Nir Eyal's Blog, page 36

Hunting for Habits: Keying in on smart design to make a product irresistible

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 wanted to create a community to share, discover, and geek out about new and interesting products. But to make it a success, we knew we had to make it a habit, a product people would use every day.

Early feedback suggests it’s been working, as gauged by several tweets and our own site traffic analysis. Qualitative feedback is great, of course, but what people actually do is more important.

60% of daily active users (DAU) are returning visitors
32% of unique visitors in the past week have visited the site 5 or more times
52% of subscribers open daily email digest (yes, daily!) and 23% click-through

This is especially encouraging, considering the site’s minimalism and lack of obvious re-engagement features. Here are the design decisions and strategies used to build a habit-forming product, largely influenced by Nir Eyal’s work.

Build for Existing Behaviors

In a recent interview, Ev Williams, founder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium, shared his strategy for building a billion-dollar business:

Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time… identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps.

Product Hunt isn’t attempting to create new desires or behaviors. We are providing people with a destination to do something they already do. Most successful startups begin this way.

People have been sharing and beautifying photography for decades. Instagram made this effortless and more accessible.

Sharing links and updates across social networks was a daily habit for many before Joel Gascoigne, founder of Buffer, scratched his own itch to make this even easier and more efficient.

As social networks increase the speed and frequency of link-sharing, people have become inundated with articles. Nate Weiner emailed himself links – an inefficient and terrible way to save articles. And he wasn’t the only one as his bookmarking service, Pocket (formerly Read-It-Later) solves this problem for millions others.

Similarly, Product Hunt’s inspiration comes from our own desires and observations of existing user behaviors.

New products are newsworthy and a topic of conversation. “What new apps are you using? What’s on your iPhone home screen? Did you see that new product announcement?” Product releases and significant feature updates also drive attention to popular publications like Techcrunch.

These conversations also exist in online communities like Hacker News. “Show HN” is a popular meme where product creators share their weekend hacks and product launches with the community. These posts often receive a lot of attention as users upvote and engage in discussion with the founders.

But these behaviors exist outside of the tech, early adopter crowd. Every Thursday, the Apple App Store features new and interesting apps, driving hundreds of thousands of downloads daily. For many, exploring featured apps is a weekly ritual. Kickstarter has also proven there is mainstream interest in discovering and sharing (and even backing!) cool, new products.

Product Hunt is the destination for these conversations and desires.

Remind Users to Return

Habits don’t form overnight. It takes several days, often weeks for a product or service to earn unprompted user engagement, triggered by people’s day-to-day emotions. Consider your use of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or other popular, habit-forming products. Engagement starts with external triggers that inform the user what to do, driving the desired behavior.

Immediately after signing up on Twitter, the service recommends users to follow. Soon after, email notifications are sent to the user, highlighting tweets from those followed. Companies promote their @username through TV commercials, billboards, online advertising, and even their own business card. Friends and colleagues talk about breaking news they discovered on Twitter. All of these external triggers – directly or indirectly delivered by Twitter – re-engage users.

This sounds obvious and some argue companies are too aggressive with external triggers (and some are), but it’s important to realize your startup is of very little interest (at least initially) to others. Users are inundated with the distractions of everyday life – they need and want to be reminded you exist.

Product Hunt uses the following external triggers to re-engage users:

1) Daily Email Digest

Every morning, yesterday’s top 3 products arrive in subscribers’ email inbox. For many, this is the product, delivering users a brief, scannable digest of what the community thinks is neat. At the bottom of the email, a large button prompts the user to view more products submitted the previous day.

2) Twitter

Each product submission is tweeted by @producthunt, attributing the user that submitted it.

Timely: The time tracking app to end time tracking http://t.co/NaWGBaMAPF via @hnshah on @producthunt http://t.co/cJLb1EKZFo

— Product Hunt (@producthunt) December 15, 2013

This extends Product Hunt beyond email and the site itself to another communication channel. Submitters receive feedback for their contribution, @producthunt followers are reminded of the service, and often founders of the products shared discover the service after monitoring mentions of their product on Twitter.

3) Product Launches

Product Hunt is a celebration of new products. Every day, new web apps, games, creative hacks, and hardware products are unveiled to the world, grabbing our attention through news feeds and online publications. When this occurs, Product Hunt users know where to turn to submit their new discovery and discuss with likeminded people. Product press and attention effectively becomes an external trigger to visit Product Hunt. Wonderful, isn’t it?

4) Products Used

But arguably the most powerful and long-lasting external trigger are the products discovered on Product Hunt. Several people have told me how much they love Momentum, appreciative that they found it on Product Hunt. After installing the Momentum Chrome extension, the service replaces the new tab with a new beautiful photo each day, prompting the user to enter their main focus for the day. It serves as a to-do list, embedding itself into people’s daily routine (consider how often you hit cmd+t in your browser). In turn, Momentum becomes an external trigger for our service, reminding users Product Hunt is the place to discover great products.

Find an Internal Trigger

External triggers such as email notifications and word-of-mouth are an important drive of re-engagement but they are not the only thing that brings users back. Internal triggers are where habits are formed. These triggers form within one’s thoughts, often coupled with emotions, particularly those that are negative. When negative feelings arise, users seek resolution, turning to products or services that alleviate the “pain.”

FOMO (fear of missing out) is a form of social anxiety. We all want to stay up-to-date and knowledgable about what’s new and happening. Some may even feel embarrassed by their lack of understanding of particular events or topics. This is certainly true in politics and news but also for products.

Product Hunt alleviates this FOMO, providing a quick digest of new and interesting products. Visitors leave the site reassured that they’re up-to-date and familiar enough with the latest products to say, “Yes, I know about .” at the next social gathering.

Make it Enjoyable to Create and Consume

The initial Product Hunt prototype offered contributors a free-form text field to include a description with each product submitted. Some users provided lengthy narratives of the product. Others didn’t include a description at all. To make Product Hunt compelling, scannable, and more fun, we added constraints, taking inspiration from AngelList’s startup taglines.

In addition to the product name and link, contributors must include a short tagline for the product. Contributors can copy and paste the tagline used on the product’s landing page or create their own. For example:

Mindie: Create 7-Second Music Videos
Hatch: The app that loves you back
Blue Goji: Gamified Exercise Equipment
BloomTHAT: Ridiculously Fast Flowers
Keezy: Turn your phone into an instrument

It’s fun to come up with a tagline – to think creatively and artistically describe a product to the world. Similar to Twitter, limiting taglines to 65 characters forces succinctness, making creation more accessible and consumable.

This small amount of effort also establishes ownership of the submission. When visitors upvote the product, contributors receive recognition not only for their discovery but also for their efforts describing the product via a tagline.

Let the User Win

Communities like Hacker News and Reddit rank user submissions using an algorithm based on the number of votes and other factors. Posts rise and fall in the ranks, creating a fluid, ever-changing homepage of the best new content. Product Hunt takes a different approach, grouping submissions by day, ranked by the total number of votes. This unique presentation reduces the anxiety of consuming a seemingly never-endless feed of content. Each day serves as a finish line, giving users the ability to quickly scan through products posted today, yesterday, and previous days.

Of course, as the community grows, more products are submitted each day. Some people informed us that they found it difficult to parse the product names to find new additions added since their previous visit earlier in the day. So we made a super simple addition to the CSS:

a:visited {color:#bbb}

After clicking the product name, it changes from black to gray to identify products previously viewed. This also turns the feed into a to-do list, encouraging visitors to click on more products and achieve “completion.”

