That doesn't include other screenshots. So, you know, we have so much leisure time these days that we're not running out of time, even though it feels like we're so hurried. If you actually do time studies on how people spend their waking hours, there's a lot of frivolity in there. What's different, what's happened is that because we have so much choice, we live in an age of such abundance. We have to learn a new skill set. Because the problem is no longer that we don't know what to do. As you said, the problem is that we don't know how to get out of our way. Right. We know how to lose weight. Who doesn't know how to lose weight? We know. We've heard all the tips and tricks. You eat less, you exercise. It's not that hard. It's doing it that's hard. Right. We all know how to have a great business. You have to do the fricking work, especially the hard stuff that people don't want to do. We know that. Right. The problem is that we don't know how to stop getting distracted.
- [03:33]
John Evans
Completely agree. I think one of the standout quotes actually, on my podcast last year, a guy, Alfred Samba, was saying, I don't know whether he's quoting somebody else when he said this, but he said to me, john, you need to create a system that beats your motivation. Because you can feel really motivated on one day and the next day it can be gone. But you need to create a system and an organization around you that trumps that motivation level. So, you know, which I thought was great insight.
- [03:57]
Nir Eyal
That's right. That's right. So if you were to boil down my research over the past decade, it could be simplified into a very simple mantra, which is that the antidote for impulsiveness is forethought. The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. Because if you wait till the last minute, they're gonna get you, right? If the cigarette's in your hand, you're gonna smoke it. If you sleep next to your cell phone every night, it's the first thing you're gonna reach for in the morning. If you have that piece of chocolate cake on the way to your mouth, even though you're on a diet, you're gonna eat it, right? It's too late. You've already lost. You've left it to the last minute. And if you rely on willpower for that last little, you know, ability to tell you to not do that distraction, it's too late. You will lose. Right? That's why people feel so out of control when it comes to their devices. But if you plan ahead, if you use forethought, there's no distraction you can't overcome. I don't care how the devices are designed to be habit forming, how they're designed to get you hooked. I know all their tricks. I freaking wrote the book hooked. I know everything they're doing to try and get you hooked. Their techniques are good. They're very good. They're not that good, Right? This is not. This is not addiction. It's not. We're not puppets on a string, you know? If you just plan ahead, there's no distraction you can't overcome. The problem is people don't plan ahead. They leave it to the last minute and then the surprise why they're so distracted now.
- [05:13]
John Evans
One of the things that struck me when I read your book, and it really was a surprise, is that I thought before that all the reasons I'm distracted are external. They're the meetings, the emails, the family chores, et cetera, et cetera. But actually, it's quite profound that it's more internal triggers than external triggers that actually cause our distraction. Isn't that right?
- [05:34]
Nir Eyal
That's absolutely right. In fact, we know from time studies that about 10% of the time that you check your phone, is it because of an external trigger? A ping, ding, a ring? 10%. 10% of the time. So what's the other 90%? It turns out 90% of the time that you check your phone, you're checking it because of an internal trigger. Not an external trigger, but an internal trigger. What is an internal trigger? An internal trigger is an uncomfortable emotional state that we seek to escape. Boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety, stress, these uncomfortable sensations which we look for relief from and so what we're doing is we're habituating ourselves. You know, our brains are cognitive misers. We're looking for the fastest way to get relief from that discomfort. And so that is the true source of 90% of our distractions. Even though we tend to blame our phones and social media and the news and our kids and our boss and all this stuff outside of us, that's only 10% of our distractions. 90% of the distractions begin from within. Showing us that distraction is not a character flaw. It's not a moral failing. It's probably not anything broken about your brain. You know, people love to jump to diagnoses so that they can get medication. It turns out that 99% of people, that is not the case. It's simply that we have not learned the skill set to deal with distraction. And we've never been taught how to deal with these feelings, these uncomfortable emotional state in a healthy way that leads us towards traction rather than what most people do. As soon as they experience that discomfort, they drink it away, they smoke it away, they eat it away, they click it away to try and quickly alleviate that discomfort. So it's just a skill set that we learn like any other.
- [07:07]
John Evans
And as you referenced it there, even the word distraction is distraction, isn't it? It's something that takes you away from the momentum attraction that you would otherwise have had had you focused on it. What are the tips to deal with those kind of inner internal triggers that might be distracting us? What are the most common hacks? I suppose to deal with that.
