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Tag: Nir Eyal

Being efficient while working from home

With so many people currently working from home, it is more important than ever that we use that time efficiently. Recently Nir Eyal, author of Hooked, shared a great infographic from the Silicon Valley Insiders blog by Dan Brodovich. As I have now been running a high performing team for almost a year while working from home, many of the insights reinforced lessons I have learned (sometimes the hard way). The key is to minimize and manage distractions, using four steps, and turning them into positives.

Master internal triggers

The first step is to become proactive rather than reactive. To master internal triggers, you first need to understand what drives you. According to Eyal and Brodovich, most people are driven by a desire to avoid discomfort and pain. Thus, you are likely to focus on a task that allows you to avoid a problem situation, rather than dealing with the more important problem.

The situation you avoid might be uncomfortable or put you in conflict with someone you have trouble working, so you sub-optimize by spending your time on something else. Rather than working on your sales strategy for the next quarter with the VP of Sales, who you personally do not get along with, you might end up working on your expense report to avoid having to deal with the VP. Not having a sales strategy has a much bigger impact on your company than getting your expense report submitted does.

To deal with this type of situation, you need to look externally for potential emotional discomfort, then write it down acknowledging the trigger and look at why you are tempted to do something else. This process is similar to an alcoholic addressing their problem by first acknowledging there is a problem.

Then, you need to change the task to make it more enjoyable or interesting. In the Sales example, you can gamify yourself by placing an internal bet that you avoid conflict and get the plan done in 48 hours. Then the activity becomes winning your internal bet rather than dealing with a tough process. If it is a boring task that you are avoiding because of the boredom, you can make it more interesting by introducing variability or discovery as part of the process (a book-keeping task where you are trying to find the biggest cost driver).

Finally, you should look inward and realize you do not have infinite willpower. Accept that you have to manage yourself and treat yourself like you would treat a friend facing similar challenges.

Make time for what needs to get done

The second step is to plan and time box your day so you focus on the activities you want to focus on, rather than get distracted. For me, this step is the most important. I use Google calendar to schedule almost all of my day, from the calls and meetings I feel are important, to time to work on projects I need to get done and even lunch and other personal activities. With a robust calendar, it becomes clear if a distraction is actually a distraction and what it is taking you away from accomplishing.

Brodovich also stresses that it is important to “schedule time for yourself first so you can be in the best shape for other commitments.” He points out you should focus on how you allocate your time, not the end result (the results will come from good allocation). Given that many of us are not only currently working at home but in a lockdown or quarantine environment, you need to schedule physical activity and entertainment diversions to maintain your health and well-being.

It is also important to value and thus allocate time to relationships. You need to start with your family, the people you love. While working from home is often thought of as a boost to work-life balance, you can easily be drawn into spending 20 hours a day on Slack and see less of your family than when you worked at an office and spent time with them after you got home. Similarly, you need to value your relationships at work, be it colleagues, your team or your boss, as high or higher than the specific tasks you are working on. When working in an office, you naturally gravitate to working together for the common good, when working from home this natural collaboration needs to be replaced by proactively ensuring you are helping the company in the best way possible. Brodovich suggests, “make time for alignment with stakeholders at work to inform about your tasks and schedule to avoid work-related distractions. Sync as frequently as your schedule changes or on a weekly basis.” The key is to schedule these relationships as part of your day, both the personal time and strengthening the bonds with your colleagues.

