How to Resist the Attention Economy — with Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

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0:28Welcome to Prop G on Getting Your Life Together, a special series where we're joined by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, Stanford educators and bestselling authors of Designing Your Life, and most recently, How to Live a Meaningful Life. Gentlemen, welcome and thanks for doing this. Yeah, thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. We went to our listeners with one question. What's the biggest thing holding your life back right now? Today, we try to help. We talk about burnout, distraction, purpose, and building a life that feels more intentional. All right, let's get into it. Our first question is, how do you build a meaningful, intentional life when your attention is constantly being pulled apart by phones, doom scrolling, and the attention economy?

1:08So just some data here to set the table. In 2025, Americans reported spending an average of five hours and 16 minutes per day on their phones, a 14 percent increase since 2024. A study by Vision Direct projects that the average American adult will spend 44 years of their life looking at screens. In 2025, researchers found that randomly moving Internet access from smartphones produced a range of benefits, including improved mental health, subjective well-being and the ability to sustain attention. So, Bill, you go first. and then I'll ask for Dave to build on it. Yeah, you know, this attention economy, and it's horrible.

1:46I mean, I'm teaching at Stanford and the undergrads can't get off their phone. The grad students can't get off their phone.

1:52We're really focused on trying to figure out how to help them with that. So one of the things is this whole doom scrolling thing, it's a dopamine hit. Every time you get a new page, it's a dopamine hit. So my advice is let's get on a better dopamine diet because we're talking in our new book about flow, about wonder and awe. If you can get into a flow state, that's a dopamine hit. If you can have an experience of wonder, and wonder is literally all around. You just got to look for it a different way. That's another way of rerouting this need to have this dopamine hit. It's just a better dopamine diet to be on wonder, awe, and flow.

2:30And that expands your access to things like nature, things like relationships, things like other people in the room. I think we should design a little app that just gives you that sort of a sense of flow, because then you'll get off the phone, walk outside, and notice how beautiful the sunset is. Touch grass, so to speak. Dave?

2:49Bill Burnett:Well, you know, let's keep in mind, you know, 10 ,000 really sharp, incredibly well-paid people working for multi-billion-dollar companies spending 60 hours a week thinking about how they compound your amygdala more effectively. So you've got a fairly substantial resource coming at you wanting to keep your attention. And people keep talking about, how do I stop doomscrolling? You know, oh God, there was my phone again and I couldn't get off. And so if you start there, you are doomed because it's too late. And so what you really need to do, there's a concept in psychology called the theory of replacement.

3:20Bill Burnett:You can't stop anything. Like don't think of a blue horse right now. Whatever you do, do not think of a blue horse. Certainly not a blue horse with a pink mane. No one, no blue horses with pink maids. Not now at all. You're screwed. So what you have to do is build things that are more attractive than the doom scrolling over time. And it's not going to happen right away because again, that dopamine hit is there. So this is where the whole design thinking model of prototype iteration, we say set the bar low and clear it, iterate, iterate, iterate. So if you start having these habits and practices or second, but we talk about less about life as a project and more as life as a practice.

3:53Bill Burnett:So I find these little experiences and it's a lighter lift than you think, you know, to drop into what we call the flow world, which is the present moment and find ways to experience your humanity, whether it's the nature or whether it's music, whether it's just enjoying what you're actually doing rather than being worried about what the screen has to say to you. You start doing that more often than what you actually start building is a different neural pathway that's attracted to this other behavior. And you can start having the good stuff crowd the bad stuff out. The bottom line is the good stuff has to crowd the bad stuff out.

4:24Bill Burnett:If you're all leveraged on stopping bad stuff, you're doomed. Yeah, just to add to that, it's not just young people. I'm addicted to my phone. It's difficult for me not to pick it up and check my text messages right now. So I empathize with, I think big tech is essentially evolving a new species of asocial and asexual males who opt for relationships that are frictionless. And the hacks I've tried, somewhat unsuccessful, sort of, it sounds lame. I'm trying to watch more TV. I'm just put my phone away. There's so much amazing streaming media content. I'm trying to get more into 80s music again. I love 80s music.

5:07I'm trying to listen to more music. And whenever I do these things, I try and put my phone away. And I have decided, and this is hard for me, I no longer sleep with my phone next to me. And I used to do that. And then when I go to dinner, the other thing I would say just more, men aged 20 to 30 are spending less time outdoors than prison inmates. and I realize there's some money involved in here, but I'm trying to say yes to more. I'm going out tonight for dinner and drinks with two guys who are in town who I don't especially know. Quite frankly, I'm not sure I especially want to know them, but they invited me out, so I said yes.

