--:-- Ryan Hanley: I opened up the screen time app on my phone for the very first time about a month ago. And I was sitting next to my girlfriend, and it said three hours and 27 minutes. Three hours and 27 minutes was my daily average screen time. That's 91 days a year spent staring at my phone. That's 17 years of my life at that pace would be spent staring at my stupid phone.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Now, I'm the type of person that considers himself and holds as a point of pride my productivity level. I focus on energy. I work on tough tasks. I get things out the door. I complete projects, right? And I hold that as a point of pride. And here I am wasting a massive amount of time staring at my stupid phone.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And when I dug into it, you know what it was? Social media apps, particularly LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter. I'm mindlessly scrolling, watching motivational videos or looking at news on Twitter or X, and then doing the same exact thing on LinkedIn. Three hours and 27 minutes, and more than half of that time was spent on social media apps.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And here's the crazy part—I immediately start justifying that action as well. Social media is a big part of how I grow my business and build my brand and connect with prospects and customers and other thought leaders and the industries that I work in. It's bullshit. It's absolute bullshit. I'm scrolling those apps as a way to distract myself from whatever it is in those moments that I needed to be distracted from or wanted to be distracted from or didn't want to be distracted from, but allowed myself to be distracted from anyways.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And I have to be self-aware, and I have to acknowledge, and I'm telling you up front that this is a problem and it's something that I'm going to fix. And it's something I've been working on for over a month. We're going to talk about the research that I found, why this happens, what the impact is to us. And then by the end of this video, we are going to dive into tactics that I've been using for over a month to now get my screen time down below three hours.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Because here's the rub on this. It's not just about the wasted time. When we're mindlessly scrolling through social media in particular, and our eyes are focused on this small screen with small letters with blue light radiating off of it, going directly into our brain. It's not just the lost time. Your body produces negative chemicals, cortisol in particular, anxiety, stress-related chemicals flood into your body as you're death scrolling these social media apps.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So not only are you losing time, but you're also drastically impacting your ability to perform at your highest level when you do put the phone down and try to get back to that important work, which is why you're here. It's why I do these videos. These are diary entries to myself because I know if these are things I'm struggling with, I know they're things you're struggling with. And I want to have honest conversations with you.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So that's why I share how, despite being someone who holds himself in high regard as being so productive and getting things done, I have a problem and I am fixing that problem. We're going to discuss it today. Let's get after it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: [In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home.] Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the show. Today, we're talking about distractions. And before we get into that topic, just a couple quick notes. If you enjoy this show, if this is something that brings you value, subscribe. Like if you're on YouTube. Leave a rating and review on Apple and Spotify if you're listening to the podcast.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: If you have questions about the apps that we're going to talk about, the research we're going to talk about, leave them in the comments. Leave them in the reviews. I look at every single one. I answer every single one because, guys, I love you for being here, and I want you to find your own peak performance. And that happens not just through me talking to you through either the video or the podcast, but it happens through real conversations. And we can do that through the comments or just DM me. LinkedIn, Instagram, obviously I'm checking them way less, but there's two ways that you can get at me.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And if you enjoy email, Ryan at findingpeak.com, just email me, my friends. I'm happy to answer your questions and respond there as well. Okay. So getting into this topic in particular, right? So this research on attention residue comes out of the University of Washington from a doctor named Dr. Sophia Leroy. She is a professor of management at the University of Washington, and she introduced the term task switching, which ultimately led to her research around attention residue.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Attention residue and understanding this particular term and its psychological impact on us and our productivity is so important because of three main factors. The first is productivity loss. When you are focused on a task and then you hit a point where maybe you come up against some resistance or there's some piece of it that really starts to create an obstacle and a struggle, we'll immediately assume that we need a distraction. We'll go, we'll pick up our phone or our phone will buzz. And now we are looking at something else or we're scrolling through Instagram or, hey, has anyone DM'd me or did someone like my last post or whatever?