SPI 808: How to Take Control of Your Time with Nir Eyal and Matt Gartland

SPI 808: How to Take Control of Your Time with Nir Eyal and Matt Gartland

Nir Eyal: The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. That’s really the summary of my 10 years of research. That if you wake up every morning and your cell phone is right there, you’re going to pick it up before you even say hello to your loved one. If you leave these type of decisions to the last minute, you will fail. But if you plan ahead, there is no distraction we can’t overcome. Paolo Coelho said, “a mistake repeated more than once is a decision.” So, how long are we going to complain about, “Oh, social media! All these things are so distracting!” before we do something about it? So a distracted person keeps getting distracted. They are choosing to be distracted because they keep making the same mistakes.

Pat Flynn: One of my favorite authors as of late is Nir Eyal. And he has written a couple books that have gone pretty wild out there, Hooked, How to Build Habit Forming Products, and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. And we’re going to talk more on the latter today, in a round table, with myself, Matt Gartland, and Nir, of course, himself, and we also get a glimpse into some of the other research and findings that he is doing with relation to a new book that he is working on, which is really fascinating.

But today we do talk about things like habits and willpower following through, how to make sure that you are being held accountable. What does that actually mean? And, and actually how to get to that next level in your business and in your life through the world that we live in today. And what I love about the way Nir approaches his work is it’s always sort of science and research based and he explains it really easily.

I mean, there’s a lot of authors out there who do science based findings for things that involve self improvement, but Nir, I find breaks it down easier than anybody else. And so enjoy this conversation between Matt, myself and Nir, and let’s talk about leveling up in life and in business. Here we go.

Cheers.

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, it took him nearly 40 years to finally get over the fact he’ll never be taller than six feet, Pat Flynn.

Matt Gartland: Hello friends, and welcome back to the pod. Another fun round table episode, as always with my partner in crime, Pat, and this time around a very special guest. We are thrilled to have Nir Eyal with us. Neer, how’s it going? Thank you so much for being here tonight.

Nir Eyal: Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Matt Gartland: Yeah, we’re thrilled to reconnect.

There’s so many great things that you’ve been doing over the years that, you know, are, I think, as relevant and prescient as ever. So really just to kind of jump in, and it’s a fun connection point back to even our relationship where it started, is your book Indistractable came out about five years ago, which was crazy when I looked back at that.

And more than ever, these days, I feel more pulled than ever, you know, there’s more signals, there’s more noise, there’s more fractiles on the internet where I could be putting my time and attention. So I’d love to kind of even hear your perspective being really like you wrote literally the book on it.

Like, do you feel like distraction in the universe that we’re living in, especially with online media, has it improved in the five years since the book has been out or has it gotten even worse?

Nir Eyal: For sure, the world is becoming a more distracting place. And why does that happen? Because it is the result of abundance.

This is the first time in human history that we have so much, right? If you are fortunate enough to be living in the industrialized world, you’re much more likely to die based on a disease of excess, like diabetes, than you are starvation. And that’s, that’s the first time in human history that that’s been the case for 200,000 years.

Humans have been plagued by drought and starvation, and this is the first time that we actually die of these diseases of excess in any significant number. So we’re seeing something very similar when it comes to information abundance. That the price of progress, again, the price of all this progress, of having all these good things in the world, is that now we have to learn how to deal with them.

So yeah, it’s a wonderful thing that for the first time in 200,000 years of human history, we don’t have to be constantly bored. If you look at literature, if you look at, you know, the historical record, there’s Boredom was a huge problem for people for 200,000 years. This is the first time in history where we have this amazing boredom alleviation device in our pockets at any time of day or night.

And that’s pretty great. That’s wonderful that we can learn a new language with Duolingo that we can use an app to read a book. We can watch videos about pretty much anything we’d like to learn about. But the price of all that progress is that we have to learn how to become indistractable. So I really think that there’s a bifurcation that there’s people in the world who will allow their time and their attention to be controlled by others, essentially have their lives controlled by others and people who stand up and say, no, I will control my time and attention.

I will control my life. Because I’m indistractable. So the world is definitely becoming a more distracting place, but that doesn’t mean we’re powerless.

Matt Gartland: So then how do we think about trying to reclaim some of that power or at least put, you know, the guardrails so much of that wisdom is in the book. I just wonder in five years, how have even your own applications of that right in your own career, with your own business, with your own family, you know, we all here have some kids.

So I’m curious, like how you’ve even adapted and evolved along the same guidelines.

Nir Eyal: Absolutely. So this is what the book is all about. And it took me five years to write Indistractable because I kept getting distracted. And so it wasn’t until I learned these tactics for myself that I could put them to use.

So today I’m 46 years old. I’m in the best physical shape of my life. I have not quite a six pack, maybe like a four and a half pack, even though I used to be clinically obese. It goes to show I’m not very athletic at all. I’ve never been athletic. But I work out when I say I will, I eat right because I say I will, I have a better relationship with my family than ever before because I’m fully present with them.

I’m not on my phone. I’m not distracted. I’m fully present with the people I love. And so I have a better relationship with my wife and my daughter than ever before. And I’m more productive at work than ever before because instead of diddling around with email and slack channels and whatever other junk, I do the work that I say I’m going to do.

And so this is the skill of the century because there is no facet of your life, your mental health, your physical health, your professional wellbeing. All of this stuff requires you to be able to focus your attention. If you can’t focus your attention long enough to read a book or to, you know, take an online course or to sit still long enough with your family over dinner without checking your device, you got a problem and we got to figure out how to fix this problem. And listen, I was patient zero. I wrote this book for me more than anyone else, because when I read everyone else’s take on the subject, it was stupid stuff like, well, just tell your boss, no, right. Just say no more. That’s stupid advice.