- [07:26]
Nir Eyal
So one of the most important things I can give people is not necessarily the tactics. The tactics are kind of cheap and they change based on the technology. What's more important is the strategy. Tactics are what you do. Strategy is why you do it. So it's more important that people understand the psychology of distraction. Because the fact of the matter, the reason I wrote this book was because I read everybody else's book on the topic and they offered up a bunch of silly little life hacks, you know, grayscale your phone, put your phone in the other bedroom, you know, disconnect from social media, be in a world without email, right? Like, come on, this is kindergarten stuff, really. You're gonna tell your boss, no, boss, I'm not gonna use email anymore. Thanks. Like, you're gonna get fired. That's ridiculous. So we have to have a tech positive approach to this stuff that helps us live in the real world and face the fact that the technology is not the problem. The it's just the latest tool we use to distract ourselves. And we know this because Plato, 2500 years ago, the Greek philosopher, was talking about Akrasia, the tendency to do things against our better interest. And so if people were struggling with distraction 2,500 years ago, the real source of the problem can't be our devices, because the devices didn't exist back then. Like literally every age, for all of recorded history, somebody is complaining about how distracted the world is. Like age to age to age to age. They're all complaining about the same thing. This is part of the human condition. It's very natural. So we just need to learn this skill set. So the strategies that I want to give people are basically four parts. And this is actually what took the longest in my research. It took me five years to write this book because I kept getting distracted as I was writing it. I was writing this book for me more than anyone else. So it's not that I knew the methods. I was learning the methods because I had this problem. And frankly, all the other books didn't solve it for me. So I needed to figure it out for myself. So it really boils down to these four basic strategies. So number one is to master the internal triggers. If you don't master your internal triggers, they will become your master. So none of the tips, none of the life hacks, none of the tricks, none of them will work unless you know what to do with emotion, with these emotion regulation problems that is the source of distraction. It's this discomfort that we don't know how to deal with in a healthy way that leads us towards traction rather than distraction. So when we interview high performance people, people at the top of their game in every conceivable field, whether it's sports, the arts, business, every one of them, they all have the same internal triggers. They also feel uncertain and indecisive and bored and stressed. They feel the same things the rest of us do. But they have learned tactics to use that discomfort as rocket fuel to propel them towards traction, rather than what most people do, which is try and escape it with distraction. So that's step number one. Master those internal triggers. The second strategy is to make time for traction. Because you can't call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. I'll say it again, so important. You cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. Because remember, as you said, the opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction is traction. Okay? They're opposites. Traction, distraction. Clearly they're Opposites. And they both end in the same six letter word. A, C, 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 unless you know what you are going to do with your time, and I mean down to the minute, okay? And this is the part that people do not like to hear. You have to plan your day. So unless you're a child or retired, this is just part of being a grown up these days. You have to plan your day. It's called time boxing. It's the most widely studied time management technique in history. It's very, very effective. And it just comes down to planning out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it. It's called setting an implementation intention. Thousands of peer reviewed studies, way more research on this than the leading time management techniques. To do lists. To do lists turn out to be one of the worst things you can do for your personal productivity. We can talk about why I hate to do lists so much. Time boxes are much, much better. Which requires you to sit down and ask yourself to turn your values into time. If you want to know what somebody's values really are, you don't listen to what they say. People will say all kinds of crap. You look at how they spend their money and how they spend their time. That's how you know what your values really are. How do you spend your money? How do you spend your time? So if you want to get wealthy, what do you do? You make a budget. You figure out how you spend your time, your money. And of course we do the same for our time by turning our values into time. And I show you exactly how to do that. We can go into more depth if it's interesting. The third step is to hack back the external trigger so that 10%, even though it's only 10%, still something we should think about, right? The pings, the dings, the emails, the notifications, that's kind of kindergarten stuff. I only spent about a page about on that stuff in my book. What I spend a lot more time on are the other things that we don't like to think about as distractions. Meetings, right? How many stupid meetings do we go to? That could have been an email, right? How many messages do we receive every day that we didn't need to receive? So I show you systematically how to go through each and every one of those external triggers. And then finally, the last strategy is called a pact. A pact is the last line of defense It's a pre commitment where we make some kind of promise. Either a price pact, an effort pact, an identity pact. That is the last line of defense for distraction. And so when we use these four strategies in concert, master internal triggers, make time for traction, hack back external triggers and prevent distraction with packs, anyone can become indestractible.
- [12:50]
John Evans
Amazing. Absolutely amazing. And the book gives you a brilliant framework, examples and a toolkit for that which, which I thoroughly recommend. Let's go back to turn your values into time. That was probably the one. I think if I go back two years, that had the biggest impact on me because I think I probably allowed meetings just to build up in my diary. I didn't give it much thought. And the idea that I then had to think about preparation, time travel time, actually blank time to sort of think about ideas and prep and so on. You know, you need to, you need to put a lot more, don't you, into how you plan your time. Then maybe it's not just about, I'm going to accept lots of meetings.