Reduce Friction

Discussion is a critical component to Product Hunt. Although not everyone has permission to comment yet, those that do are far more engaged as they revisit the site to read and respond throughout the day. To encourage conversation, we knew we needed to make it easy for users to view the discussion without sacrificing the clean, easy to consume homepage.

Our solution: the “Bashaw Pane,” named after my partner Nathan Bashaw. With a single click, the discussion dynamically slides in from the right without navigating to an entirely new page. The homepage remains visible on the left, making it easy for users to return to the feed without losing context. By reducing friction, visitors consume and contribute more.

This presentation is also used when directly navigating to the discussion, teasing new and interesting product discoveries on the left side of the page. This helps on-board new users that find Product Hunt through links shared on Twitter and elsewhere.

Make it Unpredictable

Unlike most directories, Product Hunt avoids categorizing products to encourage serendipitous discovery. Although most submissions are technology products, occasionally the delightful and unexpected product is submitted. Last week a Tuft & Needle, a new startup offering boutique-quality beds at an affordable price, was shared. Rarely would I seek a new bed but this unexpected find and AMA with its founders, was enjoyable.

As previously mentioned, Product Hunt subscribers receive an email each morning with the top three products voted by the community. The daily digest is delightful because of its variability. Subscribers know that it is coming but they don’t know what it will contain. “Which new, interesting products will I discover? Did the product I submitted make it to the top?” Curiosity is what drives people to open and read.

But even more unpredictable are the announcements included at the top of the digest highlighting founder AMA’s, announcing breaking product launches, or prompting users to submit a screenshot of their mobile device home screen for an upcoming blog post. Every day is different.

Use the Right Language

Copy is often the last thing product builders work on. Our initial tagline was, “Product Hunt is for product people,” describing the type of community we’re targeting and eliciting curiosity. That was a bad idea. It was too vague and didn’t describe the purpose of the site. So we changed it to:

The daily leaderboard for new products

Let’s break this down:

“Daily” frames the habitual behavior we’re seeking to facilitate.
“Leaderboard” implies a ranking and system of curating the best.
“New products” communicates the type of submissions accepted

Although it’s too early to tell if we’ve built a long-lasting, habit-forming product, early signs are encouraging. And it all comes down to smart design, which we hope we have attained.

Note: This guest post was written by Ryan Hoover

Photo credit: Mark Gilmour

Are Companies Too Obsessed With Growth? How to Measure Habits

Nir’s Note: In this guest post, Abhay Vardhan, discusses how to measure the strength of user habits with cohort analysis and retention rate. Abhay is a founder of Blippy.com and blogs at abhayv.com. Follow Abhay on Twitter @abhayvardhan.

Imagine an entrepreneur showed you the graph to the right for his new app called, “PinterestForDogs.”

You would think PinterestForDogs is doing quite well, right? Well, it depends.

A common mistake entrepreneurs make is to focus too much on user growth. Instead, it is often more important to ask: “Is the product creating a habit so users keep coming back?” and “How do we measure the strength of such a habit?” These questions are crucial because without establishing user habits, it is impossible to sustain a healthy user base. Eventually, all user acquisition channels saturate.

I learned this the hard way with our first product, a walkie-talkie app called blip.me that allowed users to record and share audio clips. Initially, we saw good viral growth as users invited others. User retention, however, was not so great; people were excited initially but dropped off within a few weeks. So how did it end? The app was downloaded by millions, but used by few.

Given the importance of establishing a user habit, how do we track it? In my experience, the best way to do this is by measuring retention rate through cohort analysis. Let us define these terms.

Cohort Analysis
A cohort is a group of people who share a particular characteristic over a period of time. An example is a group of users who joined on a particular day. A cohort analysis follows these users’ actions over a period of time.
Retention Rate
The retention rate of a cohort for a period of time is the ratio of number of active users at the end of the period to the number of active users at the start of the period. The definition of an active user is usually very specific to the product. For our purposes, a user is active on a given day if he or she has visited the product on that day.

Continuing with our example, PinterestForDogs, we will measure the retention rate for two cohorts of 100 users, one cohort consisting of users who joined on January 1 and another who joined a week later on January 8.

As you can see from the example, the retention rate decays with time and eventually plateaus. Although the January 1 cohort seems to have higher retention, both cohorts experience a sharp drop off and settle to a retention rate of 0.03 (3%). This final level consists of users that have become hooked: they have established a habit pattern to keep coming back to the product. These are your most interesting users.

How is cohort analysis helpful?

Critical data does not get thrown off by external events. If you just look at user growth, a mention by a blog may cause a huge spike in user sign-ups but pre-existing cohorts would not be affected much.
Cohorts give you actionable data. Why is the user retention weak? Could it be the onboarding? Do you need reminders to establish a consumption habit? By watching the cohort closely, you can understand how users are acting.
Cohort analysis naturally leads you to an intense focus on the consumer. If you are looking at a cohort of 100 users, these are real people. The more you analyze the cohort, the better you will understand them.
Cohort analysis is an objective view of progress. It’s easy to drink your own kool-aid when you are experiencing heady user growth. Keeping a close eye on cohorts forces you to continue asking the right questions.

What retention rate numbers should you expect?

Naturally, retention rates vary by industry. An e-commerce application that is able to monetize users well can probably live with much lower retention rate than a free social networking app that needs millions of active users to be profitable. The following numbers are tailored to mobile or web apps in the social networking/sharing space.

In our space, 4 weeks after the cohort join date should be when user engagement plateaus, which is the ideal time to measure retention rate. Generally a retention rate of more than 20% is excellent. To compare yourself to two successful companies in this space, Twitter and Pinterest, you can look at the analysis by RJMetrics (reproduced with permission below).

The graph above analyzes cohorts in time intervals of weeks instead of days and an active user is someone who has published at least once a week. We can see that by this measure, the retention rate for Twitter plateaus around 22%.

On the other hand, the retention rate for Pinterest settles at an astonishing 45%!

If your retention rates are less than 5% after 4 weeks, it’s likely that your product has not establish a user habit. With some analysis, you may be able to determine why. Is it something that users really want? Are your users getting confused? If we look at the retention rate of PinterestForDogs, we see that it is only 3%. This implies that it is unlikely to succeed, even though the first graph of user growth looked great.

Cohort analysis asks tough questions. But, the sooner you ask them the better your startup will be.

Summing up

To succeed, a product has to create a lasting habit so that users keep coming back. Without habits, even if there is good user acquisition, it is hard to establish a growing base of active users. Simple metrics, such as retention rate, can be applied to new users to determine the strength of the habit. Cohort analysis can lead to valuable insights crucial to the success of any habit-forming product.

Many thanks for Nir Eyal, David King, Tim Courrejou, and Sameer Shariff for comments on earlier drafts of this post.

Note: This guest essay was written by Abhay Vardham.

Want to Help With “Hooked” Book?

If you are an email subscriber, you will soon receive access to my new book titled, “Hooked: A Guide to Building Habit-Forming Technology.” I am working hard to have it to you by the end of the year.

In the meantime, I need your help. I am offering a first look to those interested in reading, editing, and providing suggestions for improvement.

In exchange for your time, your name will be listed in the book as a “Contributor” and in addition to receiving a free copy of the e-book, you will earn my sincere thanks.

If you are interested in being a contributor, please click here

NOTE: The Contributor Program will be open until December 12th, at which time I will be finishing the final draft and sending it to print. If you’d like to help, please hurry.

