You’ve probably heard this one before: When you change your habits, you change your life. But before we can change our habits, we need to learn how to master our attention and focus, and do the things you say you’re going to do that’ll direct us towards living the life we desire, and being the person we want to become.
This week, I am beyond thrilled to be sharing with you my chat with Nir Eyal, who’s going to make you think - and re-think - how you’re spending your time and attention every day. Are you actively choosing your life with each action you take? Why do we do things that we did not intend against our better interest? Why do we go off track? Through his work, Nir wants to make sure we don’t look back on our lives with regret for all the things we said we were going to do, but didn’t because we got “distracted”.
Nir is the author of two bestselling books, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and the critically acclaimed Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. He has taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, and his writings have been featured in The New York Times, The Harvard Business Review, Time Magazine, and Psychology Today.
We had so much to talk about that this conversation will be shared with you in two parts. In this first half, Nir redefines for us what “distraction” means: It is not what’s on the outside that is distracting us - not social media, not the children, not the laundry. What is distracting us 90% of the time is our desire to escape uncomfortable emotional states such as boredom and loneliness - also known as “internal triggers”. How do we manage them instead of letting them manage us? Do you know what you really want to do with your time? How can we turn our values into time and action with intention by the simple act of scheduling them in our calendar, whether that’s an hour for exercise and mediation, weekly date night with your spouse, or house chores? Let’s dive in.
(Stay tuned for Part Two of the conversation where we get into what it means to raise indistractable kids in today’s world.)
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
00:29 Nir's introduction
04:05 Inspiration for the book “Indistractable”
07:44 The impact of technology on attention span
09:29 What are internal triggers
10:15 Carrots and Sticks
14:30 How to manage Distraction
15:45 Traction vs Distraction
18:43 Busyness vs Productivity
23:54 Reactive Work Vs Reflective work
25:28 Being intentional yet spontaneous
29:21 Productivity tool: Timeboxing
32:04 Timeboxing for social media
34:33 Outro
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