- [13:26]
Nir Eyal
That's, that's so true. And what's happened is that, you know, all forms of work, everybody's job bifurcates into two types of work. There's what we call reactive work and then there's reflective work. Reactive work requires you to react to things, right? Reacting to notifications, reacting to messages, reacting to taps on the shoulder from your boss. That's reactive work. It's part of everyone's day. You know, every job has some element of reactive work work. What happens though is that people get habituated to reactive work because they don't want to think. So as opposed to asking myself, wait, what should I work on? What's most important right now for my life and my career to move forward? Let me just check email. Email will tell me what to do. Let me just go to that meeting so I don't, I make sure I don't miss out on it, right? Do I really need to be in that meeting? I don't know, but I'm going to go because it's on my schedule. So I'll just go, right? So we have become psychologically lazy and people have become habituated to not having to actually think. And so that's a huge mistake because if you don't make some time in your day for that reflective work, this is where the strategic decisions get made. This is where the planning happens, this is where the creativity happens. This is where the thinking, for God's sake, happens. It has to be time scheduled to work without distraction. You cannot have creative thoughts and make creative output that your job requires if you're constantly interrupted every 30 seconds. It just doesn't work that way. The human brain can't do it. The only way we can do our best work is when we plan some time in our day to work without distractions. So whether it's 15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, it doesn't matter. Every job is different. If you're not scheduling that time for reflective work, I promise you, you're running real fast in the wrong direction. So you've got to plan that time. So that's one of these three life domains that I described, is planning time for when am I going to do reflective work and when am I going to have time for reactive work. Then you've got the life domain of you, right? That's. This is actually where I think we should start, is that when you ask people, what are your values, you know, one of the first few things they'll tell you is, oh, my health. Health is so important, right? It's. Oh, it's very important. You got to take care of your health. Well, have you scheduled time to take care of your health? Right. Is it just something you say? Right. Do you have a time to exercise if that's important for you? A bedtime. For example, you know, my daughter, a few years ago, when I told her, it's past your bedtime, you need to go to sleep, she looked up and said, daddy, do you have a bedtime? And she was right. I was being a hypocrite. Now I have a bedtime, right? So as opposed to scrolling away on my phone like I used to, now I have a bedtime. It's in my schedule. Because remember again, you can't say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from. So literally, my calendar is planned out down to the minute with how do I take care of myself? How do I take care of my relationships? That second life domain of, you know, other people. My wife and I used to be ships in the night. We would barely find time to have a relationship because we were so busy with everything else. It's terrible, right? That's a relationship killer. And so now we have date time. We have time set aside for us to be together. I have time with my best friends that we have scheduled in advance. I have time with my parents scheduled in advance when we're going to make time to connect. So that's the relationship domain, and then finally the work domain, which we talked about reactive work and reflective work. So by just planning that time ahead to say, this is how I can live out my values. And invariably this is one of the reasons, by the way, that to do lists suck. Because to do lists have no constraints, right? You can always add more things to a to do list more and more and more and more and more and more. You have this endless to do list. Unlike a time box calendar, we all have the same 24 hours in a day. So with a to do list, there's no tradeoffs, right? So you just put down everything and then you feel like crap when you haven't accomplished those things. So you get home from work after a long day, you've been running around like crazy, and here's this list of 300 things you didn't do. And so what does that do to your psyche? If day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, here's this list of things you would do you said you would do, that you didn't do. Loser. And that's where you hear people saying this stupid stuff like, oh, I'm no good at time management or I must have undiagnosed ADHD or something or another. No, you don't. You just are using a crappy method. You're not broken, the method's broken. So a much better way is to force yourself to make those trade offs. To say, well, if I'm going to spend more time in the office, that means less time with the kids. Or if I'm going to watch, you know, more Netflix, that means less time for writing the novel or whatever it is that you want to do. But at least you're being honest with yourself and saying, this is how I want to spend my time, according to my values. And if that includes social media, awesome. Do it. Social media is not the problem. It's that we do it in place of these things we rather would do. And so we look back in regret. But if you do as I do, I plan an hour every night when I go on social media. I love social media. It's great. And I have time to watch movies and I have time to do all the things that I like to do, but I decide to do them in advance, with intent rather than doing them to escape my emotional pacification.
- [18:15]
John Evans
There's something really interesting about. You talked about planning time for health and again, I've done. That's something I've learned from you and started to adopt. The other benefit with that as well is I find all my ideas come to me when I'm on the running machine or on my bike. So it's funny, you think you're like, oh, I'm using up some time. I could be doing my emails, I could be doing work. Well, not only are you getting fitter, but I tend to find the most productive bit of thinking I do is actually when I'm exercising. So there's a double benefit to it as well.
- [18:45]
Nir Eyal
This is a great example of what I call multi channel multitasking. So there's a myth that you can't multitask. Everybody's heard this, that, oh, you can't multitask, you can't multitask. That is not true. You absolutely can multitask, but you have to do it the right way. The wrong way to multitask is to try and do different things on the same sensory channel. So the human brain can't listen to a podcast in one ear and a different podcast in the. In the other ear. We can't watch two television shows at the same time. We can't do two math problems at the same time. Human brain doesn't work that way. But we absolutely can do more than one thing on different channels. So you can listen to the radio or talk to a friend while you're driving in your car or taking a walk, right? Totally fine. So having some of that reflective work time, I'm like you. I get my best ideas when I'm out on a jog. So we should do this much more. You know, we should, we should overlap these life domains. You can absolutely get more bang for your, for your buck by using different sensory channels to multi channel multitask.
