Indistractable

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth. To help you advance in your career. Today we're really delighted to be speaking with Nir Eyal. He writes and consults and teaches about the interaction of psychology, technology, and business. Something near and dear to my heart as well. He has founded two tech companies since 2003, and has taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford.

And today, we're going to be talking about Indistractable, which specifically received critical acclaim, winning the 2019 Outstanding Work of Literature. In addition to blogging at near and far.com. Nia's writing has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, TIME Magazine, and Psychology Today. He is also an active investor in habit forming technologies. Some of his past investments include  Eventbrite, Anchor.fm, which was acquired by Spotify, and something that I think is really fun and really engaging is Kahoot!

He attended the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Emory University. Nir, thank you for writing the book. So we're all starting on the same page, maybe you can define indistractable.

Nir Eyal: First of all, thank you so much for having me on the show. I appreciate it very much. So becoming indistractable is about being the kind of person who strives to do what they say they're going to do. This is the skill of the century. This is the macro skill that is going to define the modern workplace. It's going to define your career. It's going to define your life. It's going to define your kid's life. It's the ability to do whatever it is that you say you want to do with your time. And so my mission is not to tell people what to do with their time. My mission is to help people do whatever it is that they say is important to them.

So if it's to be fully present with your kids, as opposed to checking your phone like I used to do, or I would sit down at my desk and I say, I'm going to work on that big project. And yet I check email or slack channels instead. What I realize is that, you know, distraction is a much bigger problem than just overusing our devices. Distraction, I think, is this really fundamental problem that we have to address because, you know, used to be if you didn't do something, you could argue ignorance. You could say, well, I don't know how to lose weight. I don't know how to achieve my career goals. I don't know what to do next. But today that excuse is gone.

We can Google it. I mean, there's so much great advice out there that you can find on the open web. So the problem is there's no longer the information gap. That's not the problem anymore. The problem is that we don't know why we keep going off track. Once we learn these techniques for becoming indistractable, this is how we can control our attention. It's how we can choose our life.

Anita Brick: I think that is obviously critical. So many people feel so frustrated. The MBA student who submitted a question, I think maybe living in that place a little bit, she said: “With so many things competing for my attention, how do you advise others to know where to focus?”

Nir Eyal: I think this is a good place to talk about what is distraction really. Before we dive into how to manage it, in order to understand what distraction is, we have to understand what distraction is not the opposite of distraction. Most people will tell you the opposite of distraction is focus. But I don't agree with that. In fact, if you look at the origin of the word distraction, the opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite is traction. That both words come from the same Latin root triad, which means to pull, and they both end in the same six letters action that spells action. So traction is any action that pulls you towards what you want to do, things that you do with intent. The opposite of traction is distraction. Any action that pulls you away from what you plan to do with intent.

So this is really important for two reasons. Number one, anything can become a distraction. I remember I would sit down at my desk and say, okay, I'm going to work on that big project. I'm going to write that chapter in my book, I'm going to finish that presentation. I'm going, you know, do whatever it is I need to do. Here I go, I'm going to get started. Let me get to work right now here. I'm going to stop procrastinating right after I check email. Right? Yeah. And you say to yourself, well, email is kind of a work related task, right? That's kind of a productive thing to do. I need to do that anyway. Right? If you are doing something instead of the thing you said you were going to do, that by definition, is a distraction.

Those type of distractions are much more pernicious. You know, if you're playing Candy Crush at your desk at work, it's pretty clear you're slacking off, right? You're not supposed to be doing that. And that's obvious to you and everyone else. What's less obvious, and what's much more pernicious, is when distraction tricks us into doing the urgent at the expense of the important. Checking that email real quick, scrolling that slack channel, tapping a colleague on the shoulder real quick and interrupting them in the middle of their workday. These kind of things feel urgent, but they're not necessarily the most important thing we should be working on. And so that turns out to be the more important and more dangerous sources of distraction.