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What Dr. Leroy's research found is that our brain stays back. Part of our brain's energy, part of our focus stays back with the previous task, and we are unable to reclaim our full focus for 23 minutes. Now you multiply that by the average of 50 disruptions, 50 distractions a day that we face. You're looking at 19 hours of lost full focus a week. Think about what you could get done, the quality of work product that you could complete. The amount of output that you could create if you had full focus on the tasks that mattered and you were able to reclaim those 19 hours.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I don't know that it's possible to live a completely distraction-free life, especially in the modern world that we live in, especially if you're living a modern life. You're going to have messages that come in that are important for work. You're going to have messages that come in from a spouse, a partner, a loved one, family member. Maybe your kid gets sick at school. You got to go pick them up. If we can remove the unnecessary distractions, the social media, the gaming, the gambling apps, the whatever it is, the news sites that just suck you in, if we can remove those as much as possible, then the necessary distractions, the ones that are important to your life, become less stressful. And we're able to regain more of our full focus.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: This is what distraction is costing you. Creativity, quality relationships, and the achievement of your dreams, your goals. So we're going to talk about this impact. We're going to talk about how we mitigate it and how we move forward. The things we need to do to get our full focus back, to maximize our energy, and to achieve world domination, which why would you why would you shoot for anything less?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So what none of you want to hear is that multitasking reduces our productivity by 40 percent. This is tried and true. This has been tested over and over and over again. The original research came out of the University of California. Multitasking is not a real thing. You are not a good multitasker. No one is. If there's someone in your office who walks around and presents themselves as a good multitasker, they are not, particularly if you are a man, because men's brains are wired differently than women's brains. Women lose less energy when they switch from one task to another. It does not mean that they are able to multitask or they are not impacted by a loss of creativity and energy and focus when they try to jump from task to task to task.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Particularly for men and particularly for younger men, jumping from task to task has an even greater impact on creativity, energy, and focus. We are not multitaskers. Humans are not multitaskers. We are meant to focus on one thing at a time. If the average person spends five hours and 24 minutes a day on their phone, which means even though I have a problem at 327 where I was, I'm still less than the average, which is insane. You're losing more than 100 full days a year to your phone.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So there's a few different psychological principles that come into effect here. The first is attention residue, which we talked about, right? Your brain stays attached to the prior task with a certain amount of energy and focus, which means that we're not able to focus on or refocus our attention to the new task when we switch. And on average, it takes 23 minutes to get our full attention back. Additionally, we have cognitive decline. Research out of the University of Texas shows that having your phone within reach, whether you use it or not, reduces your memory and your IQ.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And this study I've seen multiple times. This is the original research out of the University of Texas. But you have a reduction in IQ and memory just by having your phone in reach because your brain is some portion of your brain is constantly thinking, should I check? Should I check my DMs? Should I what if someone texted me? Hey, do I have any new emails? Well, what's the new sports score? And because it's there in your brain knows it's there. It's constantly and I'm pointing here because my phone is right over here today. And what I should do is take that phone and put that phone someplace else.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: When I work, I actually put it in a drawer. So when I'm doing focused work, I actually take my phone right right here and I put it in the drawer that's underneath here and I put it on silent because anything I could possibly need is going to come through my computer. And we're going to talk about the apps that I'm using to make sure that the right messages come through. All the rest get blocked during my focused time.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The last is life fulfillment, right? The last major psychological impact we're having is life fulfillment. And this one is freaking crazy. Harvard psychologists found that people are the least happy when their minds wander. The least happy, regardless of what they're doing. Distraction doesn't just waste your time. It steals your happiness.