Nir And Far: Business, Behaviour And The Brain

Here’s what the Covid-19 lockdowns have revealed about teen depression. What do bicycles and social media have in common? Soon after being adopted, each of these technologies brought on a tsunami of unjustified moral panic. Let’s start with bikes. When bicycles burst onto the Victorian scene in the 1800s, they were a big deal. This cool contraption made it possible to travel much further and faster than you could ever go on foot. Better yet, bikes were a lot cheaper than horses (not to mention simpler to maintain). You can read the NirAndFar blog post: Maybe Social Media Isn’t Making Teens Depressed, After All. And Here’s What Likely Is. https://www.nirandfar.com/social-media-and-teens/ Nir & Far, a podcast about business, behaviour and the brain by Nir Eyal. If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe on iTunes and leave an iTunes review. It will greatly help new listeners discover the show. Please visit my website Nir and Far for other info about my writing, books and teaching: http://www.nirandfar.com/

In my research and consulting work, I’ve heard countless people tell me how difficult it is to manage their time. Yet, when I ask them what they got distracted from, that is, what they planned to do with any given moment in time, they have trouble answering the question. What is a “distraction” anyway? The best way to understand what distraction is, is to know what it is not. What is the opposite of distraction? It’s not “focus.” You can read the NirAndFar blog post: What is the Opposite of “Distraction?” The Single Word that Will Change Your Life This Year https://www.nirandfar.com/opposite-of-distraction/ Nir & Far, a podcast about business, behaviour and the brain by Nir Eyal. If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe on iTunes and leave an iTunes review. It will greatly help new listeners discover the show. Please visit my website Nir and Far for other info about my writing, books and teaching: http://www.nirandfar.com/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nirandfar/support

To find your focus, learn to resist this self-sabotaging excuse. Imagine this: You’ve been diagnosed with a rare and serious disease. In hopes of keeping you alive, the doctor recommends a new, experimental course of treatment. It works for some people—maybe 60%. But it’s covered by your insurance, and if you are in the 60%, you’ll be successfully cured in six months. What do you do? Of course, you say yes. Maybe you’ll get unlucky and it won’t work for you, but it’s worth a try. You’d probably try the treatment even with only a 10% success rate. The reality is that even the best drugs don’t work for everyone, and yet we still take them. But when it comes to finding our focus, so many of us are unwilling to apply the same logic. You can read the NirAndFar blog post: Don’t Fall for This Excuse Trap: Why “That Won’t Work for Me” is Self-Sabotaging https://www.nirandfar.com/mental-blocks-to-productivity-techniques/ Nir & Far, a podcast about business, behaviour and the brain by Nir Eyal. If you enjoy this po

Maybe you’ve heard the buzz around Clubhouse, the drop-in audio chat app. It’s a bit like Twitch for conference calls. If you have no idea what “Twitch” is, you’re probably over 40. In your case, the closest analog might be those 1–900 party lines you saw advertised on late-night TV in the 1990s—but a bit less sleazy and in app form. The Clubhouse app is the new new thing, and it’s got many people hooked. The app is the latest example of a habit-forming product taking the world by storm. You can read the NirAndFar blog post on: Will Clubhouse be a Habit or Has-Been? https://www.nirandfar.com/hooked-on-clubhouse-app/ Nir & Far, a podcast about business, behaviour and the brain by Nir Eyal. If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe on iTunes and leave an iTunes review. It will greatly help new listeners discover the show. Please visit my website Nir and Far for other info about my writing, books and teaching: http://www.nirandfar.com/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nirandfar/support

In 2017, I decided I’d had enough of my smartphone and the companies that make the apps that were robbing me of my time and attention. I thought I found the perfect solution: the card phone. The card phone is what it sounds like: It’s a $18 tiny phone with no social media, no internet browser, and no email. In fact, the card phone has no apps whatsoever. It has only the ability to make phone calls and send text messages. (It even has an FM tuner too. Take that, iPhone!). At first, it was edgy and interesting to be the one friend with the “weird phone.” But the edginess wore off, and I began to miss my smartphone. I missed the convenience of navigating with GPS. I missed listening to audio books and reading articles I’d saved in Pocket. And I admit: I sort of missed the connectedness to friends I felt from using social media. I liked being “liked.” You can read the NirAndFar blog post on: Smartphone Too Distracting? Here's How to Reclaim Your Focus https://www.nirandfar.com/hack-back-phone-distractions/ Nir &a

By promoting the idea that technology is hijacking our brains and getting all of us addicted to our devices, techno-fearmongers elevate the exception rather than the rule. Josh Hawley, a Republican senator from Missouri, introduced the Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology Act, which—beyond its forced acronym—was remarkable for how aggressively it would regulate the design of certain tech products. Among other provisions, the law would ban auto-play videos on sites such as YouTube. It would require sites such as Twitter to deploy a mechanism that “automatically limits the amount of time that a user may spend to 30 minutes a day.” It prohibits sites such as Pinterest from automatically revealing content when the user scrolls to the bottom of the page, instead “requiring the user to specifically request … that additional content be loaded and displayed.” The SMART Act would do all this, according to its preamble, to protect unsuspecting people from FOMO, doom scrolling, and other “practices that exploit h