Who’s going to, you know, the only people who give that kind of advice are tenured professors who can’t get fired. If you tell your boss, no. You’re going to get laid off. That’s a stupid thing to do. Or here’s a better piece of advice. Stop using social media. Stop checking email. Thanks, stupid. I’ll get fired.

I won’t have a career if I stop using these technologies. So I just, I didn’t feel it was productive. It was certainly wasn’t for me to tell people, stop using technology. Technology is the problem because you know, when I started studying this topic, well over like 10 years ago now, one of the first things I learned, Was that distraction has always been part of the human equation.

Plato, the Greek philosopher, 2,500 years ago was complaining about how distracting the world is. So the problem can’t be caused by our technologies. It’s not technology’s fault. We love to blame the technologies. It’s very convenient, right? It’s Mark Zuckerberg’s fault. I’m not doing it. But of course, what I learned when I studied the psychology of, of distraction is that the vast majority of distractions are not external triggers. External triggers are the pings, the dings, the rings. That’s where everybody starts. They think they know how to manage distraction. Turn off your phone, grayscale your screen, turn off notifications. That stuff doesn’t work because only 10 percent of distractions come from your phone.

You know where the other 90 percent of distractions come from 90 percent in here, right? They start within us. They’re not external triggers, their internal triggers. So the big aha moment for me was realizing just digging into the basic research, starting from first principles around what is distraction.

Distraction is an emotion regulation problem. It’s an impulse control issue. Your brain probably is not broken. You don’t need any pills. What you need is skills. These are skills that we don’t learn. I didn’t learn them in school. And we don’t teach our kids. How do you focus? How do you make sure that you can become indistractable?

It starts with, there are four big steps, so I can, I can walk through those in a minute, but the first and most important first step is to master the internal triggers. Boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety. If you don’t understand the root cause of why you are escaping reality with distraction, you’re always going to get distracted by something, whether it’s too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, you’re going to find distraction because you’re always escaping a feeling.

So if you don’t have tools to deal with the feeling, none of that other stuff is going to work.

Matt Gartland: I think it’s, it’s powerful to continue to even reflect on history as then a barometer of the future, right? I mean, so many of these things that truly can be, I get synthesized into constants, right? You know, some things are truly timeless.

And then just trying to acclimate ourselves as best we can to current state realities, but know that, yeah, some things there’s just really common denominators for. It was an appreciation I had. for the book when we were working on it together. And I don’t think I completed that thought in the setup, but it was one of the last book projects that I did before Pat and I joined forces and created SPI Media was working on on Indistractable.

One of the big takeaways though, of that time working together and then just even myself trying to, you know, continually work on myself in the same capacity, right? To try to do the internal work and then set up external environments, my office, other things to play a factor was how much of this was like on me personally, right?

And there’s still that, that sense of self responsibility, of course, to process this information, to do the internal work and to do that. But what, what I’ve also found and would love Pat, you didn’t even chime in on this as well, is surrounding yourself with other people that kind of believe in trying to operate in the same way, sort of like an internal and the small community effect where like, if I can have, you know, my team or my partners also like talk about these concepts, right, maybe together in our sort of safe spaces.

Trying to help each other has helped me in my own ability to reduce my susceptibility to distractions. And I’m curious if like more of a network effect has played into, you know, Pat, your lived reality with distractions and in your, if it even, even remotely begins to kind of overlap with some of the research that you’ve uncovered on the subject.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I mean, for me, you can’t read the label when you’re inside the bottle. And sometimes when I’m in my own work or I’m even being distracted, I don’t even notice it at times because it’s almost automatic in many cases. And when there are other people who I’ve given agency to, to catch me or, you know, help me stay on track, it’s always helped out.

And this is where my mastermind groups come into play. This is where my wife comes into play. This is where you Matt have come into play several times as well. It’s like, Hey, we, we got something to focus on. Let’s stay on the path. And, you know, some people need outside help more than others, but it’s been vital, absolutely.

The hard thing is Nir the last time you were on this show, I think it was on a seven years ago, and that was after your, your book hooked, which plays directly with this because like these tools and social media, like they’re not built to help us through these problems we’re talking about right now. I mean, they’re actually working against us, which is why I love that you follow this up with your book and they’re not going to stop trying to hook us.

So for me, it is a willpower and discipline more than anything. And that is something that If you don’t consciously think about it, these things are going to control you. You’re not going to have control over it, and it’s really scary what can happen.

Nir Eyal: Yeah, I’d love to build on some of that. So one of the things, the concept that I had to change my mind about was this concept of willpower.

In fact, we’re starting to realize, and much of the psychology community has already come around to believing, that willpower is a myth, actually. It’s not a concept that’s actually a helpful psychological designation. In fact, we used to have this belief, that we called it ego depletion in the psychology community.

Ego depletion is this idea that you run out of willpower, just like battery charge on your phone, that it becomes something that you run out of. And there were some studies done by one very prominent professor that showed that in fact, this was true that people, when they were taxed with difficult tasks, they would run out of willpower.

They would, you know, use up the gas in their gas tank, so to speak. And so this got a lot of popular press. And then it turned out that as we do in the social sciences, when a study sounds fishy, when a concept sounds too good to be true. What do we do? We replicate the study. We run it again. And as far as we know now, a decade off from, from when these studies were published, it turns out that this idea of ego depletion, that we run out of willpower, like gas in a gas tank, as far as we can tell, the studies don’t replicate. It doesn’t exist. It’s not real, except, interestingly enough, in one group of people. There is one group of people out there who really do experience ego depletion. They really do run out of willpower like gas in a gas tank. Who are those people? People who believe that willpower is a limited resource.