And just like anything can be a distraction, anything can also be traction. So I am not one of these chicken little, the sky is falling. Technology is horrible. It's melting everyone's brains. We should all stop using it. It's rubbish. The research doesn't back that up. And furthermore, it's unrealistic to tell people to just stop checking email for 30 days or stop checking Facebook or whatever. You know, for many of us, it's part of our livelihoods. We can't just stop using these technologies. So the solution is to not, you know, go into some kind of digital detox. Instead, what we want to do is to ask ourselves, how do we do these things as acts of traction? And the answer is we planned for them, that as long as you plan the time to watch Netflix or scroll Facebook or check email or whatever it is you want to do, we can turn these otherwise distractions into acts of traction by planning out when we are going to do them. So that's a big part of becoming indistractable.

Anita Brick: That really answers the first question like where to put your focus? Some of it is where are your priorities and to plan for it. What if you have a lot of different things that you feel should be your focus, and you're not really sure even where to start?

Nir Eyal: So this is where we start with our values. Values are attributes of the person you want to become. There's one thing I really want folks to remember. You can't call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. If you have lots of whitespace in your day, I don't want to hear about you complaining about distraction. If you don't plan what you want to do with your time, everything is a distraction. What we have to start doing is to decide in advance how we want to turn our values into time. We start with what I call these three life domains. At the center is you. You have to take care of yourself before you can take care of others, before you can do your best work.

So you have to start by looking at the week ahead. Many people, they come up with vision boards and five year plans and regrets of the dying. Instead, how about we just start with next week, the next seven days? Look at that calendar in the week ahead and ask yourself, are you putting in the time you want to live out your values? So let's start with the you domain. If some of your values include taking care of your physical health. Now I'm not saying it should. I'm not going to tell you what your values should be. You have to decide for yourself. But if taking care of your body is important to you, well, do you have time for exercise? Do you have a bedtime?

We tell our kids to go to bed on time, but do you follow your own bedtime? Do you have that in your calendar? Do you have time for meditation, prayer, education? Whatever it is that's important to you that helps you live out your values to the values that have to do with taking care of you. Is that time in your schedule? So that's the you domain.

Then we have the next domain, which is our relationships. This country is suffering through a loneliness epidemic. We know that loneliness is as detrimental to our health as obesity and even smoking. The reason that this loneliness epidemic is occurring. And by the way, this is not new. This is something that has been going on since the early 90s. Robert Putnam wrote his book Bowling Alone in the early 90s, and it was about the decline of these civic institutions that people used to reserve time for on their calendars: the bowling league, the key club, the church group. These things had regular time on our schedules. This is why we are suffering through this loneliness epidemic, because we do not invest in our relationships.

By putting time for them on our calendar, we say we should grab coffee sometime. How many times have you heard that you've got to put that regular time, not only for your friends, for your loved ones, for your kids, for your spouse. So my wife and I, we've been married for 18 years, and we met actually in an economics class in undergrad. And a few years ago, my wife reminded me of this before I wrote this book. She said, Nir, you have made me the residual benefactor. Residual benefactor. We learned about this term in our economics class. A residual benefactor is the chump that gets whatever's left over when a company is liquidated. So it's debt holders, equity holders. The residual benefactor gets the scraps. Whatever's left over. And she told me one day, she said, look, you've made me the residual benefactor. I get whatever time is left over in your life, and that's not fair. And she was absolutely right. And so now we fix that problem. We make time to invest in our relationship with each other. So that's the second domain, your relationship domain.

The third domain is your work domain. Now there are two types of work. We have reactive work and we have reflective work. Reflective work is the kind of work where real problems get solved. It's where we need time to concentrate, to think, to strategize, to plan. We can only do that without interruption. Study after study has found that to really do our best reflective work, we need time to focus without interruption. Now, the opposite of that is the reactive work checking the emails, responding to phone calls, going to those meetings. That's all reactive work. Every job has some balance of reactive and reflective work. The problem is most knowledge workers today, their job requires them to think. It requires them to spend time coming up with novel solutions to hard problems. And yet they work as if they work in a call center. There are 100% reactive whatever emails come through, whatever slack notification, whatever meeting someone wants to me to attend, I'm there. But when it comes to the reflective work, there's no time for it.

