Nir And Far: Business, Behaviour and the Brain

It doesn’t so much matter what you do with your time; rather, success is measured by whether you did what you planned to do. It’s fine to watch a video, scroll social media, daydream, or take a nap, as long as that’s what you planned to do. To create a weekly timeboxed schedule, you’ll need to decide how much time you want to spend on each domain of your life. How much time do you want to spend on...

I had just finished giving a speech on building habits when a woman in the audience exclaimed, "You teach how to create habits, but that's not my problem. I'm fat!" The frustration in her voice echoed throughout the room. "My problem is stopping bad habits. That's why I'm fat. Where does that leave me?" I deeply sympathized with the woman. "I was once clinically obese," I told her. She stared at m...

Distraction is a curse of modern life. Between our cell phones and computer screens, not to mention our kids and coworkers, our attention is constantly being diverted. It can become difficult to focus on any one task—or any one person—for very long. If anything, the world is becoming a more distracting place. Technology is becoming more pervasive and persuasive. But hoping tech companies change th...

Nir’s Note: This guest post is written by Dr. Todd Snyder. Dr. Snyder is a Psychologist and Productivity Coach at ToddSnyderCoaching.com The world is full of self-help myths and half-truths. One bit of folk psychology that won’t seem to die is the idea that we can “visualize” our path to success by imagining the life we want. In fact, studies find visualizing our personal goals as if we’ve already...

How Slack’s culture kills distraction by building psychological safety, telling employees to go home, and using lots and lots of emojis. If there’s one technology that embodies the unreasonable demands of the always-on work culture that pervades so many companies today, it’s Slack. The group-chat app can make users feel tethered to their devices, often at the expense of doing more important tasks....

While we can’t control the feelings and thoughts that pop into our heads, we can control what we do with them. Research of smoking cessation programs performed by Dr. Jonathan Bricker, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, suggests we shouldn’t keep telling ourselves to stop thinking about an urge; instead, we must learn better ways to cope. The same applies to other distractions like che...

Note: This post originally appeared in Techcrunch . I’m proud to have co-authored this post with Katy Fike, PhD .  Dr. Fike is a gerontologist, systems engineer and Partner at Innovate50, a consulting firm helping companies create products and services for the 50+ market As web watchers, entrepreneurs, and investors search for the next big thing, they’d be wise to focus on innovations that ca...

Many people bristle at the idea of keeping a schedule. They don’t want restrictions and prefer the freedom to tackle things as they come up. While an open day is wonderful on a vacation when you have nothing to do but relax, vacations eventually end. In the real world, there is work to finish, people to meet, and a family to nurture. You can read the Nir and Far blog post on: How to be More Produc...

It feels impossible to tell if the technology our kids use should be celebrated or feared. A few years ago I wrote a book, Hooked , about how technology can be used to change our habits. I intended the book to teach startups how to build healthy habits , but now I’m not so sure. With headlines telling us technology is hijacking our brains, I started second guessing the impact of our devices, espec...

Nir's Note: This guest post is written by Jeni Fisher, a London-based Googler who consults startups on applying behavioral insights to achieve business and user goals. Early on in my role as an Apps partner manager at Google Play, I was drawn towards the Self-Improvement apps space because their persuasive influence transcends screen-level interactions. Their mission is to persuade peopl...

Nir’s Note: This guest post is by Patricio O’Gorman , technology consultant and professor at Universidad de Palermo. If you have kids, you’ve likely heard about Fortnite. The wildly popular online battle game has amassed over 125 million players and hosts more than 3 million concurrent players . The game “has brought in more revenue in a single month than any other game of its kind,” according to...

When faced with a challenge, where do you find the insight to move your life forward? Last year, over fifteen million books were sold in the self-help genre.1 That doesn’t account for the videos, courses, and workshops that fuel this multibillion-dollar industry. Include business and diet books, and that number balloons to over $1.7 billion spent on advice-seeking books.2 But there’s a secret the...