5:39And I'm going to turn my phone off and I'm just going to go out and probably drink and eat and not be on my phone. Anyways, let's move to question number two. Our next question is about productivity and discipline. Why is it so hard to stick to routines that we knew are good for us. There's a popular stat that says habits take 21 days to stick, but according to newer research from UCL, habits actually take 66 days on average to form. That 21 days figure is a myth traced back to a plastic surgeon observing post-op patients adjusting to their new appearance. The same study found that missing a day doesn't break the process.

6:16The early days are hardest, then it gets easier regardless of occasional slip-ups. Bill, thoughts on productivity and discipline? Yeah, and getting stuff done in what we call the transaction world. We do a reframe in the class, and it's going from trying to do time management, because I can't make more time, that's just not possible, to managing your energy. Because really what your experience is, is what you pay attention to. What you pay attention to is what your neurons are firing on. So that's the energy you put into something. And if you can map, we do an energy map. What do we do on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday?

6:51We look at all the events that occur regularly. We look at whether they're energy sustaining or giving or whether they're energy draining. Like my budget meeting is an energy draining meeting. My office hours with students, positive energy every time. So once you know where you're actually spending your energy, which is your attention, then you can start moving things around. There's a thing in psychology called the best last effect. The only thing you'll remember in the week is the peak thing that happened and the last thing that happened. So I manage those things in my week to make sure I have a peak experience somewhere around Wednesday or Thursday.

7:23and my Friday experience is always a positive exit. So when I come to the end of the week, I go, how was the week? I go, hey, it was pretty good. I really managed my attention, my energy. And I got a lot of stuff done because I was paying attention to the things that give me a positive boost. So that's how we reframe it. It's energy, not time management.

7:41Bill Burnett:Dave? I think the whole issue, you know, repetition, when you're trying to build a habit, you know, you have this goal in mind. We're very cool, goal-driven. It's all about outcomes. It's all about impact. and you drop the ball or it doesn't work and you go, oh, crap, you know, and then I did it again. And then you're depressed. What do you do? You want to go look for another dopamine hit. Now I feel even worse. So one of the things we really emphasize on this prototyping mindset is you can prototype anything. And so, you know, we'll actually have a thing on a life balance dashboard. We have an exercise to rebalance your life.

8:14Bill Burnett:You know, we kind of go, what's one little thing you could do a little different for two weeks and then decide, did that work for you? And so you create a low bar and clear it. Everybody's trying to get inspired to become their Olympic self. We were talking in Chicago, Chicago Ideas Week years ago, and I'm talking to Amy, the captain of the U.S. soccer team and two-time gold medal winner. I said, can you be your Olympic best all the time? She goes, oh God, are you kidding? You just hope to peak the right week of the year. So we're all shooting for things that are kind of unattainable. So if you say, okay, I'm going to try this one little thing.

8:51Bill Burnett:see how it works at the end, revalue. I'll try it again. I had a small group, young professionals group working on these kind of things, said, okay, I think we could handle getting together for six weeks. So we got together for six weeks. Conversation wasn't done. I said, do you guys want to keep going? They kind of go, well, yeah. I said, should we just keep meeting on Tuesday nights? They kind of go, oh, no, no, I can't do that. I go, okay, well, how long do you want to meet? Another six weeks. We did a six-week renewal 50 times. We were together like four years. And 35 six-week renewals in, And I said, can we just commit to this?

9:22Bill Burnett:They kind of go, no, I can't handle it. So that, fine, whatever it takes. So you really do need to kind of game yourself and recognize don't set yourself up for failure. Take the time and make the process of acquiring the habit as successful as having the habit itself. If you declare yourself a loser too soon, you'll quit. Yeah, it's interesting. I feel like I lack the discipline for habits. What I try to do is I find deadlines are great for lazy people. I'm fundamentally a lazy person. And so I like deadlines, hard deadlines that I commit to, whether it's my publisher giving me a deadline or they'll take back their advance.