- [19:43]
John Evans
Yeah, it's amazing. I get so much feedback on this podcast, but whenever someone tells me when they're listening, I can almost predict it. It's on a run, in a gym, on a commute, in a car. They are the four occasions that people listen. And they're all multitasking, aren't they? They're all exactly, as you just say, all doing other things. But podcasting is a beautiful media because you can absorb it while. While doing something else. So it works very well. We must talk about meetings. I'm sure you know that everyone listening is, oh, meetings and that kind of thing. What's your advice in terms of how to deal with meetings? Because we do have a culture of any decision, anything that happens, we have to organize a meeting and talk about it.
- [20:21]
Nir Eyal
Meeting culture is awful, and it's getting worse and worse by the day. I think in some ways I become more optimistic when it comes to the technology because what I see, you know, I Get sent every gadget and gizmo out there. And I think there's all kinds of devices now that help us do what I was hoping would happen is to fix the last generation of technology. So all kinds of apps and products that help us mindfully use our device. So I'm very optimistic on that end. What I'm not optimistic about is the way corporate culture is going, and especially this. This ridiculous meeting culture that many of us are inundated by, where what's happened is that the bar to call a meeting has gone down. It's become easier and easier to call a meeting now with Zoom, right? That it's, you know, just. Just dial in. It doesn't matter where you are in the world. I can put an appointment on your calendar. And now you're going to have to show up. It doesn't matter if you're in the office or not. Like it used to be back in the day, right before COVID Oh, we would only have a meeting if everybody was, you know, in the same physical space. Now you can be anywhere in the world and you're expected to dial in. So it's become so much easier. Meanwhile, our jobs have become intellectually more rigorous. Right. We need to think through things. And so I think what that's led to is a very lazy workplace culture where instead of people actually thinking things through on their own, they just call a meeting. Right. We see this all the time and people have forgotten. What is the purpose of a meeting? I bet you 99 people out of 100, if you ask in the workplace. Excuse me. What is the purpose of a meeting? Why exactly do we meet? They won't be able to tell you. They'll tell you. Oh, it's to brainstorm. No, no, no, no. Do you know what the right number of people in a brainstorm. There's been studies on this. What is the optimal number of people in a brainstorm? The optimal number of people in a brainstorming session is two or less. Why?
- [22:04]
John Evans
Wow.
- [22:05]
Nir Eyal
Because any more than two, you will get the loudest, the highest paid, the most dominant person, crowding out all the other ideas. We've seen this all the time, Right? So the optimal number of people in a brainstorming session is two or less. Okay. The purpose of meeting is not to brainstorm. It's to disseminate information. Incorrect. The purpose of meeting is to not disseminate information. Disseminating information can be done asynchronously. That's what email is for. There's lots of ways to disseminate information that are much, much better than having a meeting to all sit around and, you know, disseminate information that could have been sent asynchronously. The purpose of the meeting is to socialize. No, the purpose of a meeting is not to socialize. That's a social gathering, Right? That's to get together, crack some beers and have a discussion. That's not for meeting. That's not a business meeting. That's a social gathering. The purpose of a meeting is for one thing and one thing only. The purpose of a business meeting is to gain consensus. That is the point, okay? Everything else is a social engagement or a brainstorming session. Those are other things. The purpose of business meeting is to gain consensus. And so just getting people together. Let's just talk out an idea. Let me just shoot the breeze with you. That is code for I don't want to do my homework. That's what that means when someone says, let's just get together and chitchat. Let's just spar some ideas with a bunch of people. Now, getting together with one other person, sure. Now we're a brainstorming session. We can talk through an idea. That's a great idea. That's great. But calling together eight colleagues to just talk about ideas, Very intellectually lazy. So what we want to do is to increase the friction, the cost of calling a meeting, because it's become far, far, far too easy. So that the stakeholder who wants to call the meeting recognizes the cost, recognizes how expensive it is to have all these meetings on our schedule. I mean, I get calls every single week from law firms and consulting firms and agencies that tell me we are meeting all day long. That's all we do at work. And then all the real work gets done at home after work, which is terrible. That's not what people bargain for, right? So what happens? People don't go to the gym. They don't get to spend time with their family. Their lives are miserable. They bur. Because all day long they're stuck in meetings. So here's what you have to do from now on. The meeting requirement. If we are going to spend people's time, precious time, on a meeting, we have to do two things in advance. Number one is so basic, I'm almost embarrassed to say it, but it turns out that 89% of meetings in corporate America don't have an agenda. I learned this in high school student council. Okay? This is meeting 101. If there's no agenda, there's no meeting. Simple as that. If you're gonna take up our time. You can't just send a zoom link. You have to circulate an agenda. What are we going to decide in this meeting? What's the purpose? Okay, very basic. The second part is even better is that the stakeholder who's going to call the meeting needs to circulate a planning document. Okay? This is straight out of Amazon's playbook. I stole it from them. Okay, this planning document, what you're going to do is you do your homework in advance. Okay? Now when, when you circulate this planning document is up to you at Amazon as soon as you get to that meeting, okay, so you circulated the agenda. You sit down in the meeting. They literally have 15 minutes when all they do is read the planning document. This is still the best practice at Amazon today. Like they literally have a piece of paper. Everybody sits there for the first 15 meetings minutes and they read about the backstory of the problem, that then they are going to decide and build consensus around what to do next. Okay, so what that means is that the stakeholder who called the meeting did their homework. They wrote this document, they collected information. Maybe they told everybody on the team. Look, I need you to spend 30 minutes, I want you to brainstorm and then send me your feedback. Right. Asynchronously email me your thoughts. I will compile those thoughts. I will synthesize based on what I know and what I think, and I will produce a recommendation so that we can build a consensus around what we're going to do next. When you do that, you almost eliminate completely the impetus to call senseless, useless meetings. I'm telling you this. It's, it's, it's miraculous what this does for organizations.