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Now, you may be saying, Brian, you know, I like to go for walks and my mind wanders all over the place. That's because that is the task that you are on. You have chosen to go for a walk without your AirPods or earbuds or whatever, and your mind is wandering all over and traveling to different things and thinking about different things. That's the task that you set it on. When they use the word wander in this research, they're talking about distractions, and actually life fulfillment relates to the cognitive decline piece and that having your phone near you, right? It's your mind. Some portion of your mind is constantly wandering to what's going on on the phone, whatever app or, you know, news site or whatever it is that that that is your attention stealer, right? Your mind is constantly wandering to that thing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And that we get the most fulfillment, the most meaning and purpose when we are singularly focused on a task, which meaning and purpose ultimately lead to happiness. So, guys, the effects are real, right? And just, you know, Harvard, Texas, University of California, University of Washington. These are tried and true. These are deep research institutions. And there's multiple studies. I just pulled out in most cases like the study that kicked off the idea. But there have been multiple studies on all these things. There is no denying that a lack of focus, that allowing distractions to come into our lives and not being intentional with our focus crushes our productivity. It decreases our ability to be great at what we do and ultimately reduces our happiness on a day-to-day basis, which are all things that sound fucking terrible.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The root cause of all of this, right? Why are we distracted? What is the root cause of our distraction? Why do we allow this to come into our life, right? And no one wants to admit this, but distractions aren't the real problem. That's the symptom. The phone, the social media, the text messages, the TikTok, whatever it is that is your distraction is a symptom. It is not the root cause of the problem. The problem is we're avoiding discomfort. Behavioral scientists have found that every time a task gets challenging, when you're faced with the boredom, the uncertainty, and even the tiniest frustration, your brain starts screaming for escape. That's when you grab your phone. That's when you check your email or your text messages or your DMs on social media or you death scroll X to find what's going on in the world, right?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: These feel like harmless moments, but they're not. They're a horrible habit that is the result of avoiding discomfort. When the project gets tough, when we don't know what to do next, when we start to get frustrated with a conversation or a meeting or we feel like we deserve something that we're not getting, we turn to distractions. It's a bad habit. It's a coping mechanism. It is our way of dealing with discomfort. And it is one of the worst habits we can practice. And all of us, myself included, as I've mentioned multiple times here, we all do this.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: My point in going this deep on this topic is that if we only address the symptoms and we put some app blocker on our phone, and we don't understand the root cause, what happens is we just bypass the app blocker, right? There's always a button on these things where you can just go beep, or you just turn the app blocker off, or you reduce its difficulty setting or whatever so that you can just get to the thing you ultimately want to do. There are tools that we can use to help us on the way, but we ultimately have to address the core issue, which is our avoidance of discomfort, and we have to break the bad habit. Tools can help, but we must believe it in here. And we must want that focus back. We have to want that productivity back.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The issue, the reason that our body fights discomfort, avoids discomfort at the smallest, as the research shows, at the tiniest frustration, that's the quote from the research, at the tiniest frustration, our brain starts screaming for escape is because of dopamine. Every notification you check gives your brain a little hit of dopamine. Dopamine's the happy chemical. It's the feel-good chemical. Over time, we're training our brain to crave distractions so we get that dopamine hit. Because guess what your body isn't doing when you run up against an obstacle, right? It's not dropping dopamine into your body. You're frustrated. You're anxious. You're stressed. You're worried. It's dropping cortisol in your body, not dopamine.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So we look at our phone and we see that 17 people liked our last Instagram post and bang, All of a sudden, our brain drops a little dopamine in and I feel better. And even though we're doing this unconsciously to a certain extent, we are training our body and training our brain to avoid the tough projects that we need to get done that are meaningful and deliver purpose in exchange for these insignificant dopamine hits that just recalculate, rewire our brain for these little micro hits versus finishing the big projects that are ultimately going to lead to our success.