Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…and mind." That means putting these devices outside of meetings. If we're going to have a business meeting or a personal meeting, we're going to declare these no-phone zones because that's who we are. We want to be indistractable. So, we adopt these new behaviors and we see that happening already. And then we adapt to these behaviors, I should say, with these new norms. And then we adopt new technologies that help us fight the bad aspects of the last generation of technology, and that's what we have always done. In fact, right now, there's an explosion of tech companies that are making a lot of money. A lot of these apps and startups are making money with tools to help fix the last generation of technology. And so, there's all kinds of tools listed in my book from Forest and Focusmate, all kinds of tools that can help us put technology in its place, ironically enough, with new and better technology. You've touched on this point that I want to come back to around how you're not as confident that we're as addicted to technology and apps as we think, and I think that's really important. I'm excited to chat about it. Before we get there, I wanted to chat and follow this thread essentially of becoming Indistractable at work and building a company essentially that helps your teammates become less distractable. What advice would you give to leaders at companies to help employees at the company have better focus, essentially? A lot of folks that I've worked with in the past have said, "Look, I can become indistractable. I follow these four steps, fantastic. I'm indistractable. But what if my company's not indistractable? How do I help other people become indistractable? Or what if my boss is not indistractable and they're constantly asking me and pinging and dinging me for stuff and I'm not able to do my best work? So, what do I do about that?" So, there's a whole section in the book on how to build an indistractable workplace. And what I discovered was in the research in writing this book is that indistractable companies have three traits. And so, the first trait is that Indistractable companies provide employees with what's called psychological safety. This comes out of the research from Amy Edmondson at the Harvard Business School. And what she discovered was truly that companies have to provide employees with psychological safety. Meaning, if you can't talk about a problem, if you can't raise your hand and say, "Hey, you know what? I'm just not able to do my best work when I'm constantly expected to reply to every email, to every notification, every 30 seconds. I can't do my best work." If you can't talk about this problem, that is the problem. As I like to say, distraction is a symptom of dysfunction. Distraction is a symptom of dysfunction. And when it comes to the workplace, if you don't give employees that psychological safety to say, "Hey, how do we deal with this problem just like any other problem?" That in fact is a problem. It's not the technology, it's the fact that you can't get together and talk about this problem without fear of somebody thinking, "Oh, you're lazy," or, "You don't want to be on call," or, "You're expecting other people to work for you." No, that's not the issue at all. It's simply that we need to formulate how to fix this problem just like any other business challenge. The second trait is employees need a forum to talk about this problem. So, in researching this book, I ask people, what's the most distracting technology? What technology in the workplace do you find to be most distracting? The number two was some kind of group messaging service, and Slack was mentioned the most number of times. By the way, number one was email. Number two was some kind of group messaging platform, and Slack was mentioned the most often. And so, I went to visit Slack headquarters. I went to go see my friend Amir, who used to work there at the time, and I knocked on the door and I expected to see a company that was incredibly distracted because if it was the technology that was the source of the problem, nobody uses Slack more than Slack. They should be the most distracted company on earth. But that's not what I found at all because Slack, in fact, embodied these three attributes. They gave people psychological safety. They gave people a forum to talk about these problems. How did they do that? They actually created Slack channels at Slack.…

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