A masterclass on business productivity with Nir Eyal

22:43That's a social gathering, right? That's to get together, crack some beers, and have a discussion. That's not for a meeting. That's not a business meeting. That's a social gathering. The purpose of a meeting is for one thing and one thing only. The purpose of a business meeting is to gain consensus. That is the point. Okay, everything else is a social engagement or a brainstorming session. Those are other things. The purpose of a business meeting is to gain consensus. And so just getting people together, let's just talk out an idea. Let me just shoot the breeze with you. That is code for I don't want to do my homework.

23:13That's what that means. When someone says, let's just get together and chit chat. Let's just spar some ideas with a bunch of people. Now, getting together with one other person, sure, now we're a brainstorming session. We can talk through an idea. That's great. That's great. But calling together eight colleagues who just talk about ideas, very intellectually lazy. So what we want to do is to increase the friction, the cost of calling a meeting because it's become far, far, far too easy so that the stakeholder who wants to call the meeting recognizes recognizes the cost, recognizes how expensive it is to have all these meetings on our schedule.

23:44I mean, I get calls every single week from law firms and consulting firms and agencies that tell me we are meeting all day long. That's all we do at work. And then all the real work gets done at home after work, which is terrible. That's not what people bargain for, right? So what happens? People don't go to the gym. They don't get to spend time with their family. Their lives are miserable. They burn out because all day long they're stuck in meetings. So here's what you have to do. From now on, the meeting requirement, if we are going to spend people's time, precious time on a meeting, we have to do two things in advance.

24:15Number one is so basic, I'm almost embarrassed to say it, but it turns out that 89 % of meetings in corporate America don't have an agenda. I learned this in high school student council, okay? This is meeting 101. If there's no agenda, there's no meeting. Simple as that. If you're going to take up our time. You can't just send a Zoom link. You have to circulate an agenda. What are we going to decide in this meeting? What's the purpose? Very basic. The second part is even better, is that the stakeholder who's going to call the meeting needs to circulate a planning document. This is straight out of Amazon's playbook.

24:56I stole it from them. This planning document, what you're going to do is you do your homework in advance. Now, when you circulate this planning document, it's up to you. At Amazon, as soon as you get to that meeting, okay, so you circulate the agenda, you sit down in the meeting, they literally have 15 minutes when all they do is read the planning document. This is still the best practice at Amazon today. Like they literally have a piece of paper. Everybody sits there for the first 15 minutes and they read about the backstory of the problem that then they are going to decide and build consensus around what to do next.

25:26Okay? So what that means is that the stakeholder who called the meeting did their homework. They wrote this document. They collected information. Maybe they told everybody on the team, look, I need you to spend 30 minutes. I want you to brainstorm and then send me your feedback, right? Asynchronously email me your thoughts. I will compile those thoughts. I will synthesize based on what I know and what I think. And I will produce a recommendation so that we can build a consensus around what we're going to do next. When you do that, you almost eliminate completely the impetus to call senseless, useless meetings.

25:59I'm telling you, it's miraculous what this does for organizations. And I think of all the time you then say, because all the meetings that were going to happen don't happen, that you can spend actually getting things done. That's right. Yeah. Because now you can actually do work. Yeah. As opposed to just, I mean, how many meetings have we been to where the purpose of the meeting is to call the next meeting? Yeah. We're all going to meet together. A link to this, actually, one of the things in your book I found very helpful is how you build a culture within an organization. because I suppose what some people might be thinking is, well, I can make myself indistractable, but how do you build a culture around you that makes the organization, the company, the team you work in more effective?

26:38Yeah, fantastic, fantastic question. I hear this all the time. Look, I read the book. I'm indistractable. My boss keeps sending me emails at 9 p.m. Like, what do I do? Okay, so there's a few things. So I did quite a bit of research, and there's a whole chapter in the book on how to build an indistractable workplace. And it turned out what I found was that there are three attributes of an indistractable workplace. The first attribute is that the company gives people psychological safety. Psychological safety is when you can talk about a problem within the company without fear of retribution. So it turns out the problem of technology overuse at work is that we can't talk about the problem of technology overuse at work.