Anita Brick: And you’re absolutely right. No question about it. The reality, though, is what if I don't control it? One question that came in is: “I really like the early stage company where I work. That said, control does not seem to be part of the environment. What advice would you have to identify where to in air quotes to find the control, and then deliver within that area of control?”

Nir Eyal: I feel like that is a question that many people have that I talk to within the context of my role here, but much broader. If someone else is calling the shots and you decide that you like the company, but you're not sure where to find the control, enough control, to have that reflective time, where do you even start?

Let's figure out first what the problem is not okay, so let's say your boss calls you at 9 p.m. on a Friday night. Your phone rings. It's your boss, and your boss says that they want you to do something right this minute. Is it the phone that's at fault? Is it the technology or is it something else? And I would argue, clearly it's not the technology. So let's clearly blame the technology. Right. It's not like it's not email. What is it? It's a crappy company culture. There's a chapter in the book titled “The Cause of Distraction” is a corporate dysfunction is a cultural dysfunction. In my research for the past five years, this is what I find the root cause of the problem is a dysfunctional company culture.

Because the real problem, the root cause of this problem, is not the distraction itself. It's that we can't talk about the problem of distraction. There's a couple companies that I profiled in the book that are indistractable companies that I think exemplify what it means to be an indistractable workplace, and they all share three traits. Number one, they give employees what we call psychological safety. Psychological safety is when you can raise your hand, talk about a problem without fear of getting fired. And what we find is that every company on the other end of the spectrum, where you find corporate malfeasance when you, you know, look at Enron, look at the 737 disaster with Boeing right now, in every one of these companies, you will find people at the company who knew something was wrong and couldn't talk about the problem because they were scared of getting fired.

And so that is a very important trait of companies that are indistractable. They give people the opportunity to raise their hand, say, hey, you know what? This isn't working for me. I don't like that. I get called at 9 p.m. on a Friday night, and I can't have time to do anything else. I don't like that. Every five minutes, someone is tapping me on the shoulder asking me to do something. I need time to focus. I need time for reflective work. And if you can't mention that problem, you do not have psychological safety at your organization.

Anita Brick: I totally get it. Dysfunctional culture. We know it. We know it is pervasive. It is worldwide and all of that. But if you're within that context and you're not changing the culture overnight, where do you start to find a pocket of control so that you can actually move in the direction of becoming indistractable?

Nir Eyal: If you're in company management, you have to change your company to have these three traits. If you're not in company management, what you can do is you start with yourself. Before we can change others, we have to change ourselves. And there's four steps to becoming indistractable. It's mastering our internal triggers, making time for traction, hacking back external triggers, and preventing distraction with Pax.

Once you adopt these four steps, this is how we spread it throughout the organization. So for example, at Boston Consulting Group, they had one case team of eight people that took on this challenge of giving everyone on the case team one night off per week, just one night off, where they didn't have to check email, they didn't have to check their Blackberries a time. They could just, you know, be with their kids, go to the gym, go to dinner with their loved ones, whatever they want to. At first everybody said, no, no, no, can't happen. Impossible. We're in the client services industry. We're an international workforce. I distributed teams, no way we can do that. And then they said, well, what if this project was something that somebody else came to us for?

Let's say Delta Airlines comes and says, hey, we want to give everyone one night off for a week. Could you do that? Okay, fine. Let's take on the challenge. And what they found is that they actually solve this problem almost overnight. The solution was very easy okay. We're going to assign gym this night, and Judy will have that night very easy to do once they could have the conversation. So what you can do as an individual become indistractable. Utilize these four techniques. Then start making inroads by sharing these. Turns out the number one source of distraction in the modern American workplace is not phones. It's not computers. 80% of survey respondents said it was someone tapping you on the shoulder. Let me tell you about this bit of office gossip. Can I ask you a quick question? It's never quick. That actually is the number one source of distraction.