That’s it. It’s the only people that had this effect. So this is super important because when we hear things in the media all the time about how technology is addictive, how it’s hijacking our brains, how we’re powerless to resist it. In fact, what we’re doing is reinforcing exactly what the tech companies want.

It’s called learned helplessness. The media companies want you to believe there’s nothing you can do, right? You’re powerless because what do people do when they believe they’re powerless? Nothing. So it’s not me. It’s not my parenting style. Oh, it’s my kids are playing are on TikTok. They’re playing Fortnite.

That’s it’s addicting them, right? The word addiction comes from the Latin slave, addictio. It’s a clinical term and addiction is not, Ooh, I like it a lot. An addiction is a pathology, but we toss this term around as if we’re all enslaved. And as Henry Ford beautifully said, whether you believe you can or you cannot, you’re right. So one of the things I’m really fighting out there is this perception that we’re powerless, that we’re slaves, because that is the number one best way to give these media companies what they want is to believe there’s nothing you can do about it.

So I think a much healthier approach is to see, you know, what media, all forms of media, whether it’s the news, whether it’s movies, whether it’s social media. All form of media is fine. It’s great as long as you use it with intent. I think the big problem is that people, they use these tools to escape a feeling.

And this is not something we talk about. We talk about willpower and grit and resilience. We don’t talk about how to manage uncomfortable emotions. And if we can begin to identify those emotions and figure out, wait a minute, when I’m bored, I tend to check email because email will tell me what to do.

When I’m lonely, I check social media. When I’m uncertain, I Google something. When you can begin to identify the internal trigger, the feeling, with the action, then you can start taking steps to break that spontaneous stimulus and response relationship. But if we just go about our days thinking, oh, it’s something broken about my brain.

I probably have undiagnosed this, that, or the other. I probably need pills for this because there’s nothing I can do. Then we actually do become powerless. So that, that I think is a very important aspect.

Pat Flynn: And then confirmation bias kicks in and you look for signs that that’s true, which like just furthers the spiral.

Nir Eyal: Totally. Absolutely.

Matt Gartland: Yeah, that’s absolutely fascinating. I wonder how, again, with a certain sort of accountability mechanism, you know, and this is coming from a layman. I don’t have social science or psychology to back up maybe a theory, but like I can physically feel more focused and in more control.

Maybe that’s just my, my brain doing things, but when I am in a small group or I can get help from my mastermind, right. Or Pat and I are having a private conversation and we’re able to really kind of refocus ourselves on what’s important and kind of check in on priorities. That to me feels like it is helping to fade away some of the distractions or the impulse pulls that sometimes are just kind of their own, which is like they’re in the ether. So like, is there any science or truth or, or backing to, again, the power of accountability in groups like that to try to assuage some of these, these impulses?

Nir Eyal: Yeah. So, so this is called a pre commitment device, which is just a fancy way of saying you’re going to plan out what you’re going to do and when you’re going to do it. And this is very well studied. I mean, there’s thousands of peer reviewed studies about exactly this mechanism that you’re describing. There are a few different kinds of pre commitments, or you can think of them as a pact.

We have an identity pact where we have some kind of self image. So that’s why the book is called indestructible. I made up that word. It’s meant to sound like indestructible. It’s who you are. It’s an identity. This, by the way, comes out of the psychology of religion. When someone calls themselves a devout Muslim, they don’t say, Oh, I wonder if I’m gonna have a gin and tonic with my dinner.

No, devout Muslims don’t drink alcohol. It’s who they are. When someone says, I’m a vegetarian or a vegan, they don’t say, Oh, I wonder if I’m gonna have a bacon sandwich for breakfast. No, because that’s who they are. It’s their identity. So one very important pact is to have a new identity, to call yourself indistractable.

It is who you are. Because remember, behavior change always necessitates identity change. If you want to get in shape, you have to call yourself an athlete. If you want to learn a new skill, think of yourself as an academic, right? Thinking of yourself as a new identity is incredibly powerful as a tool. So that’s one identity pact.

We also have a price pact where we have some kind of monetary disincentive. So the way I got in shape and stop being clinically obese and today I’m in the best shape of my life is because I have this price pact that every morning I walk into my closet, and I see this calendar on the wall and taped to the calendar is a crisp 100 bill.

And every day, this is called the burn or burn technique. Every day I look at that 100 bill and I have a choice to make. I can either burn some calories, right? Take a run, go for a swim, do some pushups on the spot, some kind of physical activity. It’s a rule I made for myself. Or I have to physically light that 100 bill on fire.

So burn some calories or burn the money. So I’ve entered into this price pact with myself to do what I say I’m going to do. Right. To finish this book Indistractable, I made a bet with my buddy, Mark. I said, Mark, I’m going to finish this manuscript or I’m going to pay you 10,000. Works like a charm. It’s the most one of the most effective techniques you can use so the only problem with these packs there’s a couple other packs.

One of them is a social pact you described earlier the only problem is these techniques come last. Okay, if you listen to this interview and you say, oh great I know how to change my life. I’m gonna start making these packs and tip making bets. It will fail It will 100 percent fail unless you do the other three steps first.

So step number one, master internal triggers. We talked about those emotions. That’s the most important first step. And I show you how to do that. Step number two, making time for traction, putting in your calendar time to do what is in accordance with your values. Step number three, hacking back the external triggers, all those pings, dings, and rings.

That’s kind of the simple part, but super important. If you do those three things first, then the packs will work. What most people do if they try these packs, even the social packs that you talked about earlier, which are very effective, right? Entering into a pack and saying, okay, Pat, we’re going to get together.

