Hi and welcome back to part three on our series on how to become indistractable. My name is Nir Eyal, the author of Indistractable, How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life and I'm thrilled to welcome you back to the next step in your journey to becoming indistractable, how to hack back external triggers. You'll remember we talked about how to master internal triggers, how to make time for traction.
Step number three, how to hack back those external triggers. What are external triggers? Those are all those pings, dings, and rings in your outside environment, all the things that can lead you off track from what you said you were going to do, and rather, it leads you towards distraction.
So we're going to hack back those external triggers by asking ourselves the critical question. The critical question is, is this trigger serving me, or am I serving it? And if that external trigger is not serving me, it's got to go, because external triggers can so often lead to distraction, but they're not.
always necessarily harmful. If that external trigger is serving you, if it's leading you towards something that you plan to do with your time, it's helpful because it's leading you towards an act of traction. But if for whatever reason that ping, ding, or ring is leading you off track, if it's leading you away from what you plan to do, it is causing a distraction.
And so we've got to figure out how to hack back those external triggers. So once we ask ourselves that critical question, We have to learn how to remove those unwanted external triggers so that we don't constantly get interrupted. So let's start with workplace interruptions.
Surveys tell us that the most distracting thing in the modern day workplace is other people. Because we know that interruptions can lead to mistakes. And so open office floor plans, while they can foster more communication, Oftentimes, that communication comes at the expense of concentration. So communicating with other people is wonderful. Collaboration is a great thing, but not all the time.
Sometimes we want to carve out time in our day to work without distraction so that we can do the kind of work that can only be done when we are focused. Creative work, concentrating, problem solving, thinking requires us to work without interruption. So what we have to do is to defend our focus.
So in every copy of my book, Indistractable, there is a screen sign that you can pull out of the book, put on your computer monitor that tells your colleagues that you are indistractable at the moment to not disturb you just for that period of time so that you can work without distraction. And if you don't get the book, you can actually go to my website. You can see the URL right over here, nearandfar.com forward slash focus, and you can download your own screen sign to print out and put on your computer so that people know you're busy.
Let's talk about email. Perhaps the most distracting technology we use every day. If we are going to hack back email, we need to memorize this formula.
That the total time we spend on email, the big T, is determined by the number of emails we send and the time spent per email. And I like this mathematical formula of TNT because it reminds me of how email can blow up a perfectly planned day and make us very unproductive, just like dynamite is TNT, email can be TNT to our personal productivity. So we need to break down this problem, realizing that total time spent on email is a factor of the number of emails multiplied by the time spent per email.
And so we come to some very quick conclusions that can help us reduce the amount of time we spend on email by first and foremost realizing that to receive fewer emails, we have to... send fewer emails, that it's a direct function of how much time we spend sending all these emails. Those emails come right back to us. We end up playing this ping pong game of email back and forth to each other.
So we've got to make sure that we can reduce not only the number of emails we interact with, but the time spent per email. Now, unfortunately, we don't have time to go into some of the deeper tactics, but I hope you will check out my book, Indistractable. where I talk about how to reduce those two parts of the total time we spend on email. Now, the next step is to figure out how to hack back group meetings. Now, Group meetings can be an incredible time waster.
Now, many of us are not meeting in the physical world, we're meeting online in these group chats. And group chats can be a wonderful tool to help us connect with each other, especially when so many of us are working from home, but that we have to understand that these tools can also be abused. They can be huge time sinks, particularly when they are used in a company where They are where people don't respect each other's time because company culture turns out to be the root cause of the distracted workplaces that we see today.
It's not just the technology itself. It's the fact that our bosses, that our colleagues expect us to always respond, expect us to always be available. So as bad as the technology might be, we have to understand that it has to be used in the right context and in the right company culture. But the good news is company culture can.
change. And so we can actually evolve our companies to respect that time, to give us space to disconnect from group chat so we can get our most important work done. And that we have to acknowledge that different communication channels have different uses.
We don't always want to constantly be bothered by every ping or ding or group chat notification because that may not fit the job accordingly. So here's a few rules that you can start integrating right away with your company's group chat. The first rule is to get in and get out.
You want to think of group chat like a hot tub, right? You get in and you get out of a hot tub. You don't leave it up all day long. The second thing is that you want to schedule that time.
Have time in your day when you will be available to hop into that Slack function or whatever group chat system you use. Put that time in your calendar. As we talked about in the last section of the Indistractable course, that making time for traction, planning out your day is very, very important. So you want to plan that time for group chat as well.
Be picky about who gets to be a part of these group chats. You don't want everybody in the company chiming in about every topic. You want to be very judicious about the topic that's going to be discussed and who can have access to that group chat.
And use it selectively. Don't use it to discuss everything under the sun. Have certain channels for certain topics that you are going to discuss.
Now, Meetings are not only something that we conduct online through Slack or any number of other messaging platforms, we also waste a tremendous amount of time with physical meetings, right? That we find ourselves physically present in these meetings once we are in conference room settings. These can be a tremendous waste of time because we know that many people call meetings as a form of distraction, right? When I don't know what to do, when I don't wanna think for myself, When I don't want to spend time doing the hard work, let me just call a meeting. Let me see what other people think.
Come on, everybody. Let's get together and let's talk this out. And that sounds good, but as we know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and it can be a tremendous time waster to keep calling these meetings. So we want to make it harder to call a meeting, make it a little bit more difficult, add a little bit of friction, whether it's an online meeting or an in-person meeting. You have to make sure that there are some constraints to calling those meetings.
And so some tactics that we find can be very effective. Number one, if there's no agenda, there's no meeting. If you're gonna call a meeting, you have to circulate an agenda with advance notice so that we know what it is we are supposed to talk about. Then what we wanna do is to make sure we circulate a briefing document that the person who calls the meeting has the onus, if the onus is on them, to brief everybody about what the topic is that we are supposed to be talking about.
Because here's the thing. Meetings should be conducted for one reason and one reason only, and that reason is to gain consensus. That's it.
Meetings are not for brainstorming. The studies find that brainstorming is best done in groups of two people or less. Brainstorming by yourself is great. Brainstorming with a big group is a bad idea. Why?
Because when we brainstorm in a big group, the loudest person, the most dominant person, typically the highest paid person, the most male person, tends to dominate the conversation. We don't get out everyone's ideas. So instead, brainstorm on your own, send those ideas to the stakeholder who's calling the meeting, and then just build consensus in the meeting.
That's what meetings are for. And then if we're gonna have these meetings, we need to be fully present both in body and mind. And to do this, we have to make sure that we leave all those distracting devices outside and have just one laptop per meeting so we can all focus on the discussion at hand.
You don't want a meeting full of people constantly checking their devices. This perpetuates what we call a zombie meeting, where People are there in body, but their brains are somewhere else. The brains are gone. So, we talked about how to hack back group meetings, how to hack back group chat. Now let's talk about how we can hack back our devices, our smartphones, all these devices with these pings and dings.
Well, there's a few things you can do with hacking back your smartphone. Number one, you can remove all those superfluous apps. You'll find that your performance of your phone will improve once you get rid of all those distracting apps that maybe you don't use very often.
Then you can replace where you use these functions. So for example, one of the best things I ever did was to stop using my phone as a clock, right? Now I have a wristwatch, which tells me the time. Why?
Because I would constantly check my phone for the time and, oh, wait a minute, there's an email or there's a notification, there's this or this, that. What time is it again? Oh, I forgot. So replace the functionality of different tools and things you use your phone for, for only the essential. needs, like, for example, checking the time.
There's all kinds of other things you can replace. For example, I don't check my phone when I want to watch YouTube videos or read an article. I do that elsewhere. I've replaced where I'm going to do those behaviors.
Then rearrange. One of the best things you can do is to remove the distracting apps from your phone's home screen. If you find that you still need some of these apps, that's fine.
Move them somewhere else. Rearrange them. Finally, reclaim the notifications.
We know that they're are some types of notifications that are particularly distracting. The ones that make noise are the most distracting. So make sure you reclaim those external triggers that are the most distracting, like the audible notifications, that any kind of audio stimulus is going to distract you from whatever you're doing. So make sure you reclaim those notifications as well. And you can do that very, very quickly.
Next, your desktop. How can you hack back your desktop from all that clutter? We can take everything on our desktop, all those folders and images and files.
I've seen people's desktops. They can be a tremendous mess. We want to take all those files and put them into a folder somewhere else, not all over our desktop, because we know that this type of visual distraction, the visual clutter, can serve as an external trigger, which can degrade our cognitive performance.
And then, of course, turn off all those notifications on your desktop. There is no notification on your desktop that is important enough to distract you from your most valuable time at work. If there's an emergency, somebody's going to call you. They're going to text you.
They're not going to send you a notification on your desktop. So turn all those off when you want to do focused work. The next thing we can do is to hack back. This flood of information that comes from all different kinds of sources, starting with online articles. You know, we all read articles online.
There's some great content out there. That's wonderful. But we want to make sure that we're very judicious about what kind of information we allow into our lives because we are just flooded with information.
So if we're constantly reading articles online, they can serve as a distracting external trigger. So we want to make a rule. So for example, in my life, I have a rule that I never read online content on my web browser. I always send those articles to a wonderful app called Pocket, where I can read those articles on my phone when I'm ready for them. So that's my rule.
Now, this might be a surprise to many people, that we can, in fact, multitask, if we can multitask on different channels. So, for example, what I do when I send myself an article that I want to read online, I save it to this app called Pocket. and I can read it while I'm multitasking, working out in the gym, or taking a walk, or doing something else, driving, for example, during a commute.
I can listen to those articles read to me through this app. It's a wonderful function of the Pocket app. I highly recommend it, and it really does give you a win in multiple ways.
Number one, you're not wasting time scrolling and scrolling online. Number two, you're incentivizing this other behavior of, in my case, going to the gym or going for a walk. That's when I get to listen to these articles. So, we can multitask if we do it in a healthy way.
Also, what we want to do is to hack back our feeds. That social media feeds can be a huge source of distraction. Well, we can hack back this technology in all sorts of ways.
We can take back control of these feeds by using technology to hack back technology. How do we do that? We can install a whole host of different tools to help us alter this experience so that it serves us as opposed to us serving the feed.
So for example, I use News Feed Eradicator. The News Feed Eradicator does exactly what it says. It scrubs out that news feed on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn, and it replaces it with an inspirational quote. So if I want to go see the latest that someone is doing on their particular page, I can still do that, but I don't need to see all that crazy content in the feed. So I can actually use technology to hack back the technology that I find to be distracting.
And guess what? There's nothing Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey can do about it. I can hack back their technology any way I want.
So that's how we would hack back the information in our outside environment. To summarize, we can ask ourselves the critical question. of is this external trigger serving me or am I serving it?
We can hack back our workplace interruptions. We can hack back email. We can hack back group chat. We can hack back physical meetings.
We can hack back our smartphone, our desktop, online articles, and of course our feed. We can hack back all of these distracting external triggers. Now, I just gave you a very short summary of the third step of the indistractable model.
In the next video, we'll talk about how to prevent distraction with packs, and then you'll have. All four basic steps of the indistractable model. As a reminder, there's a lot more in the book, Indistractable, How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. I also hope you'll check out my blog at nearandfar.com where you can get all kinds of free tools and resources, including an 80-page workbook on how to become indistractable, completely complimentary, right there at nearandfar.com. Thank you so much.
Looking forward to seeing you next time. And until then, stay strong and stay indistractable.