- [26:02]
John Evans
And think of all the time you then say, because all the meetings that were going to happen don't happen, that you can spend actually getting things done.
- [26:09]
Nir Eyal
That's right. Yeah. Because you're, you're. Now you can actually do work. Yeah. As opposed to just. I mean, how many meetings have we been to where the purpose of the meeting is to call the next meeting? When are we all going to meet together?
- [26:20]
John Evans
A link to this. Actually, one of the things in your book I found very helpful is it is how you build a culture within an organization. Because I suppose what some people might be thinking is, well, I can make myself indistractable, but how do you build a culture around you that makes the organization, the company, the team you work in more effective?
- [26:38]
Nir Eyal
Yeah, fantastic, fantastic question. I hear this all the time. Look, I read the book. I'm Indistractable. My boss keeps sending me emails at 9pm like, what do I do? Okay, so there's a few things. So I did quite a bit of research, and there's a whole chapter in the book on how to build an indistractable workplace. And it turned out what I found was that there are three attributes of an indistractable workplace. The first attribute is that the company gives people psychological safety. Psychological safety is when you can talk about a problem within the company without fear of retribution. So it turns out the problem of technology overuse at work is that we can't talk about the problem of technology overuse at work. It's not the technology itself. It's that we can't talk about the problem. And so what I find is with companies who perpetually struggle with this problem of distraction, right? Like, my boss keeps interrupting me every 30 seconds. We can't get things done. We're just constantly digging out of each other's email inboxes and attending stupid meetings all day. If you can't raise your hand and say, hey, boss, I can't do my best work for you if I'm constantly distracted, right? If you can't have that conversation, that's the problem. It's that you can't talk about the problem. And what we always find is that when a company can't talk about distraction, there's all kinds of other skeletons in the closet too they can't talk about. So something to note, so that's number one, is that the company gives people psychological safety to talk about the problem. Okay, so let's say you've done that. Let's say you have the kind of company culture where people can talk about that. The second thing that they do is that they give people a forum, a designated forum to give feedback. So what I found, for example, at Slack, it was very interesting. I expected Slack to be the most distracted company on Earth because when we do surveys and we ask people, what is the distracting technology that you hate most? Number one is email. Number two is Slack or some other group messaging service. And so I went to Slack headquarters. This was before the acquisition by Salesforce. But I went to Slack headquarters and I expected, look, if this is the most distracting technology on Earth, they should be distracted all the time, because nobody uses Slack more than Slack. And that's not what I found at all. That, in fact, if you used Slack on nights and weekends, you are reprimanded. You are told, that's not what we do here. And in fact, they have this channel in the internal company Slack message boards, they have a channel called Beef tweets where you can post your beef about the company, things that you don't like that are happening at the company. Now, the job of management is not necessarily to fix every problem. You can't do that. You can have a difference of opinion. Some people say, do this, okay, that's up to a manager to decide what they want to do. But employees need to have a forum to talk about these places, these problems. They need to know that their concerns are seen. So what they did at Slack, it's very interesting, they actually would use emojis to convey that these messages had been received loud and clear. So they would use an eye emoji to let people know that that had been seen or a check mark emoji to tell people, yep, the problem is solved. So, number one, giving employees psychological safety. Number two, having a place to talk about this problem. And I also profiled Boston Consulting Group, which I used to work at, which used to be a terrible company. Now they're ranked as one of the best places in America to work for. They gave people these meetings where they could talk about gaining consensus to solve this problem of distraction. So there's many different ways you can give people a place to talk about this problem. The third and perhaps the most important attribute of an indestructible workplace is that company management exemplifies what it means to be indistractable. So at company headquarters in San Francisco, there was, maybe still is. I haven't been there in a while, but there's a picture of it in my book. This bright pink neon sign. It was about 6ft wide in the company canteen in huge pink neon letters that said work hard and go home. Not what you would expect in a hard charging Silicon Valley company. But that was part of the company ethos because the company management believed that to do their best work, people needed to work without distraction. Okay. And then go home. And that's exactly what happened. So what? It's amazing how, you know, companies will hire me to, to come in and teach their company how to be indistractable. And you know who it is who's using their phone in these meetings when they have an all hand meeting? It's amazing. Every single time. Is it the Millennial? Nope. Is it the Gen Z? Nope. You know who it is who's checking their phone? It's the boomer. Yeah, it's the big boomer boss who wants to show everybody I'm so important I need to Check emails all the time. Even in this meeting that we're going to talk about, we're going to learn how to not be constantly distracted. And of course that's the answer. That's why the company is so distractible, because management is showing people what they expect that you expect people to always be on, and that drives people crazy and leads to burnout. And so instead, company management needs to exemplify, here's what it means to be indistractable. So lead by example. By the way, that's also the exact same advice I give to parents. I hear from parents all the time who tell me, my kids so distracted they won't play, start playing Fortnite. They're always on TikTok, and meanwhile they're checking their phone in front of their kids 24 7.