We’re going to sit next to each other. We’re going to keep each other accountable for the next 45 minutes. Go very, very effective. But if you do that last. It will fail. It will break. You have to first do the other three.

Matt Gartland: So they stack. It’s one plus one equals three maybe equation. If you can be successful with the foundational layers, at least I would hope so, you know, they become more powerful collectively, right?

Sort of the unity of all the forces together.

Nir Eyal: It’s like learning any new skill, right? If you want to play basketball, you have to learn how to dribble before you can dunk. So you really have to figure out how to manage your emotions. That’s the most important part. You have to have those arrows in your quiver ready to go.

And people gloss over this stuff because I don’t want to think about my icky sticky emotions, right? That’s no fun, but I’m telling you, we have to acknowledge that distraction is an emotion regulation problem, an impulse control issue. So what I found in my research is that the most successful people, people who are at the top of their game, whether it’s in business, The arts, sports, whatever it is, these people, they experience the same exact internal triggers.

They also feel lonely and bored and stressed and anxious. They feel the same emotions that everybody else feels, sometimes even more so than the average person. The difference is that those people know what to do with those emotions. So highly successful people, they don’t do what most people do. Most people, when they feel a little bit bored, a little bit anxious, a little bit stressed, they look for an escape.

Give me a pill. Give me a drink. Give me a scroll. Give me a click. Give me something to take my mind off of this discomfort, right? What highly successful people do, they don’t escape the emotion with distraction. They use it as rocket fuel to propel them towards traction. And so that’s really the big difference.

But good news is that we can all learn how to do that.

Pat Flynn: I’m curious about, in terms of high performers, you had mentioned time for traction, calendar, and putting things on there is so important, but I know a few people who use them in completely different ways, right? There are people who will literally put minute by minute what it is that they’re supposed to do so that they don’t have to think about it, they’re not going to get distracted, and that’s not my style.

I prefer more time blocking, and this day is meant for this, and this day is meant for that, or in between these hours. I’m curious if there’s perhaps one that works better than another, or is it kind of like a diet. You kind of kind of have to figure out the one that works for you. How do we best utilize our calendar in that way?

Nir Eyal: Absolutely. Okay. So step number one, master internal triggers. Step number two, as you said, is make time for traction. You have to turn your values into time because you can’t say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from. I’m going to say that again. This is so important. You cannot say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from.

So if you have a big open white space calendar. What did you get distracted from? You didn’t plan traction. So you can’t say that you got distracted. You have to plan what you’re going to do. Now I’ll tell you what doesn’t work. Pat, what doesn’t work is when people say, I’m going to be spontaneous, right?

Whatever happens happens. I’m just going to go with the flow just so I can, you know, go wherever the muse takes me. That absolutely doesn’t work. We know. From study after study that the more freedom, the more leeway, the more unscheduled time people have, the less productive they are, which is of course is an illusion, right?

How many times we have a weekend and we say, Oh, I’ve got nothing planned. I’m going to sort through the garage and I’m going to organize my bookshelf and I’m going to do this. I’m going to do that. None of it gets done. We need constraints. People operate best when they have some kind of constraint. And so the best constraint you can have is time blocking now.

And a lot of people have converted to this. Mark Andreessen, the famous venture capitalist and Andreessen Horowitz, he used to have a famous article about how he doesn’t plan ahead. You know, if someone needs to see him, he needs, they need to come during the moment and that’s just how he operates. And I was so happy recently, just last year, he said that technique doesn’t work at all.

What does work? Time boxing. And that’s exactly what I promote in my book is planning out what you’re going to do and when you’re going to do it. So this is what Elon Musk does. This is what Mark Andreessen now does. If you look at the calendars of highly successful people, they don’t go with the flow.

They plan their day. If you look at the calendar of unsuccessful people, they don’t plan their day. So what that means is you’ve got to plan out according to your values, right? Values are defined as attributes of the person you want to become. You have to turn your values into time. Now, whether you schedule them like I do where I do 15 minute blocks, some people do an hour block, some people do a minute block.

It doesn’t actually matter what denomination you choose. The only thing that matters is that it’s chosen in advance. So sometimes I’ll actually schedule half a day. For example, when I’m with my daughter, we have what we call planned spontaneity. Sounds like an oxymoron plan, spontaneity. Why do I do that?

I have four hours with my daughter where we’re just going to hang out and we don’t know what we’re going to do. Maybe we’re going to go surfing. Maybe we’re going to go to the library. Maybe we’re going to go to the park. We don’t know what we’re going to do, but why do I plan that time? Why do I time block it?

Because that tells me what I will not be doing. I will not be putzing around on my phone. I will not be taking business calls. I will not be saying, Oh honey, let me just do this one thing on my phone. No, I have scheduled that time and devoted it to somebody I love very much because that’s in accordance with my values of being an available father.

So that’s why it’s so important to schedule that time is not only what you will do, but what you will not be doing. And then you can experiment it, right? You can try 15 minute increments, 20 minute increments, all day increments. It doesn’t really matter as long as it’s planned in advance. Do not change it in the moment.

Matt Gartland: How far in advance are you doing that planning? Are you doing weekly planning, monthly planning? And, and I ask in part, because especially with say some of our, our community members trying to build businesses, they’re in the early stages, they have lots of ideas. They’re trying to, you know, kind of curate their ideas, right?

And the notion of going from an earlier stage of even a creative process, whether I guess it is a business endeavor or just even a hobby project or something, the question of, of that time horizon, like how far out am I trying to, to do that planning so that I can bring more focus to the thing and I can see a light at the end of the tunnel and I can stay committed to that end point.

