Nir Eyal Shares How to Focus On Your Work and Ignore Distractions

What you pay attention to is what grows – Wall Street Journal bestselling author Nir Eyal is here to help you become indistractible. Nir brings expertise in psychology, technology, and business; today, he’s bringing those sectors to bear in defining what good, undistracted work looks like and how to set yourself up for traction in your life and career. 

GIVEAWAY DETAILS: Share one of your key takeaways from this episode on Instagram and tag Terry (@itsterryrice) and Nir (@nireyal). They’ll select a few winners and send out some free books! 

This episode is brought to you by ChatterBoss. It’s a company that helps entrepreneurs make money, save time, and avoid burnout by providing top notch executive assistants. wwww.chatterboss.com/launch 

3:32 – The thought process behind Nir’s first book, Hooked: How to build Habit-Forming Products, and how he got his start working at the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. 

It became apparent to Nir that what would be important in the coming years would be habits. As the size of screens shrank and billboards became less important, habits are powerful selling tools. 

Nir talked to his friends in Silicon Valley and researchers at Stanford, and started putting together a model for product designers to create habit-forming products

6:13 – Competitive advantage

If you have no competitive advantage, your margins will get ground down to powder. Many things can serve as this competitive advantage: Intellectual property, brand, economies of scale, or habit. Habit is one of the more defensible competitive advantages – you can take up all the space in the marketplace if your customers use your service/product without thought because it’s an ingrained habit (For example: Google). 

8:30 – Understanding distraction 

Start with the opposite of distraction. Most people would say the opposite of distraction is focus, but the opposite is actually traction. It’s pulling towards progress and meeting a goal. 

Any action can be distraction or traction – the difference is intent. If your actions are in line with your values, great! The most dangerous form of distraction is actually the thing that tricks you into focusing on the urgent, quick tasks rather than the deeper work you really need to do to accomplish your goals. 

11:34 – External vs. internal triggers

There are external triggers (pings, dings, and rings), which actually only account for about 10% of distractions. So what you need to start with is your internal triggers and discomfort – insecurity, anxiety, stress – and master them, or they’ll end up mastering you. 

13:21 – The beauties and dangers of having a vision

On the one hand, if you can keep the vision of your future goals, it makes dealing with temporary discomfort more appealing. On the other, if the vision is too far out, you can give yourself a cop-out. You don’t have to deny yourself the fun stuff, what you want to do is schedule the fun stuff, and not let it overrun your life. 

Instead of a vision, start with a plan for tomorrow. How would the person you want to become spend tomorrow? 

Values have three domains. You, your relationships, and your work. 

• Do you have enough time for sleep, exercise, and recreation?
• Do you have time for the people you love? 
• Work has two subcategories: Reactive work (answering emails, responding to needs within the company) and reflective work (time to think and create).  

There are two steps to becoming indestractible: 

1. Master these internal and external triggers, and have a plan for how you deal with discomfort. 
2. Schedule time in your day for traction. The difference isn’t self-discipline, it’s simply a plan. 

18:50 – What qualifies as a distraction? 

If you didn’t put something on your calendar, you didn’t get distracted. You never had traction in the first place. 

21:17 – The step-by-step to being indestractible

1. Master the internal triggers
2. Make time for traction
3. Hack back the external triggers (notifications, meetings, kids running through) 
4. Prevent distraction with pacts