27:21it's not the technology itself. It's that we can't talk about the problem. And so what I find is with companies who perpetually struggle with this problem of distraction, like my boss keeps interrupting me every 30 seconds, we can't get things done, we're just constantly digging out of each other's email inboxes and attending stupid meetings all day. If you can't raise your hand and say, hey boss, I can't do my best work for you if I'm constantly distracted, right? If you can't have that conversation, that's the problem. It's that you can't talk about the problem. And what we always find is that when a company can't talk about distraction, there's all kinds of other skeletons in the closet too that they can't talk about.

27:58So something to note. So that's number one, is that the company gives people psychological safety to talk about the problem. Okay, so let's say you've done that. Let's say you have the kind of company culture where people can talk about that. The second thing that they do is that they give people a forum, a designated forum to give feedback. So what I found, for example, at Slack, it was very interesting. I expected Slack to be the most distracted company on earth. Because when we do surveys and we ask people, what is the distracting technology that you hate most? Number one is email. Number two is Slack or some other group messaging service.

28:29And so I went to Slack headquarters. This was before the acquisition by Salesforce, but I went to Slack headquarters. And I expected, look, if this is the most distracting technology on earth, they should be distracted all the time because nobody uses Slack more than Slack. And that's not what I found at all. that in fact, if you used Slack on nights and weekends, you are reprimanded. You are told that's not what we do here. And in fact, they have this channel in the internal company Slack message boards. They have a channel called Beef Tweets where you can post your beef about the company, things that you don't like that are happening at the company.

29:02Now, the job of management is not necessarily to fix every problem. You can't do that. You can have a difference of opinion. Some people say, do this. Some people, okay, that's up to a manager to decide what they want to do. So, but employees need to have a forum to talk about these problems. They need to know that their concerns are seen. So what they did at Slack, it's very interesting. They actually would use emojis to convey that these messages had been received loud and clear. So they would use an eye emoji to let people know that that had been seen or a checkmark emoji to tell people, yep, the problem is solved.

29:32So number one, giving employees psychological safety. Number two, having a place to talk about this problem. And I also profiled Boston Consulting Group, which I used to work at, which used to be a terrible company. Now they're ranked as one of the best places in America to work for. They gave people these meetings where they could talk about gaining consensus to solve this problem of distraction. So there's many different ways you can give people a place to talk about this problem. The third and perhaps the most important attribute of an indistractable workplace is that company management exemplifies what it means to be indistractable.

30:05So at company headquarters in San Francisco, there was – maybe still is. I haven't been there in a while, but there's a picture of it in my book. This bright pink neon sign is about six feet wide in the company canteen in huge pink neon letters that said, work hard and go home. Not what you would expect in a hard-charging Silicon Valley company. but that was part of the company ethos because the company management believed that to do their best work, people needed to work without distraction, okay? And then go home and that's exactly what happened. So it's amazing how companies will hire me to come in and teach their company how to be indistractable and you know who it is who's using their phone in these meetings when they have an all-hand meeting?

30:49It's amazing, every single time. Is it the millennial? Nope. Is it the Gen Z? Nope. You know who it is who's checking their phone? It's the boomer. Yeah. It's the big boomer boss who wants to show everybody, I'm so important. I need to check emails all the time, even in this meeting that we're going to talk about. We're going to learn how to not be constantly distracted. And of course, that's the answer. That's why the company is so distractible because management is showing people what they expect. You expect people to always be on and that drives people crazy and leads to burnout. And so instead, company management needs to exemplify, here's what it means to be indistractable.

31:21So lead by example. By the way, that's also the exact same advice I give to parents. I hear from parents all the time who tell me my kid's so distracted. They won't start playing Fortnite. They're always on TikTok. And meanwhile, they're checking their phone in front of their kids 24-7. That's so true. So true. I love your beef tweet idea as well. Because sometimes it's just about having a forum to share these things, isn't it? And being heard is half of it. And then effectively, it's like an internal kind of qualitative research group where you're getting kind of live feedback on how people are feeling and what's stopping them being successful.

31:55That's brilliant. Yeah, absolutely. And again, it's those companies that can't talk about this problem, that can't talk about all kinds of other problems, right? How they're not serving their customers as well as they could be, about HR management issues that aren't being discussed and then end up exploding on the company with all kinds of lawsuits and bad stuff. You have to have this open communication form by giving people a chance to talk about where there are rooms for improvement. Because if we can't talk about the problem, we can't fix it. Totally, totally agree. I thought it would be a little bit of fun, actually.