- [31:35]
John Evans
That's so true. So true. I love your beef tweet idea as well, because sometimes it's just about having a forum to share these things, isn't it? And being heard is half of it. And it's then effectively it's like an internal kind of qualitative research group where you're getting kind of live feedback on how people are feeling and what's stopping them being being successful. That's brilliant.
- [31:56]
Nir Eyal
Yeah, absolutely. And again, it's those companies that can't talk about this problem, that can't talk about all kinds of other problems. Right. How they're not serving their customers as well as they could be about HR management issues that aren't being discussed and then end up exploding on the company with all kinds of lawsuits and bad stuff. You have to have this open communication forum by giving people a chance to talk about where there are rooms for improvement. Because if we can't talk about the problem, we can't fix it.
- [32:20]
John Evans
Totally, totally agree. I thought it'd be a little bit of fun, actually. I picked out my five favorite tweets of yours from last year as well. Just. Just to kind of pick up on some other. Other themes which I think could be useful. The first one actually is quite recent one is imposter syndrome, which I thought was fascinating. The feeling that you're not good enough. And I know it's something I've. I've. I've struggled with and people. I think it's one of those things that more people suffer from it than. Than you might realize. What's the difference between the doubts that we have in our minds versus the evidence for what we can actually do?
- [32:51]
Nir Eyal
Yeah, it turns out that imposter syndrome is one of these fear Based motivation. For many people, it becomes almost an excuse based on our beliefs of our self image. And so that's why it's so important. And I talk about this quite a bit in indistractable, to be very careful about our self image, that in one respect, we hear a lot about our capabilities from outsiders. And, you know, when we hear about how, for example, we're just talking about how there's this perception that technology is addictive, that there's nothing we can do about it, that it's taking over our lives. And so this teaches us this sense of learned helplessness, that there's nothing we can do. Right. The word addiction comes from addictio in the Latin, which means slave, right? So we're enslaved by this technology. So we, we kind of adopt that mentality. And you hear people kind of diagnosing themselves, oh, I must have undiagnosed ADHD or I'm this or I'm that. We adopt these monikers, and that can really hurt us as opposed to when we pick our monikers. So there's this thing that I call an identity pact, which comes out of the research around the psychology of religion, that when someone calls themselves a particular faith, for example, they're more likely to abide by those tenets. Or, for example, when someone says, I'm a vegan, right? When they call themselves a vegan, then they don't wake up in the morning and struggle with saying, oh, am I going to have a bacon sandwich for breakfast? No, their identity, their moniker is that they are Vegan is who they are. So you have to choose your identity very carefully, which is why the book is called Indestructible. It's meant to sound like Indestructible. So if you're listening to this podcast for as long as you have, you can proudly call yourself Indistractable. You don't have to read the book. You can say, hey, that's who I am. That's my identity. Is it any different from someone who doesn't eat a ham sandwich or someone who wears religious garb? No, this is who I am. I'm sorry, I don't check my phone every 30 seconds. Or, hey, if we're going to have lunch together, I'm going to put away my phone and it'd be great if you could, too, so we could be fully present with each other so we can choose our identity. And so when it comes to imposter syndrome, we have to be very, very careful to choose the right identity that serves us rather than hurts us.
- [34:53]
John Evans
And even in another tweet you said as well, even in how we perceive the quality of our sleep. Well, that blew my mind that it wasn't actually the actual quality of sleep, it was our perception of quality of sleep that was more predictive.
