I know you’re a huge advocate of this, Shane, that if you want a competitive advantage over other people in your industry, if you want a competitive advantage over people in your workplace, make time to think because nobody’s doing it, nobody’s making that time to plan, to strategize, they’re just reacting all day long, as opposed to the person who makes 30 minutes, 45 minutes an hour and protects that time and keeps it sacred for time for reflective work. So the time you plan to waste is not wasted time. As long as it’s done on your schedule, not the tech companies’. If you plan to spend your time playing a video game or scrolling social media or watching a YouTube video, great, there’s nothing wrong with it. That discomfort, that wanting more can be rocket fuel to propel us forward. You want them to want more, that’s what gets us to hunt, to invent, to create. You want people to be perpetually perturbed. That would not be a beneficial evolutionary trait. If there was ever a group of homosapiens that was happy continuously, our ancestors would have killed and eaten them. Everything we do, we do for just one reason, the desire to escape discomfort, even the pursuit of pleasurable sensations. Neurologically speaking, this is not true that human motivation is not about carrots and sticks, it’s not about pain and pleasure, but rather it’s just about one thing all human behavior is spurred by the desire to escape discomfort. If you don’t understand this principle that I live by that time management requires pain management, time management requires pain management, you’ll always be distracted by something. That is the leading because of distraction: boredom, uncertainty, fatigue, anxiety.

What I discovered was that distraction, the leading cause of distraction, and research bears this out, the leading because of distraction is not what we call external triggers, it’s not the stuff outside of us, but rather distraction begins from within, what we call the internal triggers. The question is, how do we keep the good aspects without succumbing to the bad aspects? The answer is quite simple, it’s what we’ve always done in history, we adapt and we adopt, we adapt our behaviors and we adopt new technology to fix the last generation of crappy technology.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation:Įvery new technology has goods and bads, any technology of this scale. Now available on: YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Transcript Technology Review as, “The Prophet of Habit-Forming Technology.” In this episode, Shane and Nir discuss regaining control of our attention from technology, how to get more done in less time, controlling the things you have agency over and so much more.

Bestselling author of Hooked and Indistractable, Nir Eyal was dubbed by The M.I.T.

Indistractable website