Ep. 110 - Time Management is Pain Management: How to Be Indistractable - with Nir Eyal

Find Us Wherever You Listen To Podcasts

Nir Eyal writes, consults, and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. And Nir’s latest book ("Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life”) is an indispensable resource in our uncertain world.

Nir goes beyond just providing good time management tips — although he has quite a few of those — by helping us get to the root of why we get distracted in the first place so that we can actively shift from being distractible to being indistractable.

And the best part is that these strategies are surprisingly simple. They help you take a big problem — planning your work AND life — and break it down into manageable, solvable situations. And while you’re focusing on what you can do tomorrow, you’ll end up building habits that make everything easier in the future.

Nir’s Career Journey

Nir is a bestselling author with a diverse portfolio career, but it actually all started with choosing not to write. He studied journalism in school but was deterred from choosing that as a profession when he learned the average journalist’s salary. Instead, Nir went into management consulting, which he also wasn’t fond of, before venturing into his first startup.

He ended up co-founding and selling two tech companies. Nir earned a name for himself as ‘the habit guy’ in the tech world, even dubbed by The M.I.T. Technology Review as “The Prophet of Habit-Forming Technology.”

At that point, he was asking himself, what do I do next? And he decided to combine this expertise with his old love of writing to create “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products”

Inspiration behind “Indistractable”

The success from Nir’s first book “left me so busy that I became distracted from the thing that made me successful in the first place, which was the research and the writing. And I really missed that.”

Nir shared the moment when he realized something needed to change. He was spending the afternoon with his daughter and they were going through a book of activities together, one of which was to ask each other this question: ‘If you could have any superpower, what superpower would you want?’

Nir didn't remember his daughter’s answer because he got distracted by his phone. By the time he looked up, she had left the room.

In that moment, he realized his actions sent a very clear message to his daughter: “my phone was more important than she was.” That launched Nir on this journey to discover the root cause of distraction and write “Indistractable.”

And he believes that being Indistractable is the most important super power you can have in today’s world.

Why Don't We Do What We Say We're Going To Do?

We tend to blame our technologies for distraction, but even the Greek philosophers asked themselves why we so often struggle to do what we say we’re going to do. So while technology may be a distraction, it’s not the root cause of distraction.

Nir shares that there are three causes of every distraction: an internal trigger, an external trigger, or a planning problem.

And 90% of the time, we get distracted due to Internal triggers. Those external triggers (like your phone notification going off) only account for about 10% of our distractions.

Internal triggers could be an uncomfortable emotional state, boredom, fatigue, anxiety, stress, uncertainty. During a time of heightened stress, uncertainty, or anxiety, people look for relief, which could be in the form of taking a drink, scrolling their phone, watching TV, etc.

This is when Nir realized that time management is pain management. So if we want to master distractions — which take away from our most valuable resource, time — we need to learn how to deal with discomfort.

How to Be Indistractable

There are four strategies to becoming Indistractable:
Mastering internal triggers (the first and most important one)
Making time for traction
Hacking back external triggers
Preventing distraction with pacts

Our goal is to replace distraction with traction, or the actions that draw us towards what we want in life, so that our calendar reflects our values.

One technique that Nir shares for mastering your internal triggers is The 10-Minute Rule. It’s simple: when you feel that desire to look at your phone, or whatever the distraction is, tell yourself that you will do it after 10 minutes of focusing on what you’re supposed to be doing. The intent is to ‘surf the urge,’ eventually flexing that muscle to resist temptations toward distraction over time. It’s building that habit by starting small and building an ability to manage and push through those internal triggers.

And one technique you definitely shouldn’t use is a to-do list. The to-do list is most people’s go-to tactic for time management, but it actually has the opposite effect for most people. The problem with to-do lists is that you measure yourself by how many boxes you check off, which doesn’t actually measure how much progress you’ve made towards what you need to do.

Instead, Nir suggests time boxing. Your goal isn’t to cross something off the list — your goal is to work for a predetermined amount of time (you can start small) without distraction. And unlike a to-do list, this better helps you manage your time and forces you to intentionally choose what is most important.

Time boxing feeds into the concept of turning your values into time. It’s about thinking in advance about how you want to spend your time, Nir says, because “the difference between traction and distraction is forethought.” You can think of values as attributes of the person you want to become (not the person you are now). And your calendar should ultimately reflect that.

Nir suggests breaking your values into three life domains:

The first domain is you. Because if you can’t take care of yourself, you can’t take care of others
Second is relationships. It’s important to put time on your calendar for this and not let it happen by chance.
The third and final domain is work. This is where we often start planning our calendar, but it should be the last step because it’s the least important.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Why don’t we do what we say we’re going to do? Because we don’t plan ahead!

It really can be that simple. As Nir said, time management is pain management — and the difference between traction and distraction is planning ahead. It's deciding how you want to spend your time according to your values.

So it’s going to be difficult to manage your time if you don’t have clarity on your values or what you’re trying to do with your time. And remember to think of your values as attributes of the person you want to become.

After that, you have to make the choice to not keep getting distracted by the same things again and again. The first time it’s not your fault. But every time you don’t take a step to fix it, you’re doing it to yourself.

And I think this is what holds a lot of people back. It’s not that we can’t follow time blocking strategies and can’t build helpful habits — it’s that facing the root cause of our distractions, our own discomfort, is... well, uncomfortable. It’s a lot easier to blame our phones and Facebook than it is to really get introspective.

But once you’re willing to do that, and you might want to go back and check out the previous episode with Hooman Radfar if you want a little introspective inspiration, then I think you’ll find Nir’s solutions become easier and more powerful.

How Nir defines success

Success today is simply doing what I say I'm going to do. It’s living my day according to my values.

Best career advice

It’s all prom. Even raising millions of dollars, in the scheme of things. It doesn't really matter. Nothing's all that serious. So you can obsess over what feels like the biggest deal in the world in the moment or you can be comforted by the fact that it almost certainly isn’t.

Key Takeaways

You can't call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from.
The difference between traction and distraction is planning ahead; it's deciding how you want to spend your time according to your values.
The difference between an Indistractable person and a distractible person is that a distractible person keeps getting distracted by the same things again and again.
In every area of our life, there is no distraction that we can't overcome if we plan it right. If you wait until the last minute, they're going to get you.
There are four strategies to becoming Indistractable
- Mastering internal triggers (the first and most important one)
- Making time for traction
- Hacking back external triggers and
- Preventing distraction with pacts.
Master those internal triggers by leveraging the 10-Minute Rule, whereby only after 10 minutes of focusing on what you intended to do will you give into that distraction.
To help you create traction, shift from running your life off of a to-do list to employing the time boxing technique. By working this way without distraction, you’ll end up getting more done.
- You can leverage a hybrid model to help you make that transition. Make time in the day to address those admin tasks that you need to plow through. But for projects that require a multi-step process or more challenging work, spend as much time on it as you can.
Your calendar should reflect your values, including things such as taking care of yourself and ensuring quality friendships. This requires thinking in advance about how you want to spend your time because the difference between traction and distraction is forethought.
You can think of your values as attributes that reflect the person you want to become. You can also break them into the three life domains of you, your relationships, and your work.
Everybody's job has some elements of both reactive and reflective work. Make sure to prioritize that time for reflective work and keep it sacred. If you don't, you’re always going to be reacting.
However, be honest with the fact that the real reason we constantly might veer off of spending the time we should on an important effort is because we don't feel like doing the hard stuff.