Limit external triggers

The next step is to “hack back” external triggers, reduce external triggers that distract you from your scheduled tasks. There are many of these that we can manage:

  • E-mail. Limit the time you spend on email by sending fewer messages and writing short emails. Every message you send leads to a series of additional emails, so stopping early not only saves the time of one message but potentially tens of messages. Some tricks are only responding to emails during certain hours, delaying when your message is sent and creating labels to prioritize when you need to respond to an email.
  • Group chat. I love Brodovich’s suggestion to “treat chat like a sauna – it is unhealthy to stay too long.” As with email, schedule time each day to review and comment in chats and only invite those relevant to a conversation into a chat channel.
  • Meetings. Working from home is the best opportunity to rationalize your meeting schedule, a subject near and dear to my heart. Start by gently declining invitations to meetings that are not important to your work and where you do not add much value. A good test is if you will spend more time at the meeting checking your email or chats (another problem, see above), you probably do not need to be in the meeting in the first place. Also, make sure you only invite people to meetings who are needed, either for their participation or to help their work. Meetings are not the time to be nice or show someone you are thinking of them, instead respect people’s time and make sure it is the best use of it. Finally, create an agenda for any meeting to ensure everyone is prepared and they themselves can decide if it is valuable.
  • Your mobile devices. Do I really need to stress how your phone or iPad can be a distraction? You can limit the distraction by deleting apps you no longer need, putting apps you know are distracting on a device that you will not use while working from home and managing notifications.
  • Your computer desktop. You will find that you suffer less distractions if you remove clutter from your desktop and shut off all non-essential notifications.
  • Articles. Click bating is a lot more powerful than you realize and you will often go down a rabbit hole of spending too much time on articles that do not improve your work. Brodovich suggests not reading articles on your web browser but instead saving interesting content for your mobile device (so you can review it when you are not working) as well as listening to articles and podcasts when you are out and about (maybe not as easy if you are stuck home due to Covid19).
  • Feeds. Another area to reduce distractions is hacking back feeds. Brodovich points out that feeds are built to distract you. It is how Facebook and Twitter have become incredibly valuable companies. Change the settings (or move the apps) to disable these feeds.

Prevent distractions with pre-commitments and pacts

The final step to improving efficiency while working from home is to use pacts or commitments in advance to inhibit distractions. While we have to focus on social distancing, see if you can work in conjunction with a colleague or friend so you can pressure each other to stay on task. You can also use tech to keep you from distractions (some suggestions in the post include Forest, Focusmate and SelfControl.

Related, you can use price pacts to ensure you stay focused. These are deals with yourself that you will donate or give someone else $X if you do not stay on task. You need to ensure the chosen task is a short term goal or achievement for this tactic to work.

Finally, you should develop a self-identity that connects with your self-image of not being distractible. Brodovich suggests that you “call yourself indistractable’ to identify yourself with one and therefore behave like one….Share your commitment with others so that you can get external confirmation of your new identity”

Working from home is a great opportunity

While many are working from home given the challenges everyone is facing, we all need to make the most of this time. By following these steps, you can remain efficient and productive, even potentially improving on the work you have been doing in a traditional office.

Key takeaways

  1. With the huge increase in people working from home, now is the time to look at best practices so you make the most of this time and remain as efficient and productive as you were in the office, and the best way to do this is stay focused.
  2. You should understand yourself and create a robust schedule for your day, that includes both work and personal activities. Not only will this allow you to focus on what you know you should do but also it will make clear the cost of distractions.
  3. You should also minimize distractions by critically reducing time spent on and with emails, group chats, social media feeds, online articles and your mobile devices.

Working from hom from Nir Eyal

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Author Lloyd MelnickPosted on March 24, 2020March 24, 2020Categories General Social Games Business, General Tech BusinessTags Nir Eyal, Triggers, Work from home1 Comment on Being efficient while working from home

How to hook your competitor’s customers

I have written frequently about the importance of knowing your competitors (competitive intelligence) and I also love Nir Eyal’s Hooked model to build products that retain; I just came across a slideshow by Nir that brings both of these concepts together. Nir’s presentation, “4 Ways to Win Your Competitor’s Customer Habits” (presentation below), shows the four ways companies build better hooks than their competitors.

As a quick recap, the Hook Model describes an experience designed to connect the user’s problem to a solution frequently enough to form a habit. Eyal defines habits as behaviors done with little or no conscious thought. The convergence of access, data, and speed is making the world a more habit-forming place.Businesses that create customer habits gain a significant competitive advantage. It has four phases: trigger, action, variable reward, and investment.