10:01One of the things I really enjoy about teaching, you really can't be late for your class. I mean, if you do, there's 180 people who spend$7 ,000 to take that class. That's good for me. So I like that. And this, again, is a story of privilege. I have a trainer because when he shows up at 8, I got to go outside and train. So I like self-imposed deadlines. The other thing I find is really powerful is cohort. And that is if you decide you want to run, try and find someone else to run with. All right, we're meeting at 9 a.m. tomorrow. You know, if I'm hungover and it's just me running, I'm not running.

10:39But, you know, my buddy Dave's out there in Regents Park at 855 stretching. So challenges with each other. I find that the peer pressure also works pretty well. Any follow-up thoughts on that, guys?

10:56Bill Burnett:Well, yeah, structurally, I learned that I'm both undisciplined and a workaholic. And I finally came to the conclusion, maybe alcoholics shouldn't work in liquor stores. And I was a startup guy. And I worked infinite hours. And my father died when I was a child. I wanted to be a good dad because I didn't have one. And I'm working 90 hours a week and I can't stop. So I actually finally found my way to begin. I went into gig work, you know, in my late 30s. And I outsourced responsibility to my client, which was I had very tight scoops of work. I concocted lots of deliverables with deadlines, just like you're describing.

11:29Bill Burnett:In order that when I was done, the client would say, stop, go home and have dinner with your kids. We're not paying you anymore. And I didn't have the capacity to stop myself, so I delegated it to my customers. And that is what I call don't try to work through it, work around it. When you're failing at something over and over again, if you accepted your foible and designed around it, I have to run with friends because I can't get my own ass out of bed. Then you start designing a life where the game of life is learn how to play you to win. Accept your limitations and design for them. Don't keep trying to overcome them.

12:06And we love deadlines. We just set a deadline. In fact, we just launched a new training program on our new book, and we didn't have a single slide done. And we said, we got to have this thing ready by me because a bunch of people are coming, and I'm hustling to get the last slides done. So yeah, set a deadline. Force yourself at the exposure of social embarrassment, I guess, to get stuff done. Works great. Also, it sounds really lame, but the just do it thing, whenever it's exercise, I now have a practice. If I think about exercise, I just grab my shoes and go down to my gym. I just don't think about it.

12:41I'm just like, oh, okay. Just literally like grab your shoes and go. Just don't think about it. Just do it, so to speak. So with that, we'll be right back after a quick break.

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13:38Welcome back onto our last question. How can you build a more meaningful life without getting a whole different job or reinventing your life? This is obviously ground zero for your question. Dave, I'll ask you to go first.

13:54Bill Burnett:Well, it's really, you know, we didn't intend to write this last book, which is a pretty different animal, but, you know, we help people, you know, to redesign their lives and then redesign their careers, wrote two books, and we get a lot of feedback that worked really great. And then right after the pandemic and the great resignation, 52 million people walk off the job because it's not good enough. What we kept hearing is, I'm doing all the stuff and I'm still not fulfilled. Or it's as meaningful as I want. And we looked into that and we found two things. What people were looking for to make life meaningful is it had an impact.

14:24Bill Burnett:I changed the world. I did something important. I mattered. I created a legacy, a lot of language around that, or I feel fulfilled. And we think both of those are actually all by themselves. If you've got all your meaning eggs in those baskets, impact or fulfillment, you're screwed. That's a dysfunctional belief because impact is a thing and you're not. And even when impact works, and most of the time, even if you do everything right, it doesn't work because the other 8 billion people might go off script when you're not looking. And if you're lucky enough to have an impact at all, the glow doesn't last very long.

14:53Bill Burnett:So that's not a sustainable, that's a hedonic treadmill problem. And fulfillment, we know that all of us contain more aliveness than your life permits you to express. You can't be fulfilled as in expressing your entire self, which is what Maslow told you in 1943 you should do by being self-actualized, and you can't get there from here. So that's why we came up with, oh, that's all about the transactional world. You've got to expand into the present moment in the flow world to add other forms of meaning. Otherwise, if you're trapped in transactions all the time, you can't get there from here. And Bill can talk about where in the flow world you can get your hands on that stuff.

15:28Well, you can get it all over the place. But the trick is, you know, if you're looking for more meaning, then look right where you are. You don't have to cram more into your life. Our book is all not about like, oh, there's five new things you got to learn. You got to have mindfulness practice and you got to work out and do all this other stuff. Do that if you want to. That's great. Mindfulness is a good thing. But there's a lot of meaning just lying around right away. And so the whole idea is to become a meaning-making designer, a designer of moments that are meaningful. And it's about getting more out of what's right in front of you.

