Master Your Focus with Nir Eyal

20:39Well, then you email me at 805 and 810 comes and I haven't responded to you.

20:45Mick:You're going to text me, call me, leave me a voicemail, send me an email that says, did you get my call, my text, my voicemail, right? Like all of that. Because you've conditioned people that your desk or your headspace is the emergency room for someone else's problem. That usually is not your problem or priority. I shouldn't say problem. Someone else's priority has become your priority. Yeah, your to-do list. You helped me reinforce that in a much better way by not just on the email side. You know, now, and phones are important. I get it. But I schedule time on my calendar when I'm going to do certain things.

21:27Right.

21:28Mick:So if I'm going to be on social media, because sometimes my business depends on me to do that. Right. So my calendar when I'm going to do that. But then I drill down because you also taught me to drill down and be specific. I'm not just going to say, hey, from 10 to 10, 15, I'm on social media. I'm going to say, hey, from 10 to 10.05, I'm going to go respond to DMs. And from 10.05 to 10.10, I'm going to put out a new post. And from 10.10 to 10.15, I'm going to do engagement. I'm going to go like and comment back. So I'm structured so that now I'm creating this habit. I'm forming habits. I'm forming mental blocks so that I know exactly what I'm doing.

22:12Mick:and so and what most people would see as distraction is very intentional for me and now my laser focus on my other things are there so again I love I applaud you because

22:24Nir Eyal:those are things that I got that's fantastic I mean you you said a lot there which is really worth reinforcing one thing that you said is in terms of how we're conditioned by our companies you know distraction in the workplace is a symptom of dysfunction distraction is a symptom of dysfunction. That the reason we see people so distracted at work these days, and it is taking a huge economic toll on our productivity, we could do so much more if we could work without distraction, right? We all know this intuitively. How much time are we spending wasting on stupid meetings that we didn't need to go to, pointless emails that didn't need to be answered and checked, you know, spending time on nonsense that's nothing more than a distraction.

23:02Nir Eyal:We can be so much more productive. The problem is, is that it is part of the company culture, that a sick company culture where you can't raise your hand and say, hey, boss, I can't do my best work when you constantly expect me to reply to every email in 30 seconds. If you can't raise your hand and say, this isn't working. I can't do my best work like this. If you can't say that, that's the problem. It's not the technology. People love to blame technology. It's not the technology. The technology is a tool. The problem is that you have a crappy company culture where people are scared to talk about this problem.

23:41Nir Eyal:But once they do talk about the problem, they fix it just like any other problem. We fix problems for our clients all day long. We can fix problems for ourselves as well. But it's the company culture where you can't talk about this problem because you're afraid people will think you're not a team player or you're not putting in the work because you don't check your cell phone every 30 seconds. That's exactly the problem. The second thing you said that I think was super interesting is that a lot of people misunderstand how to time box properly. And this is why time boxing is so much better than to-do lists.

24:10Nir Eyal:A lot of people use stupid to-do lists. I like to make sure I understand the research. I don't just go on what everybody else says to do. For example, the two-minute rule. A lot of people say, if a task takes less than two minutes, do it. That is terrible advice because everything takes two minutes. So every email is two minutes, two minutes, two minutes, two minutes. You spent three hours now checking email for two minutes. Terrible advice. Another super bad piece of advice. Just say no. If you want to prioritize, tell people no. Are you nuts? That's the kind of advice that a professor gives who's got tenure, you know, who can't get fired.

24:41Nir Eyal:If you tell your boss no, the person who cuts your checks, they're going to fire you. You can't just say no. That's stupid. There's a much better way to do it. To-do list, another piece of stupid advice. Keep your to-do list. Turns out to-do lists are one of the worst things you can do for your personal productivity. Why? Because to-do lists have no constraints. You can always add more to a to-do list. So what do we do? When we get affirmation from, oh, look how many cute boxes I check off. Do we do the important stuff? No. Do we do the hard stuff? No. We do the easy stuff. We do the fun stuff.

25:14Nir Eyal:We do the urgent stuff. Not the hard and important work we have to do to move our careers and our lives forward. So because careers, because to-do lists have no constraints, there's no feedback loop. So what you've done, and the right way to use these time boxes, is to have a feedback loop. So the goal of time boxing, this is what most people misunderstand about time boxing, you get it, but I think most people don't, is that they think time boxing is about finishing a task. Time boxing is not about finishing anything. It's not about finishing. To-do lists are about finishing. That's how you get reinforcement.