You come home after a long day of work and you immediately curl yourself up on the couch and binge the latest Netflix craze for hours, while you scroll and scroll through your social media feeds and snack on potato chips even though you're "on a diet." You look around and see that the garbage needs to be taken out, laundry needs to be folded, and your child's toys are strewn across the living room...

Our fears about what technology and smartphones are doing to our kids has reached a fever pitch. Articles with headlines like “ Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? ” and “ The Risk Of Teen Depression And Suicide Is Linked To Smartphone Use ” have, ironically enough, gone viral online. “It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades...

Nir’s Note: This post part of a series on cognitive bias co-authored by Nir Eyal and illustrated by  Lakshmi Mani . Discover other reasons you make terrible life choices like  confirmation bias ,  hyperbolic discounting  and  distinction bias . There I was, sitting in a packed movie theatre. I waited two years for this sequel and I’ve got enough popcorn and diet soda to la...

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote that “few things are sadder than encountering a person who knows exactly what he should do, yet cannot muster enough energy to do it.”1 Why don't we do what we know needs to get done? Why is it so hard to concentrate and finish what we start? In our digital age, is there any hope of “mustering enough energy” to stay focused on what really matters so we ca...

Nir’s Note: This post part of a series on cognitive bias co-authored with and illustrated by Lakshmi Mani . Discover other reasons you make terrible life choices like confirmation bias and hyperbolic discounting . There I was, looking at an enormous wall of television screens. Each one flashed the exact same scene  —  a beautiful flower slowly blooming to reveal each petal, pistil, and stamen in e...

Does repeating a falsehood make it true? It seems so, at least when it comes to the myth that technology is addicting us all. While a reassessment of the role our gadgets play in our lives is healthy, many people are buying into a self-defeating fallacy that ironically makes it harder to dial back. Not only does the idea that technology “hijacks” our brains smack of the same moral panics leveled a...

If you make web or mobile products, you’re actually in the business of task management. You’re counting on your product to become a recurring part of your customers’ lives. In order to accomplish that,  you have to motivate your users to build a new habit. , Sometimes software companies forget that what they’re building isn’t just a product that people find valuable. Part of what you’re build...

Recently, MessageMe  announced  it had grown to 1 million users in a little over a week's time. The revelation captured the attention of envious app makers throughout Silicon Valley, all of whom are searching for the secrets of customer acquisition like it's the fountain of youth. "Growth hacking" has become the latest buzzword, as investors like Paul Graham profess it's functionally&nbs...

We're in an addictive world. The world has become harder to resist. Products are getting better at giving people what they want and - for the most part - that has been good thing. Yet, the historical trend-line shows products are also becoming more habit-forming. All products alleviate customers’ pain. Even products used to gain pleasure must first generate desire, a unique form of discomfort, whi...

Addiction can be a difficult thing to see. From outward appearances, Dr. Zoe Chance looked fine. A professor at the Yale School of Management with a doctorate from Harvard, Chance's pedigree made what she revealed in front of a crowded  TEDx  audience all the more shocking. "I'm coming clean today telling this story for the very first time in its raw ugly detail," she said. "In March of...

Nir's Note: In this guest post, Ryan Hoover describes the design decisions and strategies used to build a habit-forming product, largely influenced by the learnings on this blog.  Follow @rrhoover or visit his blog to read more about startups and product design. Recently, Nathan Bashaw and I launched Product Hunt , a daily leaderboard of the best new products. As two product enthusiasts, we w...

Nir’s Note: This guest post comes from Stephen Wendel, Principal Scientist at HelloWallet and the author of Designing for Behavior Change . Steve's new book is about how to apply behavioral economics to product development. Follow him on twitter @sawendel . It can be extraordinarily difficult to stop habits head-on. Brain damage, surgery, even Alzheimer’s disease and dementia sometimes fail to sto...

Nir’s Note: This book review is by Sam McNerney. Sam writes about cognitive psychology, business, and philosophy. Many of us feel we’re drowning in the rising tide of emails, updates, and digital distractions. According to a survey by the Families and Work Institute, the majority of American workers report feeling overwhelmed or overworked. In her new book, Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love, and Play...