- [35:06]
Nir Eyal
This one changed my life because I used to have super bad insomnia. I would toss and turn for what felt like hours. I would wake up at 3am and not be able to fall back asleep. And so I started doing some research on the source of these problems. And you know what the most common. Well, you read the tweet in the article, so you might know. Maybe I shouldn't ask you. Sorry for the rhetorical question, but it turns out that the number one cause of insomnia, the number one cause is worrying about insomnia. Yeah, that is literally the number one cause. It's not a broken brain. Even though the pharmaceutical industry would love to sell you all kinds of pills, which we know have all kinds of side effects, the number one cause is worrying about this problem. So what I learned was that there's this method that I adopted that really changed my life. So a few things. One is that I got myself the best sleeping aid I have ever seen. I've ever found. Much better than sleeping pills because I tried those two. What works way better is a Kindle. Okay, get yourself some kind of E reader. I like the Kindle. You can use whatever you want. Some kind of E reader. And now all the modern ones, they don't have, they used to be fear of blue light, right? That doesn't happen anymore. All the new E readers don't emit blue light. So you don't have to worry about that. What it does, the reason this works, it breaks up this conversation, this script that's in your head. Because here's what happens when you have trouble sleeping. What are you thinking about? You're sitting in bed and you're thinking, oh my gosh, if I don't get to bed soon, if I don't sleep soon, my entire day tomorrow is going to be wrecked and I'm not going to be able to perform. And then I'm going, I'm gonna have to go to bed early maybe can I take a nap? Or what's gonna happen? I'm gonna script that presentation and you start ruminating and ruminating. So what happens is just the practice of reading. And I always have a semi boring book. Don't get. Don't get like horror or like a book you really enjoy. Get like a semi boring book. So for me, it's like historical nonfiction like that that tends to put me to sleep really quickly. And it's amazing. Just, it breaks up that script long enough for you to slowly fade out. And then after I put the Kindle down, I repeat a simple mantra. The mantra is, the body gets what the body needs if you let it. I just repeat that to myself. The body gets what the body needs if you let it. Reminding myself that, you know, what, if I don't fall asleep, no big deal, right? The body gets what the body needs. Sometimes the body doesn't need that much sleep. Like if I got a really good night's sleep the last night, all right, maybe my sleep won't be that great tonight, but tomorrow night I'll probably rebound and have fine sleep. So the body gets what the body needs if you let it. Now what most people do, this is what really gets people. They go to sleep too late because they're doom scrolling till 1am and then they wake up at 3am and now they're freaking out, right? So the best thing you can do to get more sleep is to have a freaking bedtime, right? So now my bedtime is 10pm, I'm in bed and now, okay, by having that bedtime, if I wake up one time here, one time there, it's no big deal. And by repeating that mantra of the body gets what the body needs if you let it. Guess what happened? I started relaxing. I stopped that anxiety script, that rumination in my head and I started falling asleep.
- [38:04]
John Evans
I love that. That's so good. It shows the power of mindset, doesn't it, how much that, you know, you control your mind. Links to one of the other tweets actually I loved from you last year, which is luck isn't chance, it's a choice. Which I think a lot of people kind of look around and go, oh, they just got lucky. I wish I was lucky as him or her. And they don't realize that they're more in control of their luck than perhaps they realize.
- [38:29]
Nir Eyal
So, so true that, that that luck is a belief set. It really is a belief set that it turns out that people who are more optimistic are more lucky. Right? It's statistically so. And people who have a. What's called an internal locus of control versus an external locus of control. A person with an external locus of control thinks, thinks that things happen to them. A person with internal locus of control thinks that they have more agency, they can affect outcomes. What's interesting about this research around locus of control is that it Turns out that people, even for people who don't have that much agency, people who are from, you know, an upbringing where they didn't have many resources, maybe they grew up in a war torn country, maybe they were discriminated against, maybe they were abused. Whatever the circumstances, even the people who did have bona fide things, they can't change. And we hear this all the time, kind of this, you know, people who are true victims, even they, when they have an internal locus of control, do better. So even if you are in the shit, if you believe you can do something to get yourself out of that situation, you do better. In every conceivable metric. People with an internal locus of control, they are wealthier, they give back to their community more, they have longer relationships, they have more friendships. Everything good happens to people with internal, internal locus of control. And this is very much related to opportunity and luck. They make their own luck. They believe they have agency. So they see things. They literally see things that pessimistic people or people that have an external locus of control just don't see.
- [40:00]
John Evans
Oh, that's brilliant. And that's very much the sort of. We sit on social media a lot with so many, so much bad news that people start to believe they're a victim of things going on around them and they take on all that negative thought, don't they? Rather than realizing that actually you've got a lot more control over your outcomes than you realize.
- [40:19]
Nir Eyal
So true. I mean, this is my big beef with the media. I heard, I can't remember who said it the other day that I thought it was really smart, but they said the media doesn't necessarily lean left or lean right, it leans down. The first rule of journalism, if it bleeds, it leads. And we forget what a business it is. You know, we think that the media, somebody's sitting there in, you know, at the New York Times or the BBC or whatever and is thinking, what's the most important piece of information that the viewers and readers should know today? That is not true. That is not true. They will show you whatever they think you're going to watch, right? And so what do they show you? Bad news. Because that's what we want to see. That's what gets people riled up. That's what gets people tuned in, is fear. Fear sells. You know, the good things that happen in the world happen very slowly. They're not as dramatic. We don't talk about all the people who, who didn't crash today on, on airplanes or who were pulled out of poverty, but it turns out year after year after year, the world keeps getting better and better. There's a wonderful book by Hans Ronsling called Factfulness that I just love. I think every human being should read this book. Where the premise of the book was he gave PhDs, he gave professors a test on the state of the world. And it just had some basic questions, true fault type questions of how the world is doing. Okay, how is the world doing in terms of education, how is it doing in terms of female empowerment, how is it during doing in terms of the expansion of democracy, the environment, all these metrics of how is the world doing? And it turns out that these college PhD professors did worse than chance. They literally did worse than monkeys who would have taken this test because they had, you know, the most educated people, had the most bias towards negativity. And so we have to be very, very careful because it completely skews our view of the world.