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So when we think about this, we're not even fighting distractions anymore. We're inviting them in. It's a bad habit over and over. These small, little, fleeting dopamine hits tell our brain that when things get tough, pick up the phone. But watching a David Goggins video on Instagram is not the same as doing the work David Goggins does. Unfortunately to our brain, we can convince it that it is. And that, my friends, is the scary reality that we have to address. Watching the Instagram video is the same to our brain as making the hard decisions, even though the results are not the same.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: One of the things that I like to do in situations like this, where I become aware of something that I am doing that does not help me get to my goals, does not help me move forward, doesn't help me, you know, reach peak performance in my life is I start asking myself questions. And sometimes I'll write down the answers in a journal or whatever. I do not have a regular journal practice. I use it more as a tool when necessary, but I'll ask myself questions.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So I started writing down some questions and I want to share them with you because they started to make me feel a little uncomfortable with kind of this idea of distraction. What could you achieve if you weren't constantly distracted? If I got an hour back a day, what could I do? I could use that to work out. I could use that hour to read more. I could use that hour to reach out and spend time with friends or close connections that I may have lost contact with because I don't have the time to reach out to them. I could build a deeper relationship with my kids, with my partner. Right. I could insert whatever's most important to you. If you got an hour back a day that wasn't spent scrolling on your phone, that was spent on a task that was meaningful to you. And it doesn't have to be a work task. It could just be something that's meaningful to you.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: How much better would your life be? What could you achieve? How many opportunities have you missed because you couldn't focus long enough to seize them? What did you give up on because you didn't have the time, right? Do you ever wanna learn to play the guitar or the piano? You ever want to get after a long run, right? Become a marathon runner. Probably need more than an hour, but an extra hour would help. You ever want to hit a hit a goal at the gym, spend more time at the range hitting golf balls, right? What is that thing that you are not able to achieve because you couldn't focus on it long enough?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: How much deeper could your relationship be if you weren't glued to the screen? Have your kids ever looked at you and said, dad, put your phone down? Have you ever sat in a room with your friends and they're having a conversation and they all laugh and you missed it because you're staring at your phone? What kind of life are you trading for these fleeting dopamine hits? Are you everything that you want to be today? Or do you, do you desire more? Not just more materially. I don't mean it that way. I mean, more as a person, a deeper thinker, a funnier person, a more creative person, a more caring person, a more understanding person, a more driven person. What are you trading to see who's DMG on your social media app?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I don't want to be less of a person like if so many of you watch the channel. No, I'm a Christian. I believe in God. And oftentimes a mental framework that works for me is when I stand in front of St. Peter at the gates of heaven. And he asked me about my life. What, how am I going to answer those questions? And do I want to have to explain to him why I wasn't everything that God created me to be because I enjoyed death scrolling X or Instagram or LinkedIn? Yeah. But you know, I had an average of seven comments a day on LinkedIn posts to drive my personal brand or, hey, I was really up to date on what was going on with the latest political scandal or, you know, international conflict or whatever. That feels like a wasted portion of my life to me.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Let's get into the prescription. How do we start to solve this problem? Because I hope the time we've spent so far, I've pounded into your head because this is what I've been pounding in my own head that this is something I got to change about myself. I don't want to be the distraction guy. So how do we change it?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: First, and this is the one that to me is the most tactical, the easiest to implement and the easiest to follow, time blocking. We all have calendars, Google calendars, Microsoft calendars, whatever calendar you have. If you don't have a calendar for some reason with some aspect of your work, create a free Gmail account and it comes with a calendar. Use the calendar. Time block. Use the calendar to block focus time, to block work time, to block workout time. Put your kids' sporting events or activities on it. Put important dates that relate to relationships on it. Put vacations you want to go on. Put, you know, the fact that you have to get your car inspected on there, like use your calendar and block out your days so that the important time is there. What do you need to get done? If you're a leader and sending out messages to staff or team members is important to you, like follow up emails, thank you emails, you know, giving people credit, asking them how they're doing that interpersonal stuff. That maybe you struggle with finding time to do, block half hour a day, make it the morning, you know, first thing you do or make it the last thing you do every day, put a half hour on your calendar so no one can put a meeting during that time and get the work done if it's important to you.