Right. So I’m curious how you in your own work, in your own life, do that.

Nir Eyal: So in my 10 years of experience and working with thousands of clients at this point, I would say about 80 percent of people can do this once a week. That’s what I do. So almost all white collar professionals have visibility for about a week’s time, right?

That’s about what we kind of know. All right, I wake up around this time and I tend to have lunch around that time and I, you know, have these tasks to do in these meetings. So that’s what I do every Sunday night. Okay. 8 p. m. It’s on my calendar. I have 15 minutes where I review my schedule from the week that just passed.

I look at my schedule for the week ahead and I make adjustments. Now, I would say most of my calendar stays the same, right? I tend to work out at the same time. I take meetings at the same time. I have my focused work sessions around the same time and I’ll make adjustments. Oh, you know what? This person needed to meet with me at this time, so I need to move some things around.

No problem. So for me, the cadence is the every week I do it on Sunday nights. Sometimes I meet with professionals who say, you know what? I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, right? Like, I don’t know until I get there. So for example, doctors give me this a lot, right? Like I need to show up and then I need to know what’s going on.

Then I can make my day. So the idea is that you make that schedule in advance. With the amount of visibility that you have into your day, week, or month. So if you can see ahead and say, okay, I basically know where things are going to fall out from my day. Then you can make it, you know, so many people I work with, they do it first thing in the morning.

Many people do it the last thing at night for the following day. I happen to, and about 80 percent of people I work with, we can do it once a week.

Matt Gartland: Pat, do you have any rituals? I’m kind of curious, even with your creative processes, you have a number of projects, obviously SPI, but you have the Pokemon channel, you have other things happening. So yeah, how do you even give some curation and definition to that?

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I mean, to add a little bit more color to this amazing discussion is one thing I’ve learned that I’ve needed to do is plan to plan.

If I don’t give myself time to then figure out the time that’s going to happen later, nothing happens. So when I’m working on a new project, okay, we need a two hour block of time to sit down and plan this project out. Right. And that has helped so much because not only just does it help me, but it helps everybody else who’s involved in the thing.

When I’m planning a video shoot, okay, we need to sit down, figure to then talk about how we’re going to shoot this thing. We don’t just like get into it right away and put it on our calendar. We need to figure out the spacing and when, when this is all going to happen. And it’s, I don’t, I don’t know if it’s a different part of the brain, but it feels like it, because in some moments I need to be more creative and spontaneous.

And I do block time out for that as well. But other times I have to be in planning mode to think about my future time right now, and without that space, I think it would just be a jumbled mess.

Nir Eyal: Pat, I’m not surprised that you use this technique because this is something I see in successful people that unsuccessful people don’t do.

And that is that they don’t differentiate. I think I use different terminology, but you’re already doing this. It’s the difference between what we call reactive work and reflective work. Reactive work is reacting to notifications, reacting to emails, reacting to taps on the shoulder from your colleagues.

Everybody in their day has to have time for reactive work. That’s just the nature of work. These days, the problem is that people get habituated to reactive work. Why? Because thinking is difficult. Most people do not like to think it requires cognitive horsepower. It’s much easier to say. Huh? What do I do right now?

Well, let me check email. Email will tell me what to do. That gives me that nice warm glow of, Oh, I’m being productive. Even though if you’re not planning time in your day for reflective work, reflective work is a kind of work that can only be done without distraction. Planning, strategizing, thinking for God’s sakes can only happen during reflective work time without distraction.

So if you are not planning some time in your day, to think, and that could be 30 minutes, an hour. It doesn’t matter, but you’d have to have some time in your day for reflective work. If you’re not doing that, I guarantee you you’re running real fast in the wrong direction.

Pat Flynn: I think I remember Ramit Sethi talking about how he reserves his Fridays specifically for that kind of planning, right?

He’s doing his work. He’s doing his calls Monday to Thursday. 20 percent of the week is dedicated to literally, okay, let’s strategize for the future. Let’s all come together and think in a way that we just didn’t have the space to do so earlier in the week. And so he’s a high performer. He’s doing well. I know a lot of other people would do that now too, that you’ve said that.

So I appreciate you calling that out and giving it some structure.

Nir Eyal: It’s kind of an untapped competitive advantage. I mean, if you look across your industry, most people ain’t thinking. They’re not. People are not thinking. They just do. They just react. They don’t reflect, but game changers take time to reflect. Now, the reason people don’t do this because they don’t realize you have to plan that time ahead.

So even when they do plan that time, they do it for like five minutes and then they have to check email and then they have a notification and then the, the, the, the, and they don’t have the time to properly think about the task in order to make those game changing discoveries. So you, you’ve got to not only plan that time, but keep it sacred.

Pat Flynn: I don’t know if you know this Nir, but I have started a YouTube channel in the Pokemon space and it’s been doing really well. We’re almost at a million subs. And there’s been a lot of other Pokemon YouTubers who’ve been in the space for such a long time. And they’re starting to notice how quickly we are growing.

And they’re just like, where did this guy come from? And you’re producing all these amazing videos and the audience is going to you. And we’ve been here for such a long time. Like why aren’t we getting views? And it’s interesting because I just see them habitually creating the same videos every week, and it’s the same thing.

They’re not giving themselves time to step back and go, okay, let’s actually talk about what the audience wants today. The audience has changed over the last decade. And of course me coming in new, I have a new perspective and I do plan time with my producer to go, okay, what is trending right now? What’s coming up later in the year?