- [42:12]
John Evans
In fact, you see that in marketing a lot, actually. Marketers are very, very bad judges of marketing because you've got so much the theory or so close to your own strategy or whatever, and you're overexposed. You don't think like the average person walking down the high street.
- [42:28]
Nir Eyal
That's interesting. Yeah. Have you seen that a lot where they don't have their finger on the pulse of who they're serving or what do you think's the core?
- [42:36]
John Evans
You know, whenever I'm sort of writing up, you know, I don't know the top 10 things every marketer should think about, I always start with the very, very same point, which is you are not the customer because the average, the average person probably buys the average product once or twice a year. And they mostly are thinking about other brands than your brand. You know, they got busy lives, they're getting on with things, but you as the marketer are thinking about your brand all the time. And so what you think they care about is often very different to what they actually care about. So is partly why, you know, in my day job at System One, we actually measure the emotional reaction that people have to advertising and product and the brand in general. And we do it really to remind people that this is actually what your customer knows about your brand or feels about the brand versus what you think. I mean, a classic one is if you, for example, if you're talking to the brand manager of Fairy Liquid, and then you might, you might say to people, how often do you think people buy that in a year? Right? And most people think, well, I go shopping once a week, so maybe I'll buy it once a month. And the actual answer is once every two years.
- [43:41]
Nir Eyal
Two years.
- [43:41]
John Evans
Yeah, it'll be something like that. Yeah. And we've done this time and time again. But the frequency that people buy a particular product on average now obviously you get some, you know, is a much, much, much less than actually people think. So it's a great one. But, you know, our ability as experts to predict behavior in our audience, back to your point. Is probably no better than a monkey throwing a dart. You know, a dart board to hit the bullseye. You know, just rounding up a few more of the couple more of the tweets that really stood out is I loved your one about why successful people get more successful as well. What are the habits of successful people that make them successful and make them continue to be successful that, you know, everyone listening could learn from?
- [44:24]
Nir Eyal
So I think the, the, the biggest one we talked about a little bit already with locus of control, I think that's an attribute of successful people across the board, that people who are, who succeed better than others are people who have high agency. Right. They're very agentic people. They believe that they could do something. And so that actually, I think is, is really highlighted actually from whether you like their politics or not. You know, this, the duo of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, I think, really exemplify this. Again, I'm not talking about their, their politics. That's a whole nother question. But here are two people who will reality into being. They have what Walter Isaacson said of Steve Jobs. They have this reality distortion field that the fact that Donald Trump says he's the best, thinks he's the best, think everybody's talking about how he's the best. It's weird. Yeah. But it's also, I think there's something to that. Right. There's even research about how when people talk about themselves in the third person, how it gives them more confidence. What they're doing is essentially every success that they have builds on this belief set that more and more of what they do works. And so you become this personality that thinks that everything I touch turns to gold. Of course there's risk to that. Right. Your ego can get ahead of what you're actually capable of doing. But I think that's probably the biggest attribute of successful people is that they believe that what they're going to do will actually work.
- [45:42]
John Evans
Yeah, yeah, that's so true. And I think then linked to that as well, the more successful you are. But you have the network effect, don't you? Where actually you get your reputations built your network, your connections. And the more well known you are, the luckier you become in effect, you know, because the network effects, you know, kicks in over and above that and gives you a bigger platform. So yeah, so so much of it again, it comes back to mentality, doesn't it? It's amazing how much of this stuff actually comes back to how we think about ourselves. Nick, I'd love to carry on because, you know, there's so much I'd love to talk about by but we run out of time. But thank you so much for talking about that and keep up the hard work because it's great and I'm a massive fan of what you're doing and I think you know, how we use our time and focus is the biggest competitive advantage we've got. So thank you.
- [46:28]
Nir Eyal
My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me here.
- [46:29]
John Evans
So, ladies and gentlemen, I hope you enjoyed listening to this one off bonus episode. We will be back to normal on Wednesday with our regular episodes coming out. If you'd like to check them out wherever you get your podcast, please do. Also hit the subscribe button to never miss an episode again. And I would love it if you give me a review. Please do give me a review wherever you find your podcast. If you want to follow me, you can find me over on LinkedIn at John Evans and also on Xensored CMO. I really appreciate you listening and watching and I look forward to you joining me next time. Thank you.