16:00You're not trying to cram more in because we're all too busy. So you don't need a new job. You can find, you know, some satisfaction in the job you've got. You can always make it better. But, you know, better is about the future. The experience of meaning is right now. It's in what you're doing right now. It's putting on your shoes and going out to the gym, you know. and then walking away feeling a little bit of a glow from the workout. It's about waking up in the morning and looking outside and taking a few deep breaths and noticing that it's another beautiful sunny day here in California. So it's about getting more out of, and we've had tons of techniques for doing this.

16:40And by the way, the whole idea that flow is this kind of peak experience. We know now from neuroscience there's at least 22 neuroscience triggers to flow, and flow is the experience of being right here, right now. And that's where you experience the more meaning that you're looking for. Yeah, I struggle with this because I struggle with anger and depression. I'm constantly, for a long time, was thinking about how do I, you know, find meaning as I mean, happiness, reward. And everyone has to figure out the discipline and the skills and the market dynamics such that they can take care of themselves and then, you know, operate in what is a fairly, sometimes unfair, capitalist society.

17:17And, you know, that's just the reality. And there's so many books and graduate programs on how to refine those skills so you can be viable in a capitalist society. What I've found is that even after I'd been working so hard to get to some sense of relevance or economic security, that once I got there, I'm like, am I really that happy or do I really feel I have meaning? and where I have found it is in what I call purpose and perspective. And purpose is different than I think what I thought when I was younger, some bolt of lightning would hit me and I'd just be so good at something, I'd find purpose.

17:55What I've found is that purpose comes from you invest so much in something, you'll never get an ROI on it. And what do I mean by that? Veterans are never going to, I don't think most veterans are ever going to get a real ROI on their service. leaving their family, putting their person in physical danger. But that's what they get is something greater. They get purpose. They've served their country. Like no one can match that sacrifice. What I have found is that I have two boys, 15 and 18. I will never get ROI on them. They will never be up at 2 a.m. worried about me. No matter if I decide to go back to graduate school at Stanford, they're just not going to pay for it.

18:34I'm never going to get the return in terms of time, love, anxiety, money that I have put into them. And what I realized is then, okay, that's my purpose. You find something, whether it's a nonprofit, your country, other people, that you invest so deeply in it. You're never going to get what we think of as a traditional return. And that's your purpose. That's why you're here.

18:57Bill Burnett:We get asked that question all the time. And we're not trying to assist you in finding the meaning of life or figure out how to design what is the purpose of my life, because those are outcomes. Those are its, and you're not an it. Our definition of the human person is you are a becoming. If you're a becoming, your future self may be differently oriented, but purpose is an aspirational valence. It's a trajectory. It's not an outcome. And in this technologically enabled, capitalistically optimized world, everything's about optimizing for outcome. So did I accomplish it? Did I find it? Did I get it done?

19:32Bill Burnett:Have I reached? Have I achieved it? And there is no it. There's no right. There's no done. And there's no it. There's just getting on with it. So we encourage people to look purposefully and experience their days meaningfully. Those are descriptions of the manner in which you're walking this thing out. And your definition of a purpose is it's a direction worth going toward. and going toward again and going toward again and going toward again. Not because eventually I'm going to get there, but because going somewhere meaningfully, even productively, is worthwhile. And, you know, so we have a compass tool to make sure, well, you don't know where you're supposed to go, but you can figure out whether or not you're on the right direction.

20:13Bill Burnett:Are you going north? We can go north. Let's keep going. I want to get your response to, I have something called, people talk about a gratitude practice, And I never really, I didn't have the discipline to keep up with that. What I have, though, is a perspective practice. And I want you guys to respond to this. I think a lot of us lack, quite frankly, perspective or appreciation or framing things to realize most of us don't have problems. We have inconveniences. And I don't own art, but I spent a ton of money for me on a photograph. And it's a photograph of Otto Frank, who's the father of Anne Frank.

20:55And it's a picture of him when he returned to the attic that his family hid in in Amsterdam and was eventually betrayed. All of his family was murdered. And I have a picture of him after he returned to the attic after he survived Auschwitz. And I have it outside my bedroom. And every morning, when I leave my bedroom, I stop and I look at it for 10 seconds. And it's this very contemplative, intense photograph of him just sitting there, you could tell, thinking or staring. And I try and imagine what's running through his mind. And then I start my day. And then the last thing I do when I'm going to bed is I, again, stare at this photo for 10 seconds.