So how do we hack back that external trigger, this thing that can lead us towards distraction? You can actually download this on my website for free. There's what we call a screen sign. A screen sign is this bright red piece of cardstock that you put on your computer monitor that says, I'm indistractable at the moment. Please come back later. You're going to do it for that hour, hour and a half. However much time you need for your reflective work, you're not telling everybody, hey, everybody change for me. No, you're just saying, look, I got a little sign up here. It says I'm indistractable for this time. Please let me do my focused work. Now, what you will find is people will ask you questions about that and say, what is that? Why are you doing that? Well, you see, I read this book that shows how much better our work output could be, how much happier we could all be, and how we can increase our well-being not only the bottom line. By working in an indistractable fashion, we start with ourselves. Then we talk about this with our teams at the Boston Consulting Group. They went from one case team to now this is something they do at the entire corporation.

Anita Brick: I think that that is awesome. There has to be safety because I've been in environments where it is absolutely, positively safe. There's a safety so you can question and I've been in other environments where if you did, you were not going to get the good projects anymore. And again, it goes back to the culture. And sometimes we have to stay in a place and sometimes we have the luxury to move on. With regard to safety, the student said: “I totally agree with you that safety in the workplace is essential for greater creativity and productivity. That said, I work in a very risk averse workplace that has an almost no failure expectation. Needless to say, people don't have a sense of safety. Where do you think I can start to bring that sense of safety to my own team?”

Nir Eyal: This is about giving people a place to talk about their concerns. Now, I would argue that if you work in a workplace that doesn't give people psychological safety, distraction is not your biggest problem. You have all kinds of skeletons in the closet. If you can't voice your concern about distraction, you can't talk about sexual harassment. You can't talk about how you're failing your customers. You can't talk about why people keep leaving this company. And we have such an atrocious churn rate. And so this is just the tip of the iceberg. Distraction is the canary in the coal mine. If you can't talk about that problem, you got all kinds of other stuff. Now this person, the question was, as a team leader, this is that you can start doing something today.

Number one, you give people psychological safety. Number two, you give them a place to talk about these problems. So at BCG they had a once a week short meeting of one hour to talk about all kinds of concerns, not just about how to give everyone predictable time off, but about all sorts of concerns. And my other advice for this person who asked this question, is there a place to talk about this problem at BCG? It's the weekly meeting at slack. You know how they do it. They actually use slack. They have these special slack channels. One of them is called Beef tweets, where people can talk about their beef with the company, or they can talk about concerns, all kinds of concerns. And it's so interesting the management doesn't necessarily say, okay, we're going to fix everything, but they acknowledge when a concern has been aired and the way they do it, ironically enough, is with emoji.

Slack management from the CEO on down will send people emoji eyes that says, okay, I saw that, or a checkmark emoji that says, okay, we're going to we're going to fix it. And so now people feel like their concerns are being heard and some of them are being acted upon. Now, that's not a promise that you'll fix every problem, the promises we hear you. And that's incredibly important for psychological well-being, that people know their concerns are being heard. And then third, and most importantly, is that management exemplifies what it means to be indistractable. So for this person who asked this question, you have to become indistractable yourself. You can't be a hypocrite and tell everybody you should spend more time doing focused work. You know, in order to do your best work, you have to put in reflective time. You have to be indistractable yourself. You can't use your phone in the middle of a meeting and expect everyone to pay attention. You have to become indistractable yourself.

And I think slack is a great example of this. When you walk into slack headquarters, it's amazing. They have this huge neon sign that says work hard and go home. It literally says it on the company wall. Everybody sees this.

Anita Brick: Now, some people can have those and still, because of their own internal makeup, turn anything into a distraction. There is a student and I love this question and it was very honest. And that's one of the reasons I really liked it. And he said: “I take things very seriously as I read about tracking triggers, because you talked about internal external triggers, I think that could become a distraction in and of itself for me. What advice would you have to avoid this becoming a problem for me, when it's supposed to be a solution to fill everyone in?

Nir Eyal: There's this technique that we talk about, so the first step to becoming indistractable is about mastering the internal triggers. Turns out from time studies, what we find is the number one source of distraction is not your phone ringing, it's not your computer. It's what happens inside of you. It's an uncomfortable emotional state. Boredom, uncertainty, fatigue, anxiety, loneliness. That's what triggers us to read the news, to check Facebook, whatever it is that distracts you from what you want to do right now in your life, whatever you're looking for to escape from that uncomfortable sensation. They all start from this common source of what we call an internal trigger. All sorts of things stem from this common internal trigger.

