Who: Nir Eyal

Claim To Fame: Nir Eyal lectured at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and Institute of Design. His first book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, is an international bestseller and taught Silicon Valley how to design behavior. His next book, Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, reveals the Achilles’ heel of distraction and provides a guidebook for getting the best of technology without letting it get the best of us. His writing on technology, psychology, and business, appears in the Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, TechCrunch, and Psychology Today. Nir blogs at: NirAndFar.com

Where To Find Nir: His Website, Amazon, Twitter

Praise For Nir: “I can think of no more important skill than focus and no better teacher than Nir Eyal. Being indistractable is the skill of the century.” — Shane Parrish, founder of Farnam Street

When and where do you like to write? Are you the same-thing-every-day kind of writer or can you write anytime, anywhere?

I write in the morning, 9:30, five days a week. I don’t know if there’s anything particularly special about the mornings but it is critical that I have time on my schedule set aside for writing. As I wrote in my new book, Indistractable, “You can’t call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from.” You must plan your time or someone else will.

Do you have any pre-writing rituals or habits before you sit down to write?

I wake up at 7am, make breakfast for my family, exercise, shower, then get to work. I often co-work with other authors at my home or at a local coffee shop. Co-working next to other people is a great way to make sure you start on time and stay focused.

Do you struggle at all with that dreaded enemy of writing: writer’s block? Do you think such a thing exists?

I think writer’s block is a myth. There’s always something to write about! That doesn’t mean what I write will be publishable of course. In fact, 90 percent of what I write is trashed as part of the process.

Writing is like talking into a keyboard. No one ever says they have “talker’s block.” My problem is there is always too much to write about. Some writers write about what they know, I write about what I want to know. As long as I follow my curiosity, I never run out of things to write about. There are so many unanswered questions out there.

With your research on the psychology of habits and habit-forming products, what are some of the go-to tools in your writing routine?

I use tech to block out tech. For instance, almost every time I write, I use a little app on my phone called Forest. It’s a timer that plants a virtual tree when you start a focused work session. If you pick up your phone and try and exit the app, the tree dies. It’s a little pre-commitment device that helps me stay focused.

Your new book Indistractable just released. What were some of your greatest discoveries and insights in researching and writing the book that you’ve applied to your writing routine?

The most important thing I learned writing Indistractable is that distraction starts from within. We like to blame our gadgets or other people for distracting us from the work we want to do, but if we’re honest with ourselves, distraction is really an emotion regulation issue. As I say in the book, “Time management is pain management.” In order to become indistractable, the first step is to learn tools for managing the discomfort within us, like boredom, loneliness, fatigue, and insecurity.

All of your work is very research-intensive. What is your method for researching and organizing material you might want to use for your future writing?

I collect interesting articles on topics I may want to write about in an app called Pocket. This helps me in two ways. First, I have a rule to never read articles in my web browser. I find it too difficult to avoid getting whisked down a content vortex of interesting articles on line. Instead, by saving articles into Pocket, I can read them later without all the external triggers that can lead to distraction. Another benefit is that the app reads these articles to you, which means I can listen while I walk or workout at the gym.

If I hear an article I like, I’ll email it to myself where I can process it for use in a future book I may write.

What does a successful writing day mean for you? And how do you finish out a day of writing? Do you have a process, or is it just that you know you’ve hit a natural stopping point?

A good writing day is typically two hours of new words on the page. I don’t really care about output, which is something you really can’t control. My job is to spend my time the way I intended. As an author, you can’t predict when a breakthrough idea will hit you, but what you can always control is the time you put into your work.

What books or writers have most influenced the way you think and the way you write?

Paul Graham’s essays were a huge influence. I love the way he overturns apple carts to help you see the world in a new way.

What is your advice to aspiring writers?

The six rules, as taught to me in my college journalism class where: read, read, read, write, write, write. That is, to borrow from Nike, just do it! These days, we don’t need to ask permission from editors or publishers to be writers. We can write blogs, publish on Medium, and self-publish our own books. There’s nothing in our way except our drive to do it. Today, writing costs (almost) nothing but your time.

Of course, all sorts of things will get in your way and working hard is necessary but not sufficient. Meaning, that honing your craft doesn’t guarantee success. But as with anything worth having in life, not working hard at it guarantees failure.

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