Last Workshops of the Year

Tickets are available to my “Hooked” workshops in San Francisco and Denver.

The workshop is a practical synthesis of what you’ve been reading here on my blog. It’s designed for anyone working on products they want to make more engaging and habit-forming.

San Francisco – Thursday, December 5 – http://hookedsfdec5.eventbrite.com/

Denver – Wednesday, December 18 – http://www.eventbrite.com/e/hooked-workshop-tickets-9485709011

IMPORTANT: Blog subscribers get 50% off the admission price using the discount code: “NirAndFarFriends”

 

The New App a Secret Agent Would Love

A few minutes before his helicopter touched down in a covert military base just outside of Kabul, Afghanistan, Tommy Thompson reached for his secret weapon. He was about to meet with top Afghan officials and he needed to ensure he hit his mark. But Thompson’s mission to the war-torn region in 2004 did not involve delivering guns and bombs. As the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, the diplomat was there to win hearts and minds.

To accomplish his directive, assigned to him by the President of the United States, Thompson relied upon information delivered at exactly the right time and place. Minutes before each meeting with dignitaries, he was handed a top-secret intelligence briefing.

The CIA-prepared binder contained the most vital, and at times trivial, information on who the Secretary was going to meet. A quick glance provided the context for the meeting, notes from previous encounters, and often times contained personal information.

“Speaking to Secretary Thompson after he read his briefing gave you the feeling you were the most important person in the world,” said Bhavin Shah, who traveled with Thompson to Afghanistan. “You understood that he cared about you enough to mention the things that were on your mind.”

Thanks to his dossier, Thompson was never without a piece of information, which when used in the right context, served to ease the conversation. His meetings were never awkward, he was never dull, and somehow, it always appeared the Secretary was, in Shah’s words, “conversationally refreshed.”

Thompson’s personal soft skills, often turned into hard results. According to Shah, “You would suddenly see stern generals and skeptical officials relax when Thompson dropped important detail to show he cared about the individual.”

Years after traveling with the Secretary, the memory of the power of good conversation and those all-important briefings stuck with Shah. In 2012, Shah along with co-founder Paul Tyma, decided to see if they could build a technology inspired by Thompson’s official briefings.

“I wanted my own dossiers,” Shah said. “I interact with so many people during my day, and I often find it hard to remember everything. I had trouble keeping everything straight.” But whether it was actually possible to build a technology good enough to do the job, was still an open question.

I first met Shah during the early days of his new company nearly a year and a half ago. A venture capital friend made the introduction and over burgers in Palo Alto, I understood why he had connected us.

Shah needed to deliver relevant information the way Thompson’s dossiers did. But with no g-man handing over carefully drafted binders, the concept would need to leverage new technologies and create new user behaviors. To succeed, the app had to become a habit.

We sketched out a few ideas using a framework I developed called the Hook Model. The Hook distills the elements of a habit-forming technology into four fundamental steps: a trigger, action, variable reward, and investment and is found in all sorts of products, which keep users coming back.

Shortly after our meeting, the Refresh team built a bare-bones version to test the validity of their idea. The v.1 used SMS text messages to send early users snippets of information gathered from the open web about the person they were about to meet.

A message like, “Don’t forget to ask Michael about his recent trip to Vancouver,” could be sent based on a quick scan of my calendar and Facebook account. 15 minutes before a meeting, this kind of information proved to be a great conversation starter.

In the early days, Shah used the so-called “man behind the curtain” technique to gauge user response. Testing the idea with a small handful of investors and friends, Shah hired a woman named Colleen to send out talking points manually over SMS.

Shah believed that if users responded well to the messages Colleen was sending, it would be worth building a technology to automate the process. Shah’s first test was to figure out his users’ triggers. He needed to understand what problem he was solving for his users by providing them with pertinent information before a meeting.

After several months of testing and tweaking, Shah decided he was ready to build the real thing. His handful of users had verified the first three phases of his product’s hook. The trigger was the fear of forgetting to mention important information during a meeting. The action would be to open the app, and the variable reward would be the new information the user would find as well as the positive feedback from the conversation itself. Shah also believed the user felt another trigger directly after the meeting, when they feared forgetting important information.

However, Shah’s concept for a habit-forming technology was still missing a critical component, the investment phase. Whenever users put data into a service, they invest in it and increase the likelihood of returning, a phenomenon I call “stored value”.

I strongly advised that while pulling publically available information from social networks about who the user was about to meet was a good first step, the user needed to add new facts to sustain the habit.

Users had to input the kind of information only they knew. In order to refresh the user’s memory before their next meeting, they needed to add private notes. Informational nuggets like a person’s favorite sports team or a home improvement project they might be working on, could only be collected by the user. But could an app help make these memory joggers useful?

Shah’s team went from the SMS version to an early app prototype, which attempted to close the loop. By connecting the app to my calendar, I would receive a notification promptly after my meetings to ask, “What would you like to remember about your meeting?”

Unfortunately, results from the prompt were lackluster. Asking users to input notes with an open-ended question worked for some, but didn’t engage those who were less motivated.

That’s when the team came up with a novel solution. Instead of using the old vague prompt, they decided to test structured categories. Names of family members could be put into the “names and people” category, while notes on a big upcoming vacations could be entered under “big events.” The seemingly simple change made a massive impact. The new prompt  increased the number of notes entered by users 3X over the old method. Shah’s app was finally becoming a user habit.

With their hook in place, Shah’s team decided to expand the reach of their new app, which recently made its debut in the Apple App Store. Inspired by Tommy Thompson’s endearing conversations, the new app is called Refresh and is available here.

Disclosures: I hold shares in and have worked as a consultant to Refresh.

Angel or Devil: Who’s Really Investing In Your Start-Up?

This article originally appeared in the Harvard Business Review

A friend called me heartbroken, crying. She had spent months looking for investors to fund her fledgling startup and now she had a big problem. Someone was ready to give her the money.

Trouble was, the cash came with a catch. The only investor willing to pony-up the money was someone she didn’t like. She also got the feeling he did not like her much either, and yet, he wanted to invest. “If he was involved, I have the feeling I would quit my company down the road,” she told me over the phone.

Time was running out, she needed the funds and with no other investor ready to commit, she feared she’d have to take the money from someone she couldn’t stand. The very thought made her sick in the stomach.

I felt for her and her dilemma piqued my curiosity. What differentiates a great early-stage investor from someone no entrepreneur wants to take money from unless they absolutely have to? I wanted to know what separated angel investors — those who add value to a company — from devil investors — those who destroy it.

Last month, famed investor and Sun Microsystems co-founder, Vinod Khosla, shocked a tech conference audience claiming, “… 95 percent of VCs add zero value. I would bet that 70-80 percent add negative value to a startup in their advising.” Can Khosla be right? Can investors be a liability rather than an asset?

“I don’t know a startup that hasn’t been through tough times,” Khosla said, and it is during these rough patches that he believes many investors fail their companies. But there are more ways an investor can screw a company than giving crummy advice.

A classic Harvard Business Review article demonstrates how investors can negatively impact the psyche of startup founders, often with toxic, long-lasting repercussions. The paper’s authors, Manzoni and Barsoux, describe a disorder they call the “set-up-to-fail syndrome.” Though they focus on how this affects the manager-to-employee relationship, I believe the affliction can also manifest in the context of an investor-to-founder partnership, particularly when a first-time entrepreneur is involved.