32:22I picked out my five favorite tweets of yours from last year as well, just to kind of pick up on some other themes, which I think could be useful. The first one actually is quite a recent one is imposter syndrome, which I thought was fascinating. The feeling that you're not good enough. And I know it's something I've struggled with. And people, I think it's one of those things that more people suffer from it than you might realize. What's the difference between the doubts that we have in our minds versus the evidence for what we can actually do? Yeah, it turns out that imposter syndrome is one of these fear-based motivations.

32:55For many people, it becomes almost an excuse based on our beliefs of our self-image. And so that's why it's so important, and I talk about this quite a bit in Indistractable, to be very careful about our self-image. that in one respect, we hear a lot about our capabilities from outsiders. And, you know, when we hear about how, for example, we're just talking about how there's this perception that technology is addictive, that there's nothing we can do about it, that it's taking over our lives. And so this teaches us the sense of learned helplessness, that there's nothing we can do, right? The word addiction comes from addictio in the Latin, which means slave, right?

33:30So we're enslaved by this technology. So we kind of adopt that mentality. And you hear people kind of diagnosing themselves, oh, I must have undiagnosed ADHD, or I'm this or I'm that. We adopt these monikers, and that can really hurt us, as opposed to when we pick our monikers. So there's this thing that I call an identity pact, which comes out of the research around the psychology of religion, that when someone calls themselves a particular faith, for example, they're more likely to abide by those tenets. Or for example, when someone says, I'm a vegan, right? when they call themselves a vegan, then they don't wake up in the morning and struggle with saying, oh, am I going to have a bacon sandwich for breakfast?

34:09No, their identity, their moniker is that they are vegan, is who they are. So you have to choose your identity very carefully, which is why the book is called Indistractable. It's meant to sound like indestructible. So if you're listening to this podcast for as long as you have, you can proudly call yourself indistractable. You don't have to read the book. You can say, hey, that's who I am. That's my identity. Is it any different from someone who doesn't eat a ham sandwich or someone who wears religious garb? No, this is who I am. I'm sorry. I don't check my phone every 30 seconds. Or hey, if we're going to have lunch together, I'm going to put away my phone and it'd be great if you could too.

34:42So we could be fully present with each other. So we can choose our identity. And so when it comes to imposter syndrome, we have to be very, very careful to choose the right identity that serves us rather than hurts us. And even in another tweet, you said as well, even in how we perceive the quality of our sleep. Well, that blew me. That blew my mind. It wasn't actually the actual quality of sleep. It was our perception of quality of sleep that was more predictive. This one changed my life because I used to have super bad insomnia. I would toss and turn for what felt like hours. I would wake up at 3 a.m.

35:15and not be able to fall back asleep. And so I started doing some research on the source of these problems. And you know what the most common, well, you read the tweet in the article, so you might know, maybe I shouldn't ask you. Sorry for the rhetorical question. But it turns out that the number one cause of insomnia, the number one cause is worrying about insomnia. Yeah, that is literally the number one cause. It's not it's not a broken brain, even though the pharmaceutical industry would love to sell you all kinds of pills, which we know have all kinds of side effects. The number one cause is worrying about this problem.

35:49So what I what I learned was that there's this method that I that that I adopted that really changed my life. So there's a few things. One is that I got myself the best sleeping aid I have ever seen, I've ever found, much better than sleeping pills, because I tried those two. What works way better is a Kindle. Get yourself some kind of e-reader. I like the Kindle, you can use whatever you want. Some kind of e-reader, and now all the modern ones, they used to be fear of blue light, right? That doesn't happen anymore. All the new e-readers don't emit blue light, so you don't have to worry about that.

36:20What it does, the reason this works, it breaks up this conversation, this script that's in your head. Because here's what happens. When you have trouble sleeping, what are you thinking about? You're sitting in bed and you're thinking, oh, my gosh, if I don't get to bed soon, if I don't sleep soon, my entire day tomorrow is going to be wrecked and I'm not going to be able to perform. And then I'm going to have to go to bed early. Maybe I can take a nap. And what's going to happen? I'm going to script that presentation. And you start ruminating and ruminating. So what happens is just the practice of reading, and I always have a semi-boring book.