That’s, that’s interesting. Oh, the Olympics are coming this year. Can we do anything related and around that? Okay. Well, we got to start that planning now. So now we’re ahead of everybody because we have given ourselves time, literally the space to come up with stuff. And like you said. And you’re spot on, just a lot of us are on automatic mode because it’s like, okay, one podcast a week, let’s go, let’s record it, let’s schedule it, we’re in it and we’re doing it and we’re feeling like we’re getting busy work done and maybe we’re not seeing the results because we haven’t given ourselves time to plan a big bold move that can, that can help us jump up.

Nir Eyal: Totally. And not only is that, do we see that in the professional space? That that’s very relatable. Unfortunately, and here’s where it gets pretty raw, we see the exact same results and deficiencies when it comes to our personal lives. How many of us give scraps of whatever’s left over in our schedule to our significant others, to our kids, to our brothers and sisters, to our parents, to our best friends.

We just give them whatever scraps of time are left over. And what this leads to, I mean, my, my mission in life here, the reason I wrote indistractable was because I don’t want to live with regret. My goal is to live the kind of life that I can look back on and say, wow, I did what I said I was going to do.

Not what social media said I should do, not what the New York times or my friends or whatever else said I should do, but I lived my life according to how I wanted to live it to minimize regret. That’s, that’s the idea is to kind of become the kind of person that I would admire by doing what I say I’m going to do according to my values, as opposed to, you know, letting the wind blow me this direction, that direction based on other people’s interests.

Because if you don’t plan your day, somebody is going to plan it for you. So that’s why we can apply the very same techniques that we would to our business, to our own life, to our personal life, to make sure we have that time with friends, with our family, by the way, also time for yourself. You know, we see a lot of people ragging on different behaviors, you know, Oh, you like to go on social media.

You like to play Pokemon. You like to watch YouTube videos. Oh, that’s a waste of time, right? That’s ridiculous, right? We see so much negativity around how people spend their time. People are so judgy around how other people spend their time. Oh, what you play Pokemon? That’s ridiculous. What a waste of time.

But oh, I watch four hours of golf on TV. That’s somehow okay. Ridiculous. That makes no sense. So we need to stop moralizing and medicalizing these technologies and realizing anything you want to do with your time is fine. Enjoy it without guilt, but do it according to your schedule and your values, not someone else’s.

So the difference between traction and distraction is one word. And that one word is intent. As Dorothy Parker said, the time you plan to waste is not wasted time. So if you put in your calendar, Hey, I like to watch YouTube videos. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s in my calendar. See, there it is. Now it’s traction.

In fact, anything else would be distraction. So it’s not that I’m arguing for, you know, this acidic life that you have to just work all day. No, no, no. I want you to plan time for the fun things in life. That’s what makes life worth living. But again, have it scheduled according to your values.

Pat Flynn: I’m going to give you a second to pick up the mic you just dropped real quick.

Matt Gartland: Pretty darn good. What I find fascinating, interesting, maybe even difficult, right, to talk about publicly, and I don’t know this way because we’ll publish, but even privately is, at least in our industry, there is like literally the term creator now, like the identity to even or with the identity point that you brought up earlier Nir is now ingrained as to just execute to make a thing and make as much stuff as possible.

There’s sort of this implied idea that if we slow down to plan, if we go slower, right, that is a bad thing that you’re not hustling hard enough. You’re not working fast enough. Like velocity is, is a big thing, right? Or at least it’s implied or even externally discussed in that way.

Pat Flynn: If I’m not creating, who am I?

Right, Matt? It’s like, so therefore I must create and create more.

Matt Gartland: Yeah. But if your primary identity, and this is something that spicy takes and whatnot, like if creator is your primary identity, it’s something that I think is somewhat of a slippery slope, if not even, you know, a dangerous thing to the, the ultimate concluding thought or the end point of, Oh, I just, thus must always be creating.

Right. And, you know, create with intent is, is a different thing than just like create on autopilot. Or at least that’s my interpretation of some of this conversation and just my own work, our work together, the creating communities were a part of. So I think it’s a real thing to like consciously. Choose to slow down, right, and plan and dial things in and to look at the right KPIs and signals in your business or whatever it is that, you know, you should maybe be calculating right and looking at to then further inform your path is probably even harkens back to your example with the Pokemon if you’re probably looking at certain signals, right?

In your analysis with your producer to further inform what you plan out and execute, but you got to slow down to do that.

Nir Eyal: The important part I think is it’s not necessarily about the pace per se. It’s about isn’t in accordance with your values. So values are defined as attributes of the person you want to become.

So what does that mean? It means you look at how does the person I want to become spend their time. And so I give people these three domains, you’ve got you, you’re at the center. If you can’t help yourself, you can’t help other people. You can’t make the world a better place. Then you’ve got your relationships, right?

This is part of the reason we have a loneliness epidemic in the industrialized world is that people don’t make time for these close relationships, particularly with friendships, right? Friendships don’t die, right? They starve to death. You know, people who lose touch with their friends, they don’t end these friendships because they got in a big fight.

That’s pretty rare. They end these friendships because, Oh, we haven’t talked in a long time. And I don’t know. I guess we’re still friends, but if we were friends, we would have talked a long time ago. So what happens now? We’re not friends anymore. So that happens because we’re not making time for those relationships, let alone with our kids, with our spouse, et cetera.

And then finally the work domain, which we talked about reflective and reactive work. I think the part that’s, that’s missing is the frame by which we assess how we turn our values into time. So I actually advise people not to make too many super longterm goals. Like for your example, if you’re saying, my identity is to be a creator that that can be helpful, but it shouldn’t be, you know, a forever and ever type of goal.

I think it’s very hard people to define their values by saying what’s important to me, right? Write down my values. Most people have a really hard time with that because we have conflicting values. I want to be an available father, but I also want to be a great business person, right? Like these are conflicting values.

So the reason a time box calendar is so powerful is that it forces you to make these trade offs given the constraints. If you want to know someone’s values, you look at how they spend their time and how they spend their money. Now what they say, you look at how they spend their time and how they spend their money, right?

The problem is that for most of us, we’re so stingy with our money. We look for sales and coupons and deals, and we split checks because we want to save a buck when it comes to our time, we just give it to whoever wants it. Oh, there’s a stupid thing trending in the news. There’s a war 5, 000 miles away. Oh, let me give my time to pay attention to those things, as opposed to spending the time the way I really want to, with intent.

As opposed to people who, who spend their money in a way that’s very cheap and they count every penny, what we should be doing is being generous with our money, but stingy with our time. And why? Because we can always make more money. You can always make more money, whether you’re Bill Gates or Elon Musk, you cannot make more time.

So I think we need to be stingy with our time, but generous with our money because time is a non renewable resource. So when we turn our values into time, when we say to ourselves, you know, I’m just going to plan a week’s time, that’s it. No more, no less. I’m not thinking about five years from now, certainly I’m not thinking about a lifetime, just this week.

How would the person I want to become spend their time, meaning how much time would I spend taking care of myself? So if personal health is important to me, well, do I have time in my schedule for exercise? Do I have time for rest? Do I have time if I like playing video games? Is that on my schedule, right?

How would the person I want to become spend their time, time with my relationships? Is it in your calendar? And then time for work, of course, reactive work and reflective time. So having that time in advance on our schedule is the only way we can turn our values into time. And then that will change over time.

So if you find, you know, like for one season of my life, being a creator was super, super important when I was writing my books, that was really my top priority. So I could see I had to make more time in my schedule, without neglecting my other values. But then after the book was done, you know what? I wanted more daddy time.

I wanted more time with my daughter and I could adjust that week by week, as opposed to having a very calcified identity that this is the way it has to be all the time that tends to stretch you in too many directions at once because you just can’t do it all. Whereas when you put it on a calendar, you have to operate under those constraints.

Pat Flynn: I’ve heard a lot of other creators talk about that similarly with seasons, like, this is my season of writing a book, so therefore, during that season, yes, it’ll be, you know, I’m gonna be waking up early and sacrificing a few things to get that done, but once that’s done, it’s my season of being at home all the time with the kids, just like you said, I’ve heard that, and it works really well.

And the idea of time being something that we shouldn’t just hand out, although we do, it reminds me of this movie. I don’t know if either of you have seen it, but it starred Justin Timberlake. And it’s where time till death shows up on a person’s arm and it’s like a ticker. It goes down, but you can exchange time with other people so that you can live a little bit longer.

And it like changes your idea of like what time means when you realize that you only have so much of it to offer and the decisions you make and the things that you do change because of that, and that’s actually how it is versus like you said, money, you can always make more money. It just doesn’t feel like it or it doesn’t feel like there’s an unlimited amount compared to I don’t know.

It’s just relationship with time and money is so important here, and I’m so glad you called that out because it’s, I mean, we see it with our kids are growing up so fast. I only have four summers left with my son. Crazy, right? You know, before he’s out, it totally changes the decisions that I make and where I spend my time.

And I’ve had to tell myself that if I catch myself going down a TikTok rabbit hole, that that is time I took away from my kids with the limited amount of time I have with them. That gets me to shut off the app and go back and, and, you know, play catch again or something.

Nir Eyal: Yeah. Yeah, totally. And look, there’s nothing wrong with some time on TikTok.

You know, parents, we need a break too sometimes. Sometimes I say, you know what? I’ve had enough kid time. I need to go do something on my own for a little bit. And that’s, that’s totally fine. But again, it should be planned. It shouldn’t be I can’t stand this feeling that I have right now in my head, let me go play a video game.

Let me go hang out on Tik Tok. Rather it should be, okay, I know that time is coming in my day. And this kind of is counterintuitive in that. One of the things you can do for yourself as well as your kids, you know, many people there’s asked me about how do I help my kids become indistractable and there’s a whole section in the book on how to raise indistractable kids.

One of the best things you can do is actually schedule the distraction. So if you’re struggling with TikTok or email or YouTube or whatever it is that you find you’re using for psychological relief from discomfort, in fact, putting it on your calendar, scheduling time for your kid to play that video game that they, you think they’re addicted to, it’s one of the best things you can do.

Because now the brain isn’t constantly thinking, when can I play, when can I play, when can I play? I know exactly when I’m going to play, it’s in my calendar, it says right there. So I don’t have to constantly keep ruminating about it.

Matt Gartland: Yeah, very powerful. That, thinking back to a younger version of me, I will at least label myself as old, you know, now with kids and everything else.

I, I just wish these sorts of conversations were happening earlier, and again, I wish I had more access to that stuff 10, 15 years ago, you know, when you, you’re an early stage entrepreneur, you’re young, you don’t have some of these important other kinds of constraints to like a significant other, or maybe you’re married, maybe you have kids yet, right?

It’s, it’s at least it was for me easier to justify just drifting, right. And spending more time working or hustling or things with less intent. So if anything, you know, we’re trying to like pull some of this wisdom forward to like the next generation of entrepreneurs that, you know, Have the next best idea, right?

But still to try to practice these disciplines and actually turn them into muscles and habits now, right? Far in advance of maybe other life events, you know, happening down the road.

Nir Eyal: That’s right. Yeah. And, and look, there’s nothing wrong with hustling hard, right? Like if you want to go be an investment banker or build a startup, you’re going to work a lot of hours and that’s, and that’s fine.