What is this sabotaging syndrome? It begins innocently enough. The chain reaction usually begins with the “tough times” Khosla says are part of every company’s lifecycle. Sometimes the investor has pre-existing doubts about the CEO’s abilities, but the infection usually starts when the company misses a minor target or isn’t progressing as quickly as anticipated.

When things do not go as planned, many investors increase supervision of the company and its CEO. The investor’s doubts in the founder begin to show in subtle cues like body language and tone, as well as in not-so-subtle ways like sending emails asking for more frequent progress reports. The investor may also initiate lengthy discussions, wanting to know how the company intends to get itself back on track.

The investor’s questions are legitimate — it’s his money after all. But the byproduct of the increased scrutiny is the deterioration of the founder’s confidence and creativity. The entrepreneur suspects the investor is losing faith and responds by overcompensating in an attempt to fight the investor’s perception.

The CEO may start working at an unsustainable pace and demand the company’s employees do the same, squandering mindshare and team morale on unnecessary tasks to placate the investor. Fearful of further disappointing her patron, the CEO may unintentionally paint a rosier view of the company or stop asking for critical feedback.

As the founder shares less, the investor interprets the CEO’s closing-up as an inability to surface problems — a sign of poor judgment and a lack of competence. The investor becomes increasingly frustrated and is now convinced that the CEO requires further oversight.

But as Khosla admits, investor’s ideas are often crap and with so much attention focused on what the investor thinks is best, the company misses real opportunities.

As the study’s authors point out, “Perhaps the most daunting aspect of the set-up-to-fail syndrome is that it is self-fulfilling and self-reinforcing — it is the quintessential vicious cycle.”

Taking cues from the more experienced investor, the first-time CEO begins doubting her own abilities. She begins performing her job mechanically, avoids risk-taking and spends more time and energy catering to the investor’s requests. The CEO’s self-doubt fuels poor performance, validating the investor’s suspicions and throwing the company into a self-perpetuating death-spiral, which leaves the once-promising CEO dazed, confused, and often times, out of work.

Stopping the Syndrome

The tragedy of the syndrome is that it is fueled by good intentions. The founder wants nothing more than the company to succeed and the investor has no intention of destroying value in a company he’s invested in. But according to Manzoni and Barsoux, how people with power react in times of trouble can have a considerable and often deleterious impact on others.

But the set-up-to fail syndrome is preventable and reversible. Both entrepreneurs and investors can take steps to vaccinate themselves from the disease.

When my friend faced the unfortunate choice between an investor she did not want to work with and the potential death of her fledgling company, she had a difficult decision to make. In her case, she decided to keep looking for other investors, believing that starting a company with the wrong person was worse than not starting a company at all.

But merely finding a good investor is not good enough. Angels can become devils when conditions bring out the unintended behaviors of well-meaning people.

An antidote to the syndrom is acknowledging how people in positions of authority influence the performance of others. Whether it involves investors, bosses, or managers, any supervisory relationship can fall prey to a breakdown of confidence. Investors must beware of the trap of labeling founders as deficient people and instead stick to judging objective outcomes and circumstances.

Next, expectations about the degree of supervision should be set early in the relationship. Companies that institutionalize regular dialogues between hierarchies can head-off the syndrome before it gets out of control. A similar practice can help CEOs and investors get along. There are many ways to open the gates to better communication — a topic several Bay Area startup CEOs and investors will discuss here.

Perception Matters

For their part, company founders can prevent the onset of the syndrome by understanding its potential impact and guard themselves from the performance drains that come from the downward spiral.

The set-up-to fail syndrome can only continue if the CEO perceives that the investor is losing faith in her abilities. Ultimately, founders and investors are on the same team and both want the company to thrive. Therefore, regardless of what the devil investor may say or do, the startup CEO must perform a bit of mental acrobatics to keep her sanity.

If the perception of disappointing an investor is getting in the way of guiding the company, the entrepreneur must choose another point of view. Founders must to ward-off the demons of self-doubt by never interpreting investor’s actions as, “You are failing,” but rather, “I want us to succeed.”

Real Angels

Both founders and investors can take steps to prevent the potential unwinding of their relationship and their company. The investor must to be aware of his role in shaping the CEO’s actions and serve as a trusted advisor rather than an overseeing elder. Meanwhile, the entrepreneur must inoculate herself by not allowing negativity to thrive, choosing instead to view the investor as an ally rather than a watchman.

In my own experience having worked with several fantastic investors, it was always the great ones who not only had insight, but also the humility to confirm that the company CEO knew best. Even during the company’s tough times, interacting with real angels leaves entrepreneur energized, confident, and more creative than before.

Real angel investors make founders feel like Gods. They remain faithful in the face of uncertainty and help CEOs rise to the challenge. They imbibe founders with an omnipotent sense that they can do anything, but, like God, they have a lot to do.

—

Here’s the gist:

Investors who add value, not just money, are angels while those who destroy it are devils.

Devil investors can unwittingly destroy company value by perpetuating the “Set-Up-to-Fail Syndrome.”

Entrepreneurs and investors can both take steps to prevent the syndrome and preserve the relationship, especially in tough times.

—

Ed Batista, Dave Kashen, Max Ogles and Scott Saslow contributed to this essay.

Photo Credit: Ryan Vaarsi

3 Ways I Use Technology to Find Happiness

Nir’s Note:   This guest post comes from  Brendan Kane who has built technology for MTV, Paramount, Taylor Swift, Rihanna, and the NHL. In this article, Brendan describes how he reprogramed the way he views the world using little more than his iPhone and iPad.

We all have the power to change our lives. I know this because I found ways to reprogram my inner circuitry and change my perspective of the world. A few simple steps inserted into my daily routine dramatically improved my life. Surprisingly, many of my new rituals were made possible using the technology I carry with me every day.

Think Big

“Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that do.”

-Steve Jobs

I was trained to think small and seek comfort rather than risk. From an early age, many of us are told to think realistically and to leave the big audacious ideas to people with more experience and resources. But the truth is, as Steve Jobs said, ““Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.”

We are all born with the same basic brain hardware and though there are variations in intelligence between people, the differences are relatively minor and show little correlation with life outcomes. However, what does make a difference  is how much we believe in ourselves and our capabilities. A much greater determinant of where we will end up in life is whether we have what Stanford researcher Carol Dweck calls a “fixed” or “growth mindset.”

I set out to remove the fixed mindset I had cultivated over the years. I did this through a daily practice of using my iPhone notes tool to brainstorm the biggest and craziest ideas I could think up. These ideas could be anything from starting a billion dollar business to designing a way to live on the moon. The practice of thinking big on a daily basis flexed my mind’s capacity to move past limitation and helped me become a more creative thinker.

Use Gratitude to Change Your Attitude

“Gratitude is the single most important ingredient to living a successful and fulfilled life.”

-Jack Canfield

One of the most impactful steps in reprogramming my brain was to take a daily inventory of everything I was grateful for. Before I go to sleep each night, I make a list of the positive things that came into my life that day. For example, I might jot down a few words to remember a particularly beautiful sunset, a compliment I received, or even a meeting that went well. I use a gratitude app on my phone to record these moments.

This routine sounds trivial but I found something strange happened when I adopted the practice. After about 30 days my perception of the world began to change. I became happier because I found myself more aware of the amazing things I had in my life. I would stop several times a day to smile in recognition and appreciation of the small things in life. The change also impacted my professional life. I started to attract more fulfilling business opportunities and more positive people to the projects I was working on.

Carry Your Dreams With You

“Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.”