36:48Don't get horror or a book you really enjoy. Get a semi-boring book. So for me, it's historical nonfiction. That tends to put me to sleep really quickly. And it's amazing. It breaks up that script long enough for you to slowly fade out. And then after I put the Kindle down, I repeat a simple mantra. The mantra is, the body gets what the body needs if you let it. I just repeat that to myself. The body gets what the body needs if you let it. Reminding myself that, you know what? if I don't fall asleep, no big deal, right? The body gets what the body needs. Sometimes the body doesn't need that much sleep.

37:21Like if I got a really good night's sleep last night, all right, maybe my sleep won't be that great tonight, but tomorrow night I'll probably rebound and have fine sleep. So the body gets what the body needs if you let it. Now, what most people do, this is what really gets people, they go to sleep too late because they're doom scrolling till 1am and then they wake up at 3am and now they're freaking out, right? So the best thing you can do to get more sleep is to have a freaking bedtime, right? So now my bedtime is 10 PM. I'm in bed. And now, okay, by having that bedtime, if I wake up one time here, one time there, it's no big deal.

37:52And by repeating that mantra of the body gets what the body needs, if you let it, guess what happened? I started relaxing. I stopped that anxiety script, that rumination in my head, and I started falling asleep. I love that. That's so good. It shows the power of mindset, it doesn't it how much that you know you control your mind it links to one of the other tweets that i loved from you last year which is um luck isn't chance it's a choice which i think a lot of people kind of look around and go oh they just got lucky i wish i was lucky as him or her and they don't realize that they're more in control of their luck than perhaps they realize oh so so true that that that luck is a belief set it really is a belief set that it turns out that people who are more optimistic are more lucky right it's statistically so and people who have a what's called an internal locus of control versus an external locus of control a person with an external locus of control things thinks that things happen to them a person with internal locus of control thinks that they have more agency they can affect outcomes what's interesting about this research around locus of control is that it turns out that people even for people who don't have that much agency, people who are from an upbringing where they didn't have many resources, maybe they grew up in a war-torn country, maybe they were discriminated against, maybe they were abused, whatever the circumstances, even the people who did have bona fide things they can't change, and we hear this all the time, kind of this people who are true victims, even they, when they have an internal locus of control, do better.

39:28so even if you are in the shit if you believe you can do something to get yourself out of that situation you do better in every conceivable metric people with an internal locus of control they are wealthier they give back to their community more they have longer relationships they have more friendship everything good happens to people with intern on internal locus of control and this is very much related to opportunity and luck they make their own luck they believe they have agency. So they see things, they literally see things that pessimistic people or people that have an external locus of control just don't see.

40:00Oh, that's brilliant. And that's very much the sort of, we sit on social media a lot with so many, so much bad news that people start to believe they're a victim of things going on around them. And they take on all that negative thought, don't they? Rather than realizing that actually, you've got a lot more control over your, you know, outcomes than you realize. So true. I mean, this is my big beef with the media. I I can't remember who said it the other day that I thought it was really smart, but they said the media doesn't necessarily lean left or lean right. It leans down. The first rule of journalism, if it bleeds, it leads.

40:33And we forget what a business it is. We think that the media, somebody sitting there at the New York Times or the BBC or whatever and is thinking, what's the most important piece of information that the viewers and readers should know today? That is not true. That is not true. They will show you whatever they think you're going to watch, right? And so what do they show you? Bad news because that's what we want to see. That's what gets people riled up. That's what gets people tuned in is fear. Fear sells. You know, the good things that happen in the world happen very slowly. They're not as dramatic.

41:09We don't talk about all the people who didn't crash today on airplanes or who were pulled out of poverty. But it turns out year after year after year, the world keeps getting better and better. There's a wonderful book by Hans Ronsling called Factfulness that I just love. I think every human being should read this book where the premise of the book was he gave PhDs, he gave professors a test on the state of the world. And it just had some basic questions, true-fault type questions of how the world is doing. Okay, how is the world doing in terms of education? How is it doing in terms of female empowerment?