Eyal identified four ways to win customer habits. If your product becomes the one the customer is hooked on, then you will enjoy their continued business.

Slide1

Faster HOOKS

The first technique is faster hooks. The faster the user passes through the model, the greater the product’s or game’s habit forming potential. Nir Eyal uses the example of Netflix, which won over people’s viewing habits from Blockbuster by delivering movies what were waiting for users rather than forcing them to get in a car, pick the movie, pay and drive home.

To achieve faster HOOKS, first understand the must-have reason people are using your product or game. Next, lay out the steps the customer must take to get the job done. Finally, once the series of tasks from intention to outcome is understood, simply start removing steps until you reach the simplest possible process. Continue reading “How to hook your competitor’s customers”

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Author Lloyd MelnickPosted on May 14, 2015January 4, 2016Categories General Social Games Business, General Tech Business, GrowthTags competition, habit forming, Hooked, HOOKS, Nir EyalLeave a comment on How to hook your competitor’s customers

Lifetime Value Part 23: Triggers, the key to both retention and virality

One theme that comes up repeatedly in what I read, and thus write, is the importance of Triggers. In my February analysis of Jonah Berger’s book Contagious, I discussed how triggers are one of the five core elements to creating a product with word of mouth. Then in June, I discussed Nir Eyal’s bestseller, Hooked, in which the author builds a model on creating a habit-forming product; triggers represent one of four phases of the model. Given the importance of word of mouth (virality) and habit (retention) as two of the three core components of customer lifetime value (LTV), this highlights the crucial role that triggers provide in success.

The role of triggers in virality and retention

Triggers are reminders for people to talk about our product, game or ideas. In Berger’s book, triggers are the foundation of word of mouth and contagiousness. For example, you may regularly show images of your game with coffee, so that people will think about and start discussing your product when they go to Starbucks.

The first step of Eyal’s Hook Model of retention is triggers. Triggers cue the user to take action. There are two types of triggers: external and internal. Habit-forming products start by alerting users with external triggers like an email, a website link or the app icon on a phone. An external trigger communicates the next action the user should take. Online, an external trigger may take the form of a prominent button, such as the Play Now button on many games. When users start to automatically cue their next behavior, the new habit becomes part of their everyday routine. Continue reading “Lifetime Value Part 23: Triggers, the key to both retention and virality”

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Author Lloyd MelnickPosted on October 7, 2014October 15, 2014Categories General Social Games Business, General Tech Business, Growth, LTV, Social Games MarketingTags Contagious, Hooked, Jonas Berger, LTV, Nir Eyal, Triggers1 Comment on Lifetime Value Part 23: Triggers, the key to both retention and virality

Why starting companies is habit forming

Earlier this year, I wrote about Nir Eyal’s great book, Hooked, and how it can help you create a product with great retention (e.g, something habit forming). What is particularly interesting is that one of the most habit-forming endeavors is entrepreneurship and building companies. The four principles of the Hook Model—Triggers, Actions, Variable Rewards and Investment—also show why entrepreneurship is so addictive.

HookedTriggers

First, there must be a trigger. Triggers prompt you to take an action. In the case of starting a business, the trigger is seeing an opportunity. It could be waiting for a taxi that never arrives (probably the trigger for Travis Kalanick to start Uber) or going to a restaurant based on a critics review and getting a bad meal (possibly the trigger for Jeremy Stoppelman with Yelp). It is consistent at retail, you cannot find a good wine so you think about starting a wine store.

Actions

The next step in the Hook model is the action phase. The trigger, driven by internal or external cues, tells the user of what to do next. There are three ingredients required to initiate any and all behaviors:

  • The user must have sufficient motivation.
  • The user must have the ability to complete the desired action.
  • A trigger must be present to activate the behavior.