- Anais Nin

What would you do tomorrow if you won the lottery? What are 10 things that you would want to accomplish with the rest of your life? Most people can only list a few things that they would do and some people can’t list any. I asked myself what the point was of running so hard toward financial independence when I really had no idea what I was going to do once I got there. If I didn’t know what I wanted, how could I achieve it?

I discovered that one of the best ways to determine what I wanted was to create a dream book of images on my iPad that I could look at every morning and evening. I gathered a list of images that represented the things I wanted most in my life and I put images representing them on my iPad and iPhone.

I often listen to my favorite music while I play a slide show of the pictures I use to remind me of the things I want to achieve, places I want to go, people I want to meet. I imagine what it would feel like if I had each of those things in my life. This exercise created a thought sequence that helped me set new goals in life and provided a deliberate destination that I could envision working and striving for each day.

Perception is Reality

Einstein said, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one”. Indeed, we are highly influenced by the way we see things. Changing the direction of our lives seems difficult because many of us have been conditioned to believe it is not possible.

But the truth is, changing our lives is as easy as changing the way we think. Changing my own life was a slow process, but I began to feel more joy and fulfillment by regularly incorporating these simple technology-facilitated habits.

Image Credit: JD Hancock

Note: This guest essay was written by Brendan Kane.

What’s Nir Been Up To?

Recently, I was asked by a friend why there have been so many guest posts on the blog lately. “What’s Nir been up to?” he asked. “Why aren’t you writing anymore?” The answer is, I am writing.

I’m working on two books at the moment. The first is a brief overview of my Hook Model, targeted at product managers, designers, and start-up folks. This e-book will be emailed to all blog subscribers by the end of the year.

The second book — still in early stages — is also about habit-forming technology, but is written in a narrative-style and targeted at a broader audience.

So while I’m feverishly plugging away at these two projects, I will publish occasional blog post of my own in addition to featuring select guest posts related to business, behavior and the brain. Feel free to suggest your own ideas for a guest post.

What else?

In other news, I’ve been teaching quite a bit lately. I once again taught the Hook Model at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and Design Schools this fall and continue to host workshops across the country.

The three upcoming workshops below will be open to the public:

Mountain View, CA - November 7 Register here
Seattle, WA - November 19 Register here
San Francisco, CA - December 5 Register here

(Blog readers get 50% off using the discount code “NirAndFarFriends”)

And finally…

I’ve starting an Angelist syndicate!

I’ve been angel investing for the past 5 years and am now pleased to offer others the opportunity to invest along with me. My thesis centers around businesses that do good for customers and their bottom line by forming — you guessed it – habits!

To learn more, see: https://angel.co/nireyal#syndicate

Thank you for reading and I’d love to hear your suggestions for improving the blog in the comments section below.

Best,

Nir

Photo Credit: mpclemens

In 10 Years, We Won’t Use Personal Technology

Nir’s Note: In this guest post, user experience designer Aaron Wilson, discusses a deep flaw of our digital devices and makes an audacious prediction about the future of consumer technology. Follow Aaron on Twitter @aarowilso.

No one wants to make a mistake like the one Clifford Stoll made in 1996. In the February issue of Newsweek Magazine, his now infamous article carried the headline, “The Internet? Bah!”

An “online database,” Stoll wrote, will never replace your daily newspaper. To futurists like Nicholas Negroponte who predicted that one day we’d buy books and newspapers “straight over the Internet,” Stoll responded flippantly, “Uh, sure.”

Clifford Stoll is not a stupid man. He has a Ph.D. in astronomy, was a system administrator at Berkeley Lab, and is considered by some to be the father of digital forensics.

Stoll has a wild Einsteinian head of grey hair that bounces as he jumps around a room. His voice has the inflection and excitement of a cartoon character and he hardly stays on topic for more than a few minutes. As he waves wildly in conversation you might catch a glimpse of the notes scribbled on his hands.

Attempting to predict the future, as Stoll did, is always a terrible idea. If you’re right, you won’t be completely right. And if you’re wrong, it will be blindingly obvious in retrospect. However, at the risk of “pulling a Stoll,” I feel compelled to share some visions of the future, in order to hopefully expand our thoughts on what we mean when we talk about technology.

Our Tech isn’t Sharable

We define technology as these little metal devices we keep in our pockets and bags. Our devices belong to us and no one else. We have intimate relationships with our phones and emotional ties to our computers.

If you and I both have iPhone 5s and you’d like to use my phone for a day, it won’t be very useful to you at all, even though the hardware may be exactly the same. In order to use the smart parts of my smartphone you’ll have to log out of my apps and log in with your own username, app by app. And you can forget about getting calls or texts, since the phone’s still linked to my number.

However, given about 10 minutes, you could reset my phone, log in with your iCloud username, activate the phone, and make my phone your phone. But you’d never do that because our phones make doing so intentionally inconvenient. The story is mostly the same with our computers. Our tech just isn’t designed for sharing.

A New World of Shared Devices

It doesn’t have to be this way, and 10 years from now it won’t be. Why do you need to have your phone or your computer? Why can’t you pick up any device, passively log in with biometric authentication, and have access to all your stuff, set up exactly the way you like? All of the technology we need to make this vision a reality is already here.

What if you didn’t need to pack your laptop or phone because you knew there would be connected interfaces on the subway, at the coffee shop, at your desk, and everywhere in between? Imagine a system where you don’t buy physical devices but instead subscribe to a service that provides access to interfaces tailored to each environment, everywhere you go.

Think about it:

The end of buying expensive devices
No more lost, broken or stolen gadgets
There’s no such thing as forgetting something at home
Forget about charging batteries and remembering your charger
You don’t have to commit to a device for 2-5 years

It starts to seem rather quaint that we carry around these blocks of metal at all times and worry about being more than 10 feet from a power outlet. Our new shareable devices would be cheap to make since they wouldn’t need much processing power, small batteries, and negligible amounts of storage. In tech talk they’re called thin clients.

Unrestricted Interfaces

I tend to get two responses when I share these ideas. The first is “Well that’s inferior to our current system because X, Y, and Z.”

I think that’s a lack of imagination talking since our current system is plagued with compromises we’ve come to accept. If you make computers and want to sell lots of them, knowing that each person will only buy one, you’re going to make the computer that’s most useful in the greatest number of situations. That use case is a single person using a computer at a desk alone. So that’s what we have — millions of unchanging interfaces that are all exactly the same. They’re good for using alone at a desk, but not really much else. The same goes for phones.

But in a world where a person uses a dozen interfaces throughout the day, you can tailor the interfaces to different situations. A coffee shop might have some tables with interfaces that are great for sharing ideas, others that are perfect for reading, and some that are ideal for writing. Your walk to the office might not have a visual interface at all and the conference room at work might have an interface that’s awesome for collaboration. But the really big things happen when we let our collective imagination run wild and think about the amazing interfaces that could exist when shape, size, and interaction method become totally unrestricted. (Microsoft, of all companies, has an interesting (but rather unimaginative ) vision of unrestricted interfaces, depicting a world of ubiquitous screens on most every surface.)

Our entire experience of technology begins to change, and not just from a hardware perspective. The overwhelming majority of our current apps and sites are designed to be used by one person using their own phone or computer. But opening up the world of interfaces dramatically changes our notion of what software is. Our entire society is built on shared real-world experience, and our apps could finally afford shared digital experience. What if instead of hiding away in our screens and using apps alone, we could actually share digital devices?