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Time blocking works. Research from Harvard's business review shows that employees who use time blocking are 74% more productive. 74%, this is not hard stuff. Right. Schedule deep work sessions. That could be, hey, you have to work on an investor deck. Hey, I have a big pitch with an enterprise client coming up and block the time to work on the pitch deck, the sales deck to do rehearsals for how you're going to pitch this person or how you want to sell them or what your hook is going to be or how to overcome objections that they're doing. Block the time for the work that moves the needle.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Cal Newport, the author of Deep Work, one of my absolute favorite books on this topic. It's back here. He also has another incredible book, Be So Good They Can't Ignore You. In Deep Work, he writes, clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not. The second way we can reduce the distractions in our lives is to build distraction-free environments. Now, there's a study from the University of California here that shows visual and auditory distractions can reduce performance by up to 64%. So that's both visual and auditory, not just visual, not just scrolling our phone.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And, you know, it really comes down to what is the environment that we're creating. Are you using focus mode on your phone while you're trying to get work done? Are you using distraction reduction or attention apps? Right. So this was the first thing that I did. And I found two apps that have worked incredibly well for me personally. The first is Opal, O-P-A-L. I'll have links to these in the show notes for this episode. And the other is Endel. And there's a lot of apps that do this. It's just the one that I picked after doing some research. Relatively inexpensive. I think it's like three bucks a month or something like that. But it makes it so that certain blocks of time during the day, it pops a message up and blocks me from getting into particular the things that I've already told you are a problem for me, social media apps. And it is a big part of how I was able to hit that initial reduction in screen time number. So getting it from three hours and 27 minutes to under three hours, that initial bump was really just adding Opal and having a little pop up anytime I tried to, you know, look over and grab and check Instagram or whatever and have it say, look, you know, you told us that from nine to 12 every morning, you did not want to be on social media and you have an hour left or whatever. And then I just go, OK, no problem. Put my phone back down. That's been a huge advantage.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The other is a tool called Endel. And this is a free app that you can pay up for premium. But particularly for people with ADD and ADHD, which I have, it is a sound app. And I used to listen to music, classical music in particular worked well for me. But this app works even better than classical music. And essentially it is a progressive set of sounds and you can adjust whether you're in focus mode, relax mode, sleep mode, and I've used it in all those different situations but particularly focus mode. It is a progressive series of sounds which for people with ADD and ADHD, whatever that that portion of your brain that is constantly searching for a new dopamine hit which is oftentimes why people have ADHD or ADD, it is a the progressive nature of the sounds keeps that portion of your mind occupied so that you can focus on the thing that you're doing and I'll be honest with you I I didn't know if it was going to be bullshit when I first downloaded it. It's on constantly. I literally don't listen to music while I'm working anymore. I don't listen to music while I'm doing tasks around the house anymore. I'll pop my ear pods in, sit in a chair, listen to the guided meditation for 10 minutes. And honestly, it works incredibly well.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I have not been practicing this as much in my life. It's something I'm going to start to bring in, especially now that focus and reducing distraction, reducing the anxiety and stress associated with distraction is a big part of how I want to improve my productivity in 2025. It's something I'm going to bring back in. Viktor Frankl has a great quote on this between stimulus and response. There is space. And in that space is our power to choose our response and when we've given our brain a chance to reset like I used to talk about mindfulness meditation as essentially if you've ever played old Nintendos right or like Contra was a big one I enjoyed Contra when I was a kid and at some point in one of the levels always you'd be rocking and rolling and everything would just freeze we just lock up and the only way at that time to you know to reset the game was you had to hit the reset button, right? To get the game going again is you'd hit the reset button. And I found mindfulness meditation to essentially be a hard reset on your brain. It just gave your brain a chance to be calm and quiet. And when you come out of it, you are much more focused on what you're doing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So mindfulness meditation is something we'll talk about more as we progress this year as I build that habit in and I'll share with you some of the things that I'm doing right now. I don't have great guidance other than I have done it in the past and found it to be incredibly productive. It's a habit that I did lose and I want to bring back as focus and productivity become more prioritized in 2025.