Babies. They’re such jerks, aren’t they? They wake you up in the middle of the night. They make huge messes for you to clean up. And let’s not forget to mention the inevitable diaper blowouts that happen at all the wrong times. Who do they think they are? Of course, this is a pretty awful way to think of infants. We were all babies at one point, and if other people hadn’t given us some grace, we wouldn’t have made it to our first birthdays. You can read the NirAndFar blog post on: Love is Measured By the Benefit of the Doubt https://www.nirandfar.com/secret-to-kindness/ Nir & Far, a podcast about business, behaviour and the brain by Nir Eyal. If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe on iTunes and leave an iTunes review. It will greatly help new listeners discover the show. Please visit my website Nir and Far for other info about my writing, books and teaching: http://www.nirandfar.com/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nirandfar/support

There are various ways of classifying lies: by their consequences, by the importance of their subject matters, by the speakers’ motives, and by the nature or context of the utterance. Perhaps the most useful way to classify lies is by to the people who tell them. Understanding lies and liars can help us avoid getting duped as well as protect us from drifting into dishonesty ourselves. You can read the NirAndFar blog post on: The Ultimate Guide to Liars and Lying: Everyone Falls Into These 4 Types https://www.nirandfar.com/types-of-liars/ Nir & Far, a podcast about business, behaviour and the brain by Nir Eyal. If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe on iTunes and leave an iTunes review. It will greatly help new listeners discover the show. Please visit my website Nir and Far for other info about my writing, books and teaching: http://www.nirandfar.com/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nirandfar/support

Nir’s Note: This guest post was written by Cheryl Maguire The laundry hamper was overflowing with dirty clothes. Lacking the motivation to throw it into the wash, I pushed the clothes down deeper into the bin so I could fit more clothes. This occurs almost every other day. When you are married and the mother of three kids, the laundry is a never-ending task especially since we are all active in sports or working out that often require multiple clothing changes in one day. You can read the NirAndFar blog post on: How to Finally Find the Motivation You’ve Been Missing https://www.nirandfar.com/how-to-find-motivation/ Nir & Far, a podcast about business, behaviour and the brain by Nir Eyal. If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe on iTunes and leave an iTunes review. It will greatly help new listeners discover the show. Please visit my website Nir and Far for other info about my writing, books and teaching: http://www.nirandfar.com/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nirandfar/support

I once worked with a person we’ll call “Dick.” Dick always told me he’d get things back to me “today or tomorrow,” but he seldom did. Dick didn’t have to tell me he’d get things to me that soon. He could have said, “next week” or “as soon as I can,” and I would have been fine with that. Instead, Dick had a habit of promising to deliver by a certain date, but he wouldn’t follow through. You can read the NirAndFar blog post on: Hypocrites: How to Survive in a World that’s Full of Them https://www.nirandfar.com/hypocrite/ Nir & Far, a podcast about business, behaviour and the brain by Nir Eyal. If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe on iTunes and leave an iTunes review. It will greatly help new listeners discover the show. Please visit my website Nir and Far for other info about my writing, books and teaching: http://www.nirandfar.com/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nirandfar/support

Over the past few weeks, people have asked me for my review of the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma. It’s no surprise. One of the film’s central themes is that social media is like an addictive drug, and I wrote the book on habit-forming technologies: Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. I also have a personal connection to the film. In August of 2018, I sat with the filmmakers for a three-hour interview. We discussed everything from the subject matter of Hooked and my second book, Indistractable, to the ethics of social-media use and how we can learn to live with the digital tools that pervade our lives. I was glad to share my perspective; it was a rich and engaging discussion. You can read the NirAndFar blog post on: Here’s My Review of The Social Dilemma: No, Social Media Is Not “Hijacking” Your Brain https://www.nirandfar.com/social-dilemma-review/ Nir & Far, a podcast about business, behaviour and the brain by Nir Eyal. If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe on iTunes and leave an

Society’s fear of technology destroying our children’s future has reached a fever pitch and many parents have resorted to extreme measures. A quick search on YouTube reveals thousands of videos of parents storming into their kids’ rooms, unplugging the computers or gaming consoles, and destroying their devices. You can read the NirAndFar blog post on: Screen Time for Kids: Give Them What They Need https://www.nirandfar.com/screen-time-for-kids/ Nir & Far, a podcast about business, behaviour and the brain by Nir Eyal. If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe on iTunes and leave an iTunes review. It will greatly help new listeners discover the show. Please visit my website Nir and Far for other info about my writing, books and teaching: http://www.nirandfar.com/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nirandfar/support