The World in a Four Inch Screen

For  years we’ve been trying to cram our world into our gadgets. We’ve been trying to represent our world — in all its vivacity, complexity, and detail — on four inch screens. And to a considerable extent we’ve been successful. But in doing so we’ve created a scenario where we must choose between interacting with the real world and interacting with its representation on our devices.

When product designers create physical things, they go through great pains to think about how these things will complement and interact with our world. Digital designers do the same. But they do so largely at the level of the representation of our world, not thinking enough about how devices and software will interact with our physical world. And so we end up with an ecosystem where our gadgets and apps work increasingly well together, but often fail to acknowledge the very real world around them.

The big difference is that most screenless objects have fewer intended uses than our digital devices. There’s something wonderful about single purpose objects. It’s why we prefer spoons and forks to sporks and why we still love physical books. Our digital devices, on the other hand, try to do it all by recreating our entire world within the digital ecosystem. And so, to use any function of our infinite-purpose-devices, we must choose to leave our real world and engage in the digital world.

But what if instead of trying to put our world in our devices, we met halfway, and created technology that complemented our world. When interfaces move out of our bags and pockets and into the world around us, we create technology that stops competing with our real world and begins harmonizing with it. When we remove restrictions from interfaces, we have the opportunity to create experiences that blur the line between the technological and the physical in a positive, harmony-inducing way. Our tech becomes like the best physical objects in our lives, enhancing our experience while meshing with the world we already know.

Who Will Create the Future?

The second response I get to my vision of the future is, “Okay, but what company could and would do that?” Well, it’s certainly not Apple. Apple makes money by selling expensive, premium pieces of metal. They make more money if you have an iPhone, iPad and a MacBook and they make even more money if every member of your family has one of each. It’s not in their best interest to make our technology cheap and sharable. In Apple’s perfect world everyone has multiple devices that are never shared…which sounds a lot like our current world.

Google, on the other hand, is already moving toward this new vision. The previous version of Android added the ability to have multiple users on the same device. The most recent version takes it even further, allowing multiple people to share an Android device and each have their own totally separate environments, essentially creating many phones in one.

Google makes its money by making it as easy as possible for you to use Google stuff (and see Google ads) as often as possible, regardless of where you are or what type of device you’re using. Google’s most recent phones have been sold roughly at cost, which makes sense when your goal is to get Google into as many hands as possible.

Google’s already experimenting with providing insanely fast data speeds and has the reach and power to spur the creation of this kind of system. They wouldn’t need to do it all themselves, they’d just need to incentivize the right players to make the right moves. It seems likely that Google will take the lead in creating our future of shared devices.

We Can Do Better

At a talk at the Commonwealth Club of California a month after his Newsweek article, Stoll stood behind a podium and exclaimed in his wildly fluctuating pitch that “It’s not computers that bother me. I love computers! It’s this culture of computers that gives me the heebie jeebies!” For all his blatant errors, Stoll was onto something. He argued that the power of computing itself is an incredible thing. But the culture we’ve built up around our devices makes no sense. I agree with him.

17 years after his famous foible, Clifford Stoll is frustrated by everyone’s Internet obsession. We’re excited about apps and websites and flat design. Doesn’t it all just seem a bit small, mundane, when you stop to think about it? Are we content with the pieces of metal we carry around and the experiences they afford us? Or are we capable of something fundamentally better? I, for one, think we are.

Note: This guest essay was written by Aaron Wilson

Photo Credit: Emily Rachel Hildebrand

How to Break 5 Soul-Sucking Technology Habits

Nir’s Note: In this last in a series of guest posts on the topic of technology habits, Jason Shah shares practical tips he used to regain control over his devices. Jason is a Product Manager at Yammer and blogs about user experience and technology at blog.jasonshah.org. You can follow him on Twitter @jasonyogeshshah.

“Not long ago, in a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center in Texas, a 17-year-old boy was weathering withdrawal at its worst. His body shuddered with convulsions. He hurled tables and chairs around the hospital.

Had he been hooked on heroin? Cocaine? Jim Beam? Joe Camel?

No, his psychologist said. The teenager had withdrawn cold turkey from the Internet.”

This account of a young man’s struggle with Internet withdrawal is from a 1996 New York Times article. Since then, the Internet has become even more pervasive and habit-forming.

The Internet has much in common with gambling: it’s compulsive; it’s compelling; it’s distracting.  Many people find it hard to resist the Web’s grip. Affluent adults in the US spend more than 30 hours a week on the Internet — it’s almost a full-time job!

Indeed, much of the web’s appeal is hardwired in our DNA. Technology companies carefully hone their services to cater to our survival instincts. Over time, we have become conditioned to know where to look on the Internet for rewards, and in the spirit of survival, we return repeatedly to get as much as possible out of a reliable source of pleasure.

Though psychologists and other professionals continue to debate whether Internet usage may become habit-forming to the point of being pathological, Internet addiction is being considered for official classification as a disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder.

Hello, I am an Addict

I have a confession. I am an addict.

I check my devices way too often. I feel stressed when I am away from my computer. And most disturbing (though not uncommon), I often imagine my phone is vibrating in my pocket, only to subconsciously reach for it and, with a jolt, realize it is in my backpack or across the table — and on silent.

My addiction to technology involves a plethora of habits I’d like to break in order to live what I believe would be a more deliberate, productive, and enjoyable life.

Here are my five worst tech habits:

Checking my iPhone unnecessarily and walking with my head down, eyes glued to the phone

Browsing Facebook, Twitter, and off-topic articles when I should be focused on work, especially when I am doing work that I actually enjoy

Googling every obscure question that comes to mind without first pondering the possible answers

Mapping myself to nearby places without using common sense first

Watching Netflix to fall asleep

Sure, iPhone technology is pretty spectacular. When put to good use, it can really maximize efficiency. But my iPhone also distracts me from the people I love. The temptation to open a new tab and passively browse the Internet draws me away from work I truly care about and damages my productivity. The “why think, when you could Google” mindset is eroding my imagination. Using my maps application instead of my memory has caused me to miss out on the landmarks that make a place special, and has put into dormancy the great sense of direction I once had. Watching streaming television before bed cuts into my precious hours of shuteye, and decreases the quality of my sleep.

So I have decided to break my terrible habits. To do so, I’ve considered the structural factors that enable these bad behaviors, in the form of internal and external triggers. Eliminating or rewiring these triggers will disrupt my habits, and allow me to change my behavior. Right?

Habit #1: Checking my iPhone Unnecessarily

I frequently check my phone without any real need. I find myself using my phone while walking to the office, in the middle of lunch with coworkers, or while I’m waiting for a barista to make my coffee — but why?

There are several triggers contributing to this mindless behavior. For one, the phone sits right in my pocket, on my person at all times where I can feel it. Sometimes I leave my phone on my desk so I’m not attached to it, but being able to see it at all times is not much better.

Triggers: notifications, feeling the phone in my pocket, seeing my own phone or other people use their phones (or phone-related accessories, e.g. earbuds), anxiety, and boredom.

Here are some steps that I’m taking to limit how much I check my phone:

Charge the phone in a different room at night. I really disliked the whole “Wake up, roll over, clear my notifications, and then snooze” routine I was developing. Charging elsewhere helps avoid stress right before bed and distractions first thing in the morning.

Turn off push notifications. These are rarely important and end up serving as dangerous gateways for all of the other apps on the phone.

Sign out of Facebook and Twitter apps on my phone. The friction of having to sign in makes those 1-2 minute rushes of social media doses harder to indulge.

Lock your phone / change your auto-lock to 1 minute. If my phone screen is lit up, I want to look at it. It’s hard to ignore. Locking your phone and letting the screen go black will make it easier to ignore than a bright screen with all of those shiny app icons.

Leave the phone in the work bag. Urgent calls are rare and my bag is just as safe as my pocket. Turn the sound on for calls if you need.

Add a passcode. The additional friction is enough to dissuade me from unlocking the phone sometimes, or at least buys me enough time to realize that I’m distracting myself.

Limit “good” reasons for needing to use my phone. For example, I used to listen to music on my walk to work. But my desire to change the song would quickly lead from scrolling a playlist to browsing my Facebook feed. So I have decided that, if I can’t just stick to whatever Spotify decides to play, I will not listen to music on my walk at all.

Habit #2: Checking Gmail and Facebook While Working

I’m often in the middle of working on something that I’m enjoying and find exciting. Yet somehow, despite a lack of boredom or spare time, I often open up tabs to check Facebook, Twitter, and Hacker News. It’s not a scheduled or helpful break. But when I get stuck, it’s just easy to rationalize two minutes of browsing the Internet as a way to “recharge” or learn something different for a moment.

Even when I do have the answer, I sometimes feel anxious to know that I haven’t missed a new email or Facebook notification. Even though these emails and notifications rarely require an urgent response, or any response at all, the impulse is hard to ignore.

Triggers: Anxiety, tab counts, remembering a friend, needing to dig up some information (e.g. someone’s phone number), mental exhaustion, and boredom

Some triggers that lead me to leave my work are anxiety (“What if I just got an email from The President? Even the 0.00001% chance is worth a 2 second check!”) and mental exhaustion, which is sometimes just perceived and not real at all (“I just finished a whole paragraph! Wow, that took a lot out of me. Let me do some mindless Facebook stalking.”)

Use browser tab counts. Keep Gmail and Facebook open in tabs: This is kind of cheating, and may seem counterintuitive. Ideally you have strong will, signed out, and don’t check these distractions when working. However, it’s a compromise for me. Instead of compulsively opening the page (and inevitably getting distracted) I can glance at the tab counts and know that I have nothing new. Avoiding the inbox and news feed helps reduce the number of triggers that could further distract me.

Log out of popular web apps, clear your browser history, turn off address bar autocomplete (if you can), don’t bookmark TechCrunch or whatever distracts you: For me, the friction of having to login every time I want to check Facebook helps stop me.

Unfollow everyone on Twitter: By following no one, my feed has gotten so boring that I don’t check Twitter very often anymore, yet still use it to disseminate content.

Don’t follow the trail and limit yourself on tabs: It’s a beautiful vision, the worldwide web — a collection of interlinked resources, ideas, and tools. But the problem arises when that blog post you were mildly interested in about SaaS pricing leads to a link about startup life which leads to a People Magazine article about Justin Bieber. “How did I get here?” you ask after 30 minutes of wasted time and 10 open tabs that map how you traversed the depths of the Internet. Be disciplined about accomplishing your goal when you click on a link and try not to follow a scary trail of time-wasting. Close tabs you’re no longer using, so that those tabs don’t come back to haunt and distract you later.

Habit #3: Googling Everything

The mind behind Lost and Star Trek, JJ Abrams, mentioned in a TED talk that there is no mystery left in the world. We can know whatever information we want with just a quick Internet search. Abrams keeps sealed a mystery box he bought with his grandfather when he was just a child. Abrams has never opened the mystery box.

He is generally right: we don’t let ourselves wonder enough.

And how many times have we all found ourselves saying “I don’t know [answer to obscure question]. I bet we can just Google it…” Before I return to my friends with how many feet tall the Eiffel Tower is or whether Yelp was profitable last quarter, I get distracted.

Trigger: Not knowing something

Not only is the distraction harmful and I have now killed the conversation, but also the idea that more knowledge is necessarily good is quietly dangerous.

Sure, there is little harm to knowing more. But that is a shallow understanding of what happens. There is a real cost below the surface of Googling everything without a second thought: the gradual erosion of critical thinking skills and one’s ability to form educated guesses. I am making an effort to stop myself before Googling information and getting lost in the twists of the Internet. This is a hard one to change because the triggers are often diverse, and not necessarily obvious. However, nowadays, one solution for me is simply seeing the Google search bar and forcing myself to justify what I am about to search for has helped me curb the behavior.

Habit #4: Navigating Short Distances, Bumping into People While I Follow the Blue Dot

When Mapquest digitized maps and rid married couples of arguments about how to get to Uncle Steve’s farmhouse, I thought the maps problem was solved.

When Google mobilized maps, I thought all of the new problems with maps – speed, accuracy, access, data manipulation, etc. – were solved.

But somehow, maps still are not without problems. For example, I find myself overly reliant on maps, using it to find places I can make a very good guess about otherwise. Sometimes the destination is less than two miles away. Sometimes I find myself updating the directions and following the blue dot when I am already standing in front of the venue!

Feeling confident in my direction is just a few taps of the finger away, so why not?

Trigger: Getting to a new location

To combat this, I’m working to map out my directions before I go or simply pausing to think about the logic of getting to places nearby, and avoiding maps altogether. I would even like to try asking people on the street for help as a break from always using Google Maps. Needing to look up the address for a meeting and map it is often a trigger for me to use my phone. Simply being mindful and trying to remember the address has helped curb the behavior, too.

Habit #5: Watching Netflix Before Going to Sleep

“It’s been a long day. I deserve a break. Let me watch House of Cards for an hour before I go to sleep.” That’s how I rationalize firing up Netflix at 11:30pm most nights.

Two hours later, I stir from being half-asleep to a greyed out, powerless Macbook screen.

I slam the screen shut, regret what I know will be a 4 hour sleep night, and roll over to go back to bed. Terrible.

Triggers: Mental exhaustion, boredom, browser bookmark, app icon, social media references to movies and TV shows (seeing shared videos on social networks, mentions of certain shows)

Honestly, the trick here beyond removing some of these triggers (deleting the bookmark and reducing how much I use social media) has simply been a matter of changing what I believe television means for me. The trigger is mental exhaustion, or believing I am exhausted simply because it is the end of the day. Historically, by believing TV helps me recharge, or at least does not require me to expend any more energy, it’s easy to give in to the triggers and indulge.

But today when I have the self-awareness to acknowledge the trigger of exhaustion, I am rewiring myself to understand that what I need is sleep, not TV drama, buffering, or fast-moving pixels. Realizing what I actually need helps me go to sleep without all of the TV first.

Breaking The Internet Addiction Takes a Mix of Trigger Control and Discipline

Nir, through his Hooked framework, helped me understand what made me behave in the way that I do. While I found the framework powerful as a person who builds products, I also found the framework useful from the other side of the table — in defending against the habits that technology companies are encouraging me to develop.

This defense is manifests in trying to eliminate or rewire the triggers for these five bad habits that I shared, and so far, it has helped me lead a much more productive and deliberate life.

Acknowledge the habit. Identify the triggers. Either kill the triggers or rewiring the triggers to get you to do whatever you would rather do instead. Rinse, and repeat.

This has worked for me. What triggers are responsible for your worst habits, and how do you plan on eliminating the triggers or rewiring what those triggers mean?

Note: This guest essay was written by Jason Shah.

Photo Credit: B Rosen

4 Simple Things I Did to Control My Bad Tech Habits

Nir’s Note: In this guest post, Sharbani Roy explores techniques she used to change her bad habits related to eating, sleeping and exercising. Sharbani blogs at sharbaniroy.com and you can follow her on twitter @Sharbani.