Continue reading “Why starting companies is habit forming”

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Author Lloyd MelnickPosted on September 25, 2014October 15, 2014Categories General Social Games BusinessTags Actions, Founders, Hooked, investment, Nir Eyal, start-ups, Triggers, Variable RewardsLeave a comment on Why starting companies is habit forming

Summer reading list

I came across some great books this year, many of which I summarized in this blog, and thought it would be helpful to list the books I have found most valuable professionally over the years. I will focus, though, on the recent ones that have had a strong impact.

Thinking Fast and Slow

Any reading list I create must start with Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. It is by far the most important book I have read. Kahneman provides fantastic insights into decision making, which not only help you understand deeply your customers but also your own decision making processes. Although the book is somewhat dense and not an easy read, it will impact everything you do once you finish it. Thinking, Fast and Slow

Predictably Irrational

The perfect complement to Thinking, Fast and Slow, is Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. Ariely also focuses on decision making, from a behavioral economics perspective, but discusses it in a manner more entertaining than any novel I have read. This book has a certain point in my heart as Dan was on the Board of Advisors of my first company (Merscom), and his advice was as good as his book. This is a book you may stay up all night reading that will also help you build a much more successful product. Predictably Irrational

Hooked

Next on my list is Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal, a book I recently blogged about. Hooked is probably the hottest book among tech companies this year and presents a great framework for creating products that customers will keep coming back to. Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

Contagious

Jonah Berger’s Contagious: Why Things Catch On is probably the book I have quoted most this year. Another book I summarized earlier in the year, Contagious tells you how to generate word of mouth for your product based on real academic research, not urban myths that do not really work. I think I have quoted Contagious in more Quora answers than all other books combined (click here to read my post about Contagious). Contagious: Why Things Catch On

Blue Ocean Strategy

I normally hate strategy books because they either focus on trite phrases with no practical value or use anecdotes that may or may not be transferable. Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, on the other hand, is a book that helps you create a truly effective strategy (click here for my post on Blue Ocean Strategy). Like Contagious, it is based on academic research, and it provides a framework for building a truly great company. Blue Ocean Strategy

The Innovator’s Dilemma

While The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change) by Clayton Christensen may not be directly useful for many of you, it is most applicable to leaders of market leading companies, it provides a very helpful understand of how disruptive technologies emerge. For the game industry (which accounts for many of my readers), it is particularly illuminating and helps explain many of the shifts we have seen (my post on the key learnings from The Innovator’s Dilemma).

The Signal and the Noise

Finally, another thought-provoking book that helps you understand much better how to use analytics, and not misuse them, is The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don’t by Nate Silver. Nate Silver, best known for being the best prognosticator of the past two elections, destroys many of the fallacies around predictive models and provides a broad infrastructure on how metrics can help (read my post on the lessons I took away from the book). The Signal and The Noise

These books will probably get you through the next month or so. As I come across more great ones, I will definitely share them with everyone.

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Author Lloyd MelnickPosted on June 24, 2014July 23, 2014Categories General Social Games BusinessTags blue ocean strategy, Clayton Christensen, Contagious, dan ariely, Daniel Kahneman, Hooked, Innovator's Dilemma, Jonah Berger, Nate Silver, Nir Eyal, predictably irrational, signal and the noise, thinking fast and slow5 Comments on Summer reading list

The secret to creating a hit habit-forming product or game

The hottest book in Silicon Valley currently is Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal, and for good reason; it is an incredibly valuable book for building a business. As Eyal points out, amassing millions of users is no longer good enough. Companies’ economic value is a function of the strength of the habits they create. User habits become a competitive advantage. Products that change customer routines, where users become hooked, are less susceptible to attacks from other companies.

Users who continually find value in a product are more likely to tell their friends about it. Frequent usage creates more opportunities to encourage people to invite their friends, broadcast content, and share through word-of-mouth. Hooked users become brand evangelists: Megaphones for your company, bringing in new users at little or no cost.

Habit-forming products change user behavior and create unprompted engagement. The aim is to influence customers to use your product or play your game on their own, repeatedly, without relying on overt calls-to-action such as ads or promotions. Once a habit is formed, the user is automatically triggered to use the product during routine events such as waiting in line at Starbucks. