Nir Eyal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Are you watching me because this happens to me every morning. You got to stop. This is totally autobiographical. This is what I used to do all the... "Oh, let me just scroll that Slack channel. What's everybody at the office doing? Oh, let me just catch up on industry news." That's important. That's part of my job. I'm being productive, right? And what I didn't realize is that distraction was tricking me into prioritizing the urgent and the easy stuff at the expense of the hard and important work I had to do to move my life and career forward. So, just because it's a work-related task, doesn't mean it's not a distraction. In fact, that's the worst kind of distraction. Far worse than playing Candy Crush or whatever because then you're putzing around, then at least it's obvious that you're distracted. But if you're just checking work email, you feel productive even though that's a distraction because it's not what you said you want to do with your time and attention. So now, we have this framework. We have traction, we have distraction. Now, there's one more thing that's super important, then we'll have the entire picture so that we can stop thinking about the model and actually get to a brass tacks of what do we actually do. Now that we have traction distraction the other thing we have to consider are triggers. We have two kinds of triggers. We have external triggers. These are things in our outside environment, the usual suspects, the pings, the dings, the rings, all this stuff in our outside environment, which we tend to blame for distraction, but studies find, that's only 10% of the reason we get distracted, 10% of the time it's because of something outside of us. What's the other 90%? Turns out 90% of the time that we get distracted, it's not because of what's happening outside of us, but that most distraction begins from within boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety. That is the cause of 90% of our distractions. So, whether it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, you are always going to get distracted from one thing or another unless you understand the root cause of the problem. So, step number one to becoming indistractable is to master those internal triggers or they will become your master. Now, we're working around those four points. Step number two, make time for traction. We can talk about that. Hack back the external triggers and step number four, prevent distraction with pacts. So, you asked a big question, I gave you a big answer. That's the overall framework. That's a strategy. Tactics are what you do. Strategy is why you do it. So, I wanted to explain the strategy before we got into the tactics. Amazing. I love this word traction because it relates to kind of the other side of this podcast of growth, product market fit, building products people want, getting traction with users. So, I really like that there's this additional way of thinking about traction, which is basically not being distracted. Can you just repeat the four steps again for people to have this in mind?…

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