It’s 2 AM and you’re exhausted, but unable to sleep. You’ve been cycling through Facebook, email, and other online media for hours. You want to stop, but you can’t. This technology-induced insomnia will likely ruin your next day (or two) of productivity — and you’ve really achieved nothing according to your list of to-dos. Late-night surfing has become a bad habit you’d like to break, but just can’t figure out how.

Sound familiar? Let’s take a look at some data, narrated by my inner monologue.

Inner Monologue: “Wow, 12AM, I should get into bed.”

Lights turned off, head on pillow. Check.

Inner Monologue: “Hmm, I’m a little bored. I had those articles I was going to read…and I’m not that sleepy yet.” I reach for my phone. “I love you, smart phone.”

One article later.

Inner Monologue: “What a great article! I should share it.” Switch to Facebook news feed. “Oh, look at Amanda’s adorable baby!” Like. Scrolling down. “Ha! Teslas ARE awesome.” Continue scrolling. “Puppies and kittens AND a baby hedgehog all in one photo!?” Like. “Oh, I should send that Tesla pic to Aleks … and email her to catch-up.” Switch to Gmail. “Hmm, inbox full. I’ll just respond to two.” Mid-response, a new post from TechCrunch pops up. ” Oh, what’s this? Smartwatch?” Click.

And, like that, I’m sucked into my seemingly inescapable cycle of social media-email-news…welcome to my communication vortex.

When Habits are Easier to Make Than Break

Habits are a complicated beast. Though modern technology has the power to form good habits, it can also reinforce bad ones. Technology enables a faster cycling through what Nir Eyal calls, the Hook Model, a four-phase process, which creates and strengthens our compulsions.

I realized I had a real problem when I mentioned to a trainer that I was running on a treadmill because it was easier to read and write emails on my phone than if I ran outside. It was a wake-up call that made me realize my technology habits might be affecting other areas of my life.

I decided to take a closer look at how technology affects the three habits I try the hardest to keep in good standing: eating, sleeping, and exercising.

Eating

Imagine you’re at work. It’s 11:30 AM and you are feeling peckish. You are swamped answering emails and your mind is deep in your work. Not to worry, you brought an apple as a healthy snack. You look up twenty minutes later to notice you are no longer hungry. But you realize the apple remains while a chocolate-chip cookie you tucked in your desk “in case of emergency” is gone!

How did this mindless eating happen? For many, the trigger for making poor eating decisions is not only hunger, but stress.

An interesting study related to making healthy food choices helps us answer why we often pick the cookie, not the apple. First, students were given a string of numbers to remember and recall, taxing their mental faculties. Afterwards, they were asked to walk down a long hallway where they were presented with two snack options: a fruit salad or a slice of chocolate cake. The fruit salad was clearly the healthier choice, while the chocolate cake was the more indulgent option. The researchers found that the test subjects who had memorized more numbers were also more likely to choose the chocolate cake.

The study’s authors theorized that people make decisions using either their rational or emotional brain. When we have to mentally juggle too much information, such as a long string of numbers, our ability to access the rational side of our brain can be impaired, leaving room for the emotional brain to take over.

Excessive technology use may have the same effect on our internal struggle between good and bad habits. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Email, and other technologies make us perform mental juggling acts, perhaps increasing the difficulty of holding ourselves accountable for rational decisions.

Sleeping

I’ve heard I should always schedule important meetings in the morning because my levels of serotonin are highest then – meaning I’d be able to make better decisions. But as you read above, I’ve developed some bad habits around my slumber. Turns out, it might not only be what I’m looking at on my phone that is keeping me up, but the phone itself. Light interferes with the production of melatonin, a chemical trigger which tells the brain to go to sleep. In fact, recent studies found that the blue light emitted from computers and other devices may even be linked to depression.

Even small devices, such as our cell phone, produce enough light to disrupt our sleep cycles and of course any sound from those late-night videos or games you (or your partner) are playing don’t help either. The more you surf, the less likely you are to sleep.

Exercising

The research on physical exercise overwhelmingly points to a number of positive health benefits. But email, TV, and the multitude of apps on our devices are just a few of the distraction, which can hold us back from hitting the gym to break a sweat. As children, we would go out and play if we had nothing to do. But as adults, we have trained ourselves to think exercise is a chore and turn to our gadgets when feeling bored.

Diminishing Satisfaction

It was clear I had some bad habits around eating, sleeping and exercising, but how was I going to get myself cleaned up?

I took a second look at the Hook Model and realized that when it comes to breaking habits, triggers are often too ingrained to be erased; the habit loop can only be identified and re-trained. Identifying triggers requires some self-discipline and experimentation.

Re-wiring habits is even trickier. The key in changing habits is to associate existing triggers with new, more powerful rewards. There are a few more things involved in cultivating this change, but generally, if you can train yourself to believe a reward for a “good” habit is more pleasurable than a reward for a “bad” habit, you’re on an upward path. Similarly, when the pleasure associated with the reward of an existing habit is diminished, there is a greater chance another stronger reward will take its place.

But technology can lead to a vicious cycle of diminishing satisfaction. The more technology we use, the more we attempt to cram into our days. This is often referred to as “time deepening,” but this phrase is a  misleading because filling life with more and more activities and distractions makes time (and our various rewards) feel shallower, not deeper. Restated another way, the more we try and get done, the less satisfaction we get from each individual reward, making us more likely to seek new rewards at an even higher frequency.

So, are we doomed to be cranky, flabby, lazy insomniacs? Thankfully, no.

Making Friends with Boredom

Take a common trigger, like boredom. When it hits, we generally check email, eat, watch TV, or procrastinate, all of which make the problem worse by fueling guilt-induced stress. To break it, we need to train ourselves to acknowledge, anticipate, and here’s the kicker … embrace feeling bad.

The key tool I use to achieve this state of bliss are “mini-sabbaths,” small breaks from the constant connectivity of our everyday lives. Linking back to the Hook Model, here are four tips for taking mini-sabbaths at each point in the habit cycle that I’ve found to be effective methods for wrangling-in my own technology vortex.

(1) Anticipate Triggers

Try a quick  3-minute meditation in preparation for sleep to allow your mind to embrace boredom.
Disable all push notifications on your devices.
Leave your phone at home from time-to-time, particularly when going to the gym. Get a workout buddy to keep you honest.

(2) Acknowledge Actions

Buy an alarm clock and keep your phone in another room, not by your bed.
Only keep healthy food at home so you have to go to the hassle of going to the store to get junk food.
If you like to exercise to music but find yourself tempted to check email, splurge for an iPod instead of taking your phone.

(3) Embrace New Rewards

At bed time try listening to soothing music to help you relax instead of surfing the web when insomnia strikes.
Challenge yourself to drink a large glass of water and wait 10 minutes before snacking. Often times, you may think you feel hungry when you’re actually just dehydrated.
Pick a mantra. Select one positive word you want to embody and repeat it to yourself over and over again while you exercise. Envision yourself becoming more and more like that word with each additional step you take.

(4)  Commit to Rewiring

Learn more about your own hooks and commit to understanding your weaknesses.
Track how you spend your time by using software or recording with pen and paper. Regardless of how, take the time to learn as much about yourself so you can be more effective in making lasting changes.
Be kind to yourself. Acknowledge that you will fall into old habits from time-to-time and let yourself get back to your new healthier routines without the self-inflicted guilt, which can often trigger stress and cause bad habits to return.

Note: This guest post was written by Sharbani Roy