Imagine you bought a new phone, but at the end of each day, every day, the operating system crashed. Would you keep using the faulty phone? Of course not. You’d take it back to the store, complain, and get a new one. And yet, many people run their entire lives on a faulty operating system. It’s called the to-do list. Have you ever met someone who runs their day using a to-do list and actually finishes everything they said they’d do? Me neither. You can read the NirAndFar blog post on: Be a Schedule Builder, Not a To-Do List Maker https://www.nirandfar.com/todo-vs-schedule-builder/ Nir & Far, a podcast about business, behaviour and the brain by Nir Eyal. If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe on iTunes and leave an iTunes review. It will greatly help new listeners discover the show. Please visit my website Nir and Far for other info about my writing, books and teaching: http://www.nirandfar.com/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nirandfar/support

Hindsight bias occurs when people feel that they “knew it all along” – when they believe that an event is more predictable after it becomes known than it was before it became known2. In other words, when we’re looking back at an event after it already happened, knowing that outcome influences our perception of the events leading up to it. You can read the NirAndFar blog post on: Hindsight Bias: Why You Make Terrible Lie Choices https://www.nirandfar.com/hindsight-bias/ Nir & Far, a podcast about business, behaviour and the brain by Nir Eyal. If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe on iTunes and leave an iTunes review. It will greatly help new listeners discover the show. Please visit my website Nir and Far for other info about my writing, books and teaching: http://www.nirandfar.com/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nirandfar/support

What stresses you out? How do you deal with that dreaded feeling? And did you know there’s a bullet-proof method for disarming stress? You can read the NirAndFar blog post on: How to Turn Off Harmful Stress Like a Switch https://www.nirandfar.com/handling-stress/ Nir & Far, a podcast about business, behaviour and the brain by Nir Eyal. If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe on iTunes and leave an iTunes review. It will greatly help new listeners discover the show. Please visit my website Nir and Far for other info about my writing, books and teaching: http://www.nirandfar.com/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nirandfar/support

Which of the following is true?     A. Screen time is the leading cause of anxiety and depression amongst teenagers     B. Studies have found that screen time shrinks people’s attention span to less than that of a goldfish     C. Studies show screen time causes addiction     D. None of the above The correct answer: D. You can read the NirAndFar blog post on: This is How the Media is Misleading You on “Technology Addiction”  Nir & Far, a podcast about business, behaviour and the brain by Nir Eyal. If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe on iTunes and leave an iTunes review. It will greatly help new listeners discover the show. Please visit my website Nir and Far for other info about my writing, books and teaching: http://www.nirandfar.com --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nirandfar/support

Society’s fear of technology destroying our children's future has reached a fever pitch and many parents have resorted to extreme measures. A quick search on YouTube reveals thousands of videos of parents storming into their kids’ rooms, unplugging the computers or gaming consoles, and destroying their devices. You can read the NirAndFar blog post on: Screen Time for Kids: Give Them What They Need https://www.nirandfar.com/screen-time-for-kids/ Nir & Far, a podcast about business, behaviour and the brain by Nir Eyal. If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe on iTunes and leave an iTunes review. It will greatly help new listeners discover the show. Please visit my website Nir and Far for other info about my writing, books and teaching: http://www.nirandfar.com/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nirandfar/support

You can read the NirAndFar blog post on: Be a Schedule Builder, Not a To-Do List Maker https://www.nirandfar.com/todo-vs-schedule-builder/ Nir & Far, a podcast about business, behaviour and the brain by Nir Eyal. If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe on iTunes and leave an iTunes review. It will greatly help new listeners discover the show. Please visit my website Nir and Far for other info about my writing, books and teaching: http://www.nirandfar.com/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nirandfar/support

In 1967, a catchy tune by The Beatles, “All You Need is Love,” became the anthem for the Summer of Love. The Flower Power culture embraced the song and its message, “love is all you need.” If someone had asked humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers what the song meant, he might have said, “Unconditional Positive Regard!” Although it didn’t quite roll off the tongue the same way, Rogers introduced the concept nearly a decade before the Beatles song, it has the same basic message: empathy invokes change. You can read the NirAndFar blog post on: The Surprising Benefits of Unconditional Positive Regard https://www.nirandfar.com/upr-unexpected-benefits-beyond-therapy/ Nir & Far, a podcast about business, behaviour and the brain by Nir Eyal. If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe on iTunes and leave an iTunes review. It will greatly help new listeners discover the show. Please visit my website Nir and Far for other info about my writing, books and teaching: http://www.nirandfar.com/ --- Support this podc

When Harvard’s Leslie Perlow began to study The Boston Consulting Group, she was well aware of the firm’s round-the-clock reputation. After conducting interviews with BCG’s staff, Perlow found that this reputation was coming at a major cost. Employees were leaving the elite consulting firm, in part because they lacked control over their schedules. To address the issue, Perlow offered a simple proposition: If everyone who worked at BCG hated the always-on lifestyle, why not try to give consultants at least a “single predictable night off a week”? This would give people time away from phone calls and email notifications and allow them to make plans without the fear of being pulled back into work. You can read the NirAndFar blog post on: This is How to Repair a Toxic Work Culture https://medium.com/the-mission/this-is-how-to-repair-a-toxic-work-culture-24fa03fdb138 Nir & Far, a podcast about business, behaviour and the brain by Nir Eyal. If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe on iTunes and leave an iTun