So what we have to do is to understand what is the source of that discomfort. This is where we have to get into the psychology of why do we get this right in the first place. It's never just about the task. It's always about an uncomfortable, emotional state. The way we can do something about it is to become aware of the preceding emotion. Was I bored, anxious, uncertain and fatigued? What was it that led me to look for escape with something else? Why did I have to get out of my head? And so the way we do that is after we get distracted, if we can, as quickly as possible catch ourselves. Note that distraction and note one of the three sources.

There are only three sources for every single distraction. It's either an external trigger, an internal trigger, or a planning problem. And so the idea here is that, you know, we're not looking for perfection, we're looking for growth. And the only way to do that is to reflect upon why we got distracted. So there's a wonderful quote by Paulo Coelho, who said that a mistake repeated more than once is a decision. So this is what happened to me. I would constantly get distracted by the same thing again and again and again. Again I was distracted with the news again, something stupid on a slack channel or an email, and I didn't get done what I said I was going to do. And so if you let that happen again and again and again, you are making a decision to be distracted as opposed to if you reflect upon what happened, identify it's only one of three causes, and then put something in place to prevent it from happening in the future.

That's the goal of why we track these distractions. So what you will find is at first you're going to be tracking a lot of these distractions. But then over time, you know, after a month or so you'll be tracking very few, because now you will have become more and more and distractible throughout your day. You'll still get distracted from time to time. You know, things come up. But the idea is you're a scientist, not a drill sergeant, right? You're not tracking. These are these distractions to beat yourself up. You're tracking these so that you can improve over time. You can grow as opposed to looking for perfection. That's the idea.

Anita Brick: Okay. Maybe you can think of an example, because I think a lot of people are more drill sergeant. So what advice would you have for someone who is pretty exacting? Drill sergeant like to move away so that they can learn without the underlying fear and guilt.

Nir Eyal: So the answer, to paraphrase, is self-compassion. We know that people who are more self compassionate are much more likely to reach their long term goals, no matter what that goal is. And so self-compassion is a skill we need to cultivate. If you are that kind of high achiever personality, you need it more than anyone. People who don't cultivate self-compassion. Here's what happens. Let me back up. So we have two types of viewpoints. Typically, when people think about distraction, we have the blame and we have the shamers, the blame, or they blame things outside themselves. They say, oh, it's this technology that did it to me. It's my boss. It's this, it's that, it's, oh, this is the one I hear all the time. It's the world these days, right? As you can do. You can't do anything about it, right? These technologies aren't going away. Facebook isn't shutting down. Slack isn't shutting down. We're not going to stop email. That's not going away. Completely fruitless to complain about all these external factors. So blaming doesn't work. The other angle and this is where I think you were headed earlier is the gamer.

They don't blame things outside themselves. They blame themselves. Right? They say I'm sorry. They shame themselves. They say I'm lazy or here I go again. I'm getting distracted. Once again, I must have a short attention span. There must be something wrong with me. I'm not good enough. The reason that doesn't work is because we know that when we shame ourselves, shame feels horrible. And back to what we were talking about earlier. How these internal triggers are all desires to escape uncomfortable sensations. When we shame ourselves, we are more likely to look for more escape with additional distraction.

Anita Brick: Well, you're absolutely right.

Nir Eyal: Let me get to the conclusion. The conclusion is, please, we don't want to be blamed. We don't want to be shamers. We want to be claimers. Claimers claim responsibility not for how they feel. This is a really important distinction. You cannot change how you feel. Just like you can't change the urge to cough or sneeze. You don't control that urge. What you can control is how you respond. Hence the term responsibility to that discomfort. So when you feel these uncomfortable emotional triggers uncertainty, fatigue, loneliness, anxiety, whatever it might be, are you letting that lead you towards traction which is healthy or distraction which takes you off course? So it's really about how you respond to those uncomfortable sensations. And so this is why self-compassion is so important.