25:48Nir Eyal:when I crossed off a bunch of cute little boxes. No, in fact, I used to, I'm embarrassed to admit, I used to do a task and then realize, oh, I didn't write on my to-do list. So let me go back and write on my to-do list just so I can check it off, right?

26:00Mick:How stupid is that? Because you needed, maybe not you, but people that do this and there's someone dear to me and I'll just say that so I'm not saying name, likes to quantify busyness by what's on a to-do list that's been marked off. And it's like, at the end of the day, I don't care. I don't need to know that it took 15 steps to get this one thing done. I don't care how it got there. Right, right. But why do people do that?

26:27Nir Eyal:Perfect. Exactly. But people do this because that's how they measure their productivity.

26:33Mick:Right.

26:33Nir Eyal:But rather, here's what happens. When you keep a to-do list and you run your life, there's nothing wrong with getting things out of your head and onto a piece of paper. That's fine. The problem is when you run your life on a to-do list. That's the problem. Because here's what happens. You look at a task and you say, okay, I got to make this presentation. All right, well, let me prepare the slides for this presentation. So I start working on it. I'm working on it for five minutes. And then I get some email notification. Let me just check that real quick. And then I get some of my Slack notification.

26:59Nir Eyal:And then I got to, you know what, let me go get a cup of coffee. And then, oh, Janet's at the water cooler. Hey, Janet, how are you doing? And wait, what was I working on again? Oh, I totally forgot, right? And so now I have to get back into, what was I doing? I don't even remember. Here's what happens with someone who keeps a time box calendar rather than a to-do list. the goal of a time box calendar is not to finish anything. What? It's not to finish anything. What does that mean? What's the goal of a time box calendar? The goal of a time box calendar is to work on or do whatever you said you were going to do.

27:27Nir Eyal:Whatever you said you were going to do, whether that's that big presentation, making those sales calls, being with your daughter, it doesn't matter. Whatever you said you were going to do for that time period without distraction for as long as you said you would. Why is that so much better?

27:41Mick:Traction and action.

27:42Nir Eyal:That's exactly right. So what you're going to do by doing that is by saying, hey, I'm going to work on this presentation for 30 minutes. Okay, that's it. I'm going to work on it no more, no less, 30 minutes. Nothing else am I going to do. Then I can say, hey, I worked on this presentation for 30 minutes. The slide presentation needs to be 30 slides long, and I got done three slides. Well, that means I need nine more time boxes to finish the entire task. So for the first time, you know how long things take you. So what you've learned over time is that, hey, it takes me five minutes to respond to my DMs.

28:11Nir Eyal:It takes me 10 minutes to do this, 10 minutes to that. But you've only learned that by having time boxes so that you can assess how long things take. Most people never figure that out because they work on a test for five minutes, get distracted, forget what they were working on, do something else, check email because email will always tell you what to do next. And then they have no idea how long things take. And then at the last minute before the deadline, they stay up all night and do a crappy job at the last minute. That's what most people do. We don't have to live that way. There's a much lower stress way to be, which is to become indistractable, to learn how long things take you by timeboxing, by using this fantastic technique.

28:47Mick:And what that did for me, Nir, and we're going to talk about the next book coming up, I promise. I just love indistractable so much that it's become a way of life for me. But people use the term multitasking like it's a badge of honor. I'm great at multitasking. I can do 10 things at once. And I tell people this. No, you can't. You're switch tasking, but you're never multitasking. And, you know, I guarantee there's somebody that's listening to this episode right now that has multiple screens or tabs. And one of those tabs, I promise you, is email or Slack or something that's a communication channel.

29:27Mick:And your eyes are just right there most of the time. And when that alert goes off, like Nir is talking about, switch what you're doing and you go over there. You are not responding to an email, talking to a client and doing a purchase order all at the same time. That is not humanly possible because our brains can't do it. We talk a lot about trends on this show and AI is the one that just won't quit. But here's the thing. Talking about AI doesn't make you more productive. Actually putting it to work does. And that's what Zapier did for me. Zapier is an AI orchestration platform that connects top AI models like ChatGPT and Claude to the apps your team already uses.

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31:04Nir Eyal:That's right. Now, what you can do, that's absolutely right. You can't multitask at the same thing at the same time. So you can't do two math problems at the same time. You can't listen to two podcast episodes at the same time. You can't watch two television shows at the same time. You can't answer two emails at the same exact time. What you're doing is exactly what you described. It's called task switching. You're going back and forth and you're losing something in that process. You're losing focus. You're losing concentration. What you can do, there is a small hack here. You can do what I call multi-channel multitasking.