I’m not saying people shouldn’t work like crazy. If you want to work 24/7, that’s your prerogative. It’s not up to me or anyone else to tell you how to live your life. Okay. What I want to help people do is to live the kind of life they want. If you say you want a certain type of life, if you know you’re capable of more, but you’re not doing it, that’s what I want to help with.

So I’m not going to tell you exercise and you know, here’s what you need to eat. And then, you know, no, I’m not gonna make any judgments. If you want to play video games all day long, great, do it. But I want to help you do it with intent because the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. I mean, that, that’s really the summary of my 10 years of research.

The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. That if you wait till the last minute, right, if you’re on a diet, but the chocolate cake is on the fork, You’re going to eat it. If you’re trying to quit smoking, but the cigarette’s in your hand, you’re going to smoke it. If you wake up every morning and your cell phone is next to your nightstand, right?

If it’s right there, you’re going to pick it up before you even say hello to your loved one. So if you leave these type of decisions to the last minute, you will fail. They will get you these distractions. If you plan ahead. There is no distraction we can’t overcome. So there’s a wonderful quote, Paolo Coelho said, a mistake repeated more than once is a decision.

Such a good quote. A mistake repeated more than once is a decision. So, how long are we going to complain about, Oh, social media! Oh, video games! All these things are so distracting! My email! All these things are so distracting! Before we do something about it. So a distracted person keeps getting distracted.

They are choosing to be distracted because they keep making the same mistakes. Whereas an indistractable person says, okay, I see what you did there, right? You got me distraction, but I know that there’s only three causes for every distraction, an internal trigger, an external trigger or a planning problem.

That’s it. There is no other source for distraction. So an indistractable person says, okay, I’m going to take steps today to prevent getting distracted tomorrow.

Matt Gartland: That’s your second or third mic drop probably in one episode. That’s outstanding. It has, these things tend to happen. It is evaporated on us. Nir, this has been just a remarkable chat and you’re continuing to write and expand upon all of this work.

Where can folks go to engage on that and get the latest and greatest from you?

Nir Eyal: Absolutely. Thanks. Yeah. I’m working on my third book now, so that’ll be a few years ahead. But if you want to follow my writing until I get there, I publish a lot of my ideas as I’m working on my next book. And so my blog is called Nir and Far.

Nir is spelled like my first name, NirAndFar.com. And my latest book is called Indistractable, how to control your attention and choose your life.

Pat Flynn: Neil, may I ask you, can you give us a little heads up on maybe the topic that you’re focused on for the next publication?

Nir Eyal: Yeah, sure. It’s about beliefs.

It’s about how our underlying beliefs affect our reality. And it’s, it’s an old topic. It’s probably the oldest self help topic, but there’s been a lot of research lately that’s kind of overturned our understanding about the effects of beliefs. So for example, I’ve been going really deep into placebo research.

Placebos are frickin fascinating, and there’s all this interesting research that actually now, I’ll give you a taste. So, we used to think that in order for placebo to work, you had to not know that it was a placebo, right? So you’d go into the doctor, and you’d be in some clinical trial, and they’d say, okay, you know, we, we don’t, it’s a double blind controlled, randomized control study, so the doctor doesn’t know if the pill is a placebo or not, the patient doesn’t know if it’s a placebo or not, and then we could see if the placebo has an effect.

And we used to think that you had to be deceived in order for the placebo to work. You had to believe you were getting the real drug. Turns out, that ain’t true. That in studies where they tell people this is an inert substance, it has no pharmacological effect whatsoever, it is a placebo, it still works!

It’s called an open label placebo. And in fact, the placebo effect in clinical trials, you know, like if you’re a pharmaceutical company and you’re, you have a new drug, you have to prove it’s more efficacious than a placebo, right? The problem is that year after year after year, drug companies are having a tougher time getting their medications approved because the placebo effect is getting stronger.

The placebo effect is getting stronger in the general population in all of us. Why? Because more people are hearing about the placebo effect. And so it’s turning out that it’s beyond the belief. You don’t even have to believe it’s the medication, that there’s something hardwired in us around expectations, essentially beliefs around, around how things should work.

That actually does change our perceptions. Placebos can’t cure cancer. They can’t cure heart disease. But turns out they have an amazing effect in Parkinson’s. They have an amazing effect in insomnia, in depression, in anxiety, ADHD. I mean, the list goes on and on and on all the things that placebos can do. So that’s just kind of a taste of what I’m working on now.

Pat Flynn: Thank you for that. That I cannot wait for that.

Matt Gartland: That’s a fantastic trailer on what’s ahead. Yeah. Excellent. Nir, thanks again so very much for everyone listening. Thanks so much for tuning in. We’ll catch you next time in our next special episode of around table. We’ll catch you then.

Pat Flynn: All right. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Nir. Again, you should definitely check out his books, Indistractable, Hooked, pay attention to what he’s got going on for his next stuff about beliefs, placebos. I want to know more about that. And I’m glad that we have somebody like Nir who is kind of advancing on that stuff, researching it, understanding it. And again, like I said, in the intro, he’s so good at taking all of this stuff and making it easy for us to not just understand how it works, but how to apply it in our own lives as well.

So Nir, thank you so much. Matt, as always, thank you for joining me here on the podcast.

And I hope you enjoy this one until the next round table. We have more Friday episodes, some coaching calls ahead, and of course, our amazing interviews on Wednesdays, which you’ll see coming up very soon. So if you haven’t done so already, please hit subscribe.

I look forward to serving you the next one. We’ll see you then. Cheers.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. Our senior producer is David Grabowski, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media, and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!