How do we cultivate self-compassion instead of the unhealthy habit of blaming or shaming? What we're going to do instead is to talk to ourselves the way we would talk to a good friend. This is your answer. Many of us, we talk to ourselves like bullies. If you heard the conversation, I mean, I'm this type A personality as well. You know, if you heard the conversations of what I would say to myself, I would never talk to a friend the way I would talk to myself. And now I've changed that conversation. Now when I fall off track, I don't beat myself up. I ask myself, what would I say to a friend who had just gone through what I'd gone through? And that is the answer. We talk to ourselves with self-compassion, the way we would talk to a good friend, and that disarms that internal trigger that leads us towards distraction.

Anita Brick: We're actually right. I was thinking about this. I had this commitment that I had made. I had a dozen things that needed to be done in a relatively short period of time. And I was chatting with a really close friend, and I was going into this whole blaming, self blaming and shaming. She said, Anita, you're a really good friend, but if you talk to me the way you're talking to you, I'd be out the door so fast you would be done. And that was actually a big wake up call for me. I would never talk to a friend that way, but I felt very comfortable talking to myself that way.

Nir Eyal: Right. And the irony is that we think that when we're tough with ourselves, when we beat ourselves up, we're prodding ourselves to perform. But that's actually not what we find is it occurs in real life that the studies find that, in fact, if what you care about is being productive and getting lots of things done, you will be more productive when you talk to yourself in a self compassionate way.

Anita Brick: Got it? Do you have time for one more question?

Nir Eyal: Absolutely. Fire away.

Anita Brick: Okay, good. What are three things that you would advise someone who's listening, who wants to be indistractable and use this to advance and build an enduring career, starting now?

Nir Eyal: First of all, let me differentiate between distraction and diversion. Distraction is always bad because by definition, per what we talked about earlier, distraction is an action that pulls you away from what you want to do with intent. Distraction is always bad diversion. On the other hand, there's nothing wrong with it. A diversion is just a refocusing of attention. So if you would like to refocus your attention and watch a movie, read a book, go out with your friends, enjoy a drink, even get a little tipsy. Nothing wrong with that. I'm not going to tell you not to. These are all things that can be enjoyed when they are enjoyed with intent. And I think that's the big difference here.

We need to stop vilifying the technology and understand that we can use these tools in a way that serves us as opposed to us serving them by using them with intent. That's a really important differentiation. I want you to have diversion in your day. The trouble is that for most of us, when we get home from work and all we want to do is just watch something on Netflix and relax, or be with our kids and just take some time off. We don't even allow us ourselves to have that pleasure because we're thinking about all the things in our to-do list, and so we don't even fully enjoy our relaxation time because we're thinking, oh, I didn't get enough done. And so let me just talk about real quick what I call the tyranny of the to do list. You know, there's lots of apple carts that I overturn in this book, a lot of myth busting.

And one of the myths is that the to-do list is the right way to be productive. For most people, it backfires. So let me tell you why it backfires. So to do list is your register of output all the things you want to finish. Do this, do that. That's what your to-do list is. And for me, when I used to keep a to-do list, I would have all these things to do list because that's what all the productivity guru results to do. And yet day after day I would recycle half of those to-do list from one day to the next, to the next, to the next. And so what I was doing is that I was reinforcing an identity that yet another day went by and I didn't do what I said I was going to do yet another day where I couldn't rely upon myself to finish the things I said I would do.

Loser. And so that identity gets pounded into your brain day after day, week after week, month after month, that you can't do what you said you're going to do, which is why it's so important. Instead of keeping this to do list, which is nothing more than a register of outputs, it's wishful thinking. You can't have output without input. What's the input time? Of course it's time. So you have to plan out what it is you are going to do in your day. Why? Because when you use this technique we call time boxing. I have this free tool you can use on my website nyarandfar that can make this for you. It doesn't cost anything. You don't have to sign up when you use this time boxing technique. At the end of every time box you are a winner because the only goal when you keep a time box calendar is to work on whatever it is you said you were going to work on for as long as you said you would. The goal is to not finish anything. What do you mean not finish anything? That doesn't make sense.

The goal is to not finish anything. The goal is to work on the task without distraction for as long as you said you would. If you do that, if you work on that hard project, that presentation, you finish that model, whatever it is, for an hour, 30 minutes, an hour and a half, whatever amount of time. If you do that, you're reinforcing your image, your self-image as someone who does what they said they're going to do. You're building that identity for yourself. And it turns out funny enough, people who do that are much more productive than people who use the to-do lists on their own. By planning your day and by making those time boxes, you're much more productive than the person who just keeps the list of output. That's step two of becoming indistractable.

After we master the internal triggers, we make time for traction. Step three is we hack back the external triggers, and step four is we prevent distraction. Those are my four big steps to becoming indistractable. My advice that I would give.

Anita Brick: I love that. I agree, and I think we can all find places to calendar those things.

Nir Eyal: I recommend doing it in about a week's time. Most people have visibility into what their week looks like. Some people don't. Some people, their day changes every day. No problem. You're going to do it once a day. That ten minutes of sitting down and planning out your week ahead, it literally takes ten minutes. Once you get the hang of it, it will change your life.

Particularly, you know, we talked about earlier, what can you do if you're not the boss? Your organization constantly distracts you. How do you work in a workplace? How do you affect change in the culture of your company? What do you do? You want the secret? Make a time box calendar. Become indistractable yourself. Ask your boss for just 15 minutes to show them your time box calendar. This will change your life. Your boss will worship the ground you walk on. Why? Because when you sit down with your boss and you say, hey boss, look, here's my week ahead, okay? Here's all the things I'm going to work on and when I'm going to work on them. Now you see this other piece of paper over here? Here's a list of stuff that you've asked me to do that I don't know where to fit into my calendar. Can you help me find a place for those things? What should I reprioritize? Why is this such a game changing technique? Because we've all heard this ridiculous trope that if you want to be more productive, you have to learn how to say no, give me a break.

You're going to look at the person who pays your bills and say, no, that's stupid. You're not going to do that. Nobody's going to do that. Instead, don't be the one who says no. Make your boss the person who says no because they're looking at your calendar. You say, look, my calendar is full. Here's what I'm doing during my workday. Here's the stuff on this other piece of paper that I won't have time for. Can you help me reprioritize? That technique will change your life. It'll make your boss so happy because now they have visibility. It's amazing how few managers have any idea how their employees spend their day. They are desperate to know what are you doing with your time?

So when you sit down once a week, take 15 minutes and share that time box calendar, that's a huge key to becoming indistractable at work and at home.

Anita Brick: I love it. What's really important is that it's not zero-one kind of thing.

Nir Eyal: No, that's right.

Anita Brick: You start at the level that you could do because it goes back to where we started this conversation. Do we do what we say we're going to do? And starting small, if we can do it consistently? From everything you've said and things that I know as well is much more powerful than saying, all right, I'm going to go to the gym once a year for four hours.

Nir Eyal: Consistency over intensity. That should be everyone's mantra, consistency over intensity. And you're absolutely right. Who is the kind of person that people want to work with? It's a person who does what they say they're going to do. How many people have you worked with who say they're going to do something and don't deliver? Oh, it drives me crazy, right? You don't want to work with someone like that. You want to work with the kind of person who delivers. Guess what? People want to be in relationships with people who deliver. People who keep their commitments. It's the kind of person you want to fall in love with. This is what it means to become indistractable. It's about doing what you said you're going to do. It's about living with personal integrity in all facets of your life.

Anita Brick: Absolutely makes sense. You don't have to do it all at once. You can start where you are and build from it. Very, very, very good advice here. Thank you so much. I know you are a super busy person and to take the time for us today, I appreciate this very, very much. I know that there are a lot of different places that people can find you and cue into the things that you've been talking about.

Nir Eyal: Nearandfar is great, so near get a spell like my first name, nearandfar.com. One little bonus tip here. If you end up getting the book Indistractable, there's actually a lot of free content. If you order the book, keep the order number and enter that order number at indistractable.com. And then you can get all that bonus content as well.

Anita Brick: Wonderful. Thank you for making the time for us. Really really appreciate it.

Nir Eyal: Oh my pleasure. Thank you so much Anita.

Anita Brick: And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.