31:36Nir Eyal:So that's when you engage different sensory channels. So for example, you can absolutely listen to a podcast while you're driving. No problem. Because one is the physical channel where you're driving the car and you have to pay attention with your eyes, but then you can also listen to something, have a conversation, listen to a podcast, have a phone call while you're driving. So you can do multi-channel multitasking. So what I do is I'll engage the physical channel. For example, in the gym, I'll listen to audiobooks. So I'll check two boxes off at once. I check my value of educating myself, of always learning more as I'm doing one of my other values, which is taking care of my health.

32:17Nir Eyal:Or maybe if I go on a walk with a friend. That you can't actually do, but you can't do the same sensory channel at the same time. You're absolutely right.

32:26Mick:Good stuff. All right, Nir. I dominated because selfishly, I just wanted to talk about Indistractable. You can see how much I minded, right? I love it. It's my favorite book out there. But the floor is yours now. What does Nir want to talk about? What do you have going on? What's going on in Nir's world?

32:45Nir Eyal:Well, I've been, after six years of working hard on trying to uncover another layer deeper, right? So here's what happened. After Indistractable was published, you know, I do these office hours where anybody can call me and for 15 minutes, we can talk about whatever you want to talk about. If you've read one of my books, I love to hear reader feedback. And I love to help people with whatever challenges they might face that I might have done some research into. and every once in a while, maybe like one out of every 20 calls, somebody would call me and say, hey, I read Indistractable. I really loved it, but here's the problem.

33:19Nir Eyal:You see, it didn't work. I'd say, oh, wow, it didn't work. Tell me more. I spent five years writing it. There's 30 pages of citations to peer-reviewed studies. I know it changed my life and sold half a million copies. I hear from people all the time why it works, but I'm so curious. Tell me more. I want to learn what didn't work for you. Let's talk about step one. How did step one go? Mastering internal triggers. Tell me how that went for you. Ah, you know, you know, Nir, I read it. I read it. They tell me. I just, um, I just didn't do it was the problem. Okay. I'd say no problem. That happens.

33:53Nir Eyal:Maybe you skipped a step two, right? Making time for traction. How'd that go? Tell me about how that went. You know, I also read that too. I just didn't, I just didn't do that either. And so people would wait for months to tell me that the book that they read but didn't implement didn't work for them. And I thought for a while, like, wow, what's wrong with me? Like, what did I do wrong in this book? And then I realized, actually, I do this too. I have books on the shelf that I've read but haven't put into practice. I've paid gurus and experts to give me advice that I haven't done anything with.

34:28So why is that?

34:30Nir Eyal:Like, isn't that super interesting that we know what to do? We know the behavior. We know the benefit we want, and yet we don't do it, right? So what's going on? What's deeper there? And so what I realized is that motivation is something that we don't understand well, that I certainly didn't. I thought the motivation was if I know what to do and I want the benefit, I just do it. But there's clearly something else here, that what's missing are beliefs, that I can know what to do, I can know the behavior, and I can know the benefit, I can know why I'm doing it. But if I don't believe in the outcome, I won't sustain my motivation.

35:07Nir Eyal:It turns out that that is the crucial element of who succeeds and who fails. It's about who persists. And in order to persist, we have to believe that we are doing the right thing and that we will get the benefit. So for example, if you're working for a boss who you don't believe has your best interests at heart, well, how motivated are you going to be if you don't believe you're going to get that benefit or that promotion, that raise, because you don't trust your boss? Not very. You're not going to sustain your motivation. Or conversely, what if I know I need to exercise or whatever the case might be?

35:39Nir Eyal:I know I need to persist at this job. I know I need to make those sales calls. I don't believe that I can do it. If I don't believe I can do it, I'm also going to lose motivation. So knowing what to do, even if I know it conceptually, here's what I need to do. And I want the reward. I want the benefits. It's not enough. I have to have that belief. So motivation is not a straight line. It's a triangle. You have to have the behavior, the benefit, and the belief. So when I was looking into, wow, you know, the research shows how important beliefs are, I was looking for where's the book to tell me how to engineer my beliefs.

36:09Nir Eyal:How do I figure out what beliefs to adopt and which ones to let go of? And all I found was a lot of gobbledygook around positive thinking and manifesting, and none of it's really supported by good research. In fact, a lot of it shows that a lot of the stuff that people are doing these days is actively backfiring. Just thinking positive or even manifesting, most people are doing it completely wrong in a way that actually hurts you. And so I really wanted a science-backed approach to figuring out how do you break through your limitations so that you can achieve extraordinary results.