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The fourth way that is to build better habits through rewarding yourself for deep work. We have to create dopamine hits, dopamine rewards that are greater and more important to us than the dopamine that we get from the distraction that is keeping us from doing the work. That makes sense. Research from the University of Chicago shows that immediate rewards boost motivation towards long-term goals. So, you know, we crave rewards. That's why we're looking at Instagram or we're looking at X or we're looking wherever we're looking in general is that it drops a dopamine reward into our brain. So can we treat ourselves a walk, a snack, whatever it is, treat ourselves when we hit a goal of focused activity.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So if you say to yourself, I'm going to work for 30 minutes distracted and free on this task and only this task at the end of those 30 minutes, give yourself some sort of reward. Now, try to make that reward productive. Try to make it positive, right? We don't want to be stuffing ourselves our faces with candy all day as a reward. But can you find a reward in your life that hopefully is positive, but creates a greater dopamine hit than the distraction creates? And when we do that, we are essentially training ourselves, training our brain to say, I'm going to give 30 minutes of focus without wanting a distraction, because I know at the end of this 30 minutes, I'm going to get this thing that I want.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And BJ Fogg, who's the author of Tiny Habits, a great book. You know, if you've read Atomic Habits by James Clear, this is another great book to read. Celebration is the best way to wire in a new habit, right? We have to wire in a new habit and give that habit a reward that is greater than the reward we get from distractions.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The fifth and final way to take control of our distractions is to take control of our inputs. According to a survey done by Deloitte in 2021, 80% of smartphone users check their phones within 15 minutes of waking up. The first thing we consume, the first thing we do in our day sets the tone for our mental state for the day. This is why so many people talk about reading in the morning or working out in the morning or doing mindful meditation in the morning because these are positive inputs that create a positive momentum for the rest of your day. You're putting yourself in a mental state of I'm going to get shit done. Not what happened in the world or, you know, no one liked the last post I put out or geez, you know, I'm at the same level as this guy and he's doing so much better than me or she's doing so much better. There's so much negativity that can be brought into our brain by checking our phone, looking at the tasks that other people have given us either through text message or through email, right?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Establish a routine. It does not have to be long. It can be 10 minutes. I'm going to get up and I'm going to do pushups and air squats for 10 minutes when I wake up while my coffee is brewing just to get my body pushed in the right direction. Or I'm going to read 10 pages of a book to start the day that's going to help propel me towards the things that I want to get done. I'm going to get that positive, focused engagement, get that ball rolling early. Read, right? Meditate. Sit in silence. Journal. Attack a creative project. I've always found that my most creative time is in the morning. I am the most creative in the morning and my creativity drops as the day goes on. And I'm essentially creatively useless at night. Some people are night owls. Very few people are night owls. Most of us, the vast majority of us, are our most creative, our most productive in the morning. And if we can get that productivity ball rolling early, we're setting ourselves up for success in the day.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Guys, distraction is stealing our future, right? Every swipe, every scroll, every notification is stealing our future. A month ago, I found out that I was spending three hours and 27 minutes a day on my phone, that I was losing 91 days a year. And if I kept that pace, 17 years of my life was going to be spent staring at a stupid phone. That was depressing to me. But I'm going to make the changes necessary to become my most productive self because I will not stand at the gates of heaven and have to explain to St. Peter why I gave so much of my life away to this stupid freaking phone and the stupid shit that comes through it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: There are things we need to do here. It does have value. I don't hate the phone. I love the phone. but being mindful, being intentional with how we use it to hit our goals, to be productive, to be the best versions of ourselves. Every moment that we reclaim from our distractions is moving our life forward. What you focus on is who you become. This is the way.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: [In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home.] It's 3 a.m.