41:44How is it doing in terms of the expansion of democracy, the environment, all these metrics of how is the world doing? And it turns out that these college PhD professors did worse than chance. They literally did worse than monkeys who would have taken this test because they had – the most educated people had the most bias towards negativity. And so we have to be very, very careful because it completely skews our view of the world. In fact, you see that in marketing a lot actually. marketers are very very bad judges of marketing because because you've got so much the theory you're so close to your own strategy or whatever and you're overexposed you don't think like the average person walking down the high street that's interesting yeah have you seen that a lot where they don't have their finger on the pulse of who they're serving or what what do you think is the core of the problem totally in fact you know whenever i'm sort of writing up you know i don't know the top 10 things every marketer should think about i always start with the very very same point which is you are not the customer because the average the average person probably buys the average product once or twice a year and they mostly are thinking about other brands than your brand you know they've got busy lives they're getting on with things but you as the marketer are thinking about your brand all the time and so what you think they care about is often very different to what they actually care about so it's partly why you know in my day job at system one we actually measure emotional reaction that people have to advertising and product and the brand in general and we do it really to remind people that this is actually what your customer knows about your brand or feels about the brand versus what you think i mean a classic um a classic one is if you for example if you're talking to the brand manager of fairy liquid and then you might you might say to people how often do you think people buy that in a year right and most people think well i go shopping once a week so maybe i'll buy it once a month and the actual answer is once every two years but two years yeah it'll be something like that yeah and we've we've done this time and time again but the frequency that people buy a particular product on average now obviously you get some you know it is a much much much less than actually people think so it's a great one but you know our ability as experts to predict behavior in our audience back to your point is probably no better than than a monkey throwing a dart at a you know a dartboard to hit the bullseye you know just rounding up a few more the couple more of the tweets that really stood out is i loved your one about why successful people get more successful as well what are the habits of successful people that make them successful and make them continue to be successful that that you know everyone listening could learn from so i think the the the biggest one we talked about a little bit already with locus of control i think that's an attribute of successful people across the board that people who succeed better than others are people who have high agency, right?

44:34They're very agentic people. They believe that they could do something. And so that actually, I think, is really highlighted actually from whether you like their politics or not. The duo of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, I think, really exemplify this. Again, I'm not talking about their politics. That's a whole other question. But here are two people who will reality into being. They have what Walter Isaacson said of Steve Jobs. They have this reality distortion field. That the fact that Donald Trump says he's the best, thinks he's the best, think everybody's talking about how he's the best, it's weird, yeah.

45:09But it's also – I think there's something to that, right? There's even research about how when people talk about themselves in the third person, how it gives them more confidence. What they're doing is essentially every success that they have builds on this belief set that more and more of what they do works. And so you become this personality that thinks that everything I touch turns to gold. Of course, there's risk to that, right? Your ego can get ahead of what you're actually capable of doing. But I think that's probably the biggest attribute of successful people is that they believe that what they're going to do will actually work.

45:42Yeah, that's so true. And I think then linked to that as well, the more successful you are, you have the network effect, don't you? Where actually your reputation's built, your network, your connections. And the more well-known you are, the luckier you become in effects, you know, because the network effects, you know, kicks in over and above that and gives you a bigger platform. So, yeah, so much of it, again, it comes back to mentality, doesn't it? It's amazing how much of this stuff actually comes back to how we think about ourselves. I'd love to carry on because, you know, there's so much I'd love to talk about, but we run out of time.

46:14But thank you so much for talking about that. And keep up the hard work because it's great. And I'm a massive fan of what you're doing. And I think, you know, how we use our time and focus is the biggest competitive advantage we've got. So thank you. My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me here. So ladies and gentlemen, I hope you enjoyed listening to this one-off bonus episode. We will be back to normal on Wednesday with our regular episodes coming out. If you'd like to check them out wherever you get your podcasts, please do. Also hit the subscribe button to never miss an episode again. And I would love it if you give me a review.

46:46Please do give me a review wherever you find your podcast. And if you want to follow me, you can find me over on LinkedIn at John Evans and also on X at Uncensored CMO. I really appreciate you listening and watching and I look forward to you joining me next time. Thank you.