36:39Mick:Love it, brother. I freaking love it. You know, Nir, I also wanna give you the floor really quick too, because you have some of the most amazing workshops that you put on. How can people find out about those? And what are a couple that you have going on or that people can go just go either purchase or self-study on their own.

37:00Nir Eyal:I appreciate it. So yeah, so at the moment, it's just the books. I'm not doing any workshops at the moment. I probably will at some point, but the most important thing is if it's an interesting topic, if you found that you have aspirations in your life that you know you're capable of, that you can do more, but for one reason or another, it's not happening. Maybe there are relationships in your life that aren't repaired. Maybe you have goals that you haven't met, that New Year's resolution that keeps coming up year after year, and you say, okay, next year I'll do it, next year I'll do it. What's underlying that?

37:33Nir Eyal:Can I tell a quick research study real quick that blew my mind? Absolutely. Do I have a minute? I love this study. This is the one that really blew my mind. In the 1950s, there was a biologist by the name of Kurt Richter. Richter had a very simple question. He wanted to figure out how long a wild rat could swim. Okay, pretty simple. So he took a rat, put it in a cylinder of water, he sat there with a timer, turns out 15 minutes, 15 minutes before the rat gave up and died and drowned underwater, 15 minutes. Then he had an idea for another experiment. He wanted to see what would happen if he took a new group of wild rats, put them in the water, and this time, right before the 15 minute mark, when he knew they were starting to struggle and would soon give up, what would happen if he reached in, pulled out the rat, dried it off, let it catch its breath, and then plunk, put it back inside the water.

38:26Nir Eyal:Now, he did this a few times, and he wanted to see how much longer the rat would swim for. What would happen if the rat knew that salvation might be possible, that this hand might reach in and save it? How much longer would the rat swim for? It started with 15 minutes. 15 minutes, it gave up and died. How much longer would the rat swim for when it was conditioned to be hopeful, to think that maybe something would save it? What do you think, Mick? How much longer did the rat swim for? Maybe you already know this study. I don't know. Tell me. What do you think? Take a guess. I have no idea. I'm going to make a fool of myself.

38:59Nir Eyal:How much longer? 15 minutes was the first trial. How much longer after he saved the rats? 30 minutes. That would be amazing, right? If it could double the persistence of the rat, that would be incredible. Higher. Keep going. An hour. An hour. Oh, my goodness. If I could give you some kind of intervention that could make you four times more persistent, right? You're working on that hard project. I can make you work four times harder. You're making those sales calls. I can help you sustain, make four times the sales calls. That would be incredible, right? Unbelievable. Keep going. Four hours near.

39:36Nir Eyal:I'll tell you the answer. They didn't swim for double. They didn't swim for 60 minutes. They didn't swim for two hours. They didn't swim for four hours. they swam for 60 hours, Mick. They went from 15 minutes to 60 hours of straight swimming. Why? What happened? What changed? Same bodies, right? They didn't all of a sudden become super rats. Same exact physical strength. Same exact environment. Same experiment. That didn't change. We can't ask the rats what changed in their minds, but the only variable left is that something was unlocked in their brain. they suddenly had a hope, a belief that something might save them if they kept trying, if they kept persisting.

40:20Nir Eyal:And this is the lesson for us, that when we change our beliefs, we become more persistent, we unlock something that is always there within us, and we can achieve things that we never even imagined. And that's what Becoming Beyond Belief is all about.

40:35Mick:I love it, brother. I love it. Can't wait. Super excited. near man like this has been a true master class um i again selfishly i asked the questions because there are some things i needed today uh you have no idea what that meant i'd love to be on a game like we can anytime we can go much deeper for sure oh we didn't scratch the surface there's so much to be unbelief but it was it was fun we should do it again yes sir yes sir well again bro I'm honored to have you on. I know you're busy, so I appreciate all that time. Enjoy hopping around. I know you're living the life right now, so enjoy that, man.

41:17Mick:And whenever you need me, you just know I'm here for you, brother.

41:20Nir Eyal:I appreciate that very much. Great to see you, Mick, and reach out anytime as well. Looking forward to talking again soon.

41:25Mick:You got it. To all the viewers and listeners, remember, your because is your superpower. Go Unleash It. that's another powerful conversation on mick unplugged if this episode moved you and i'm sure it did follow the show wherever you listen share it with someone who needs that spark and leave a review so more people can find their because i'm rudy rush and until next time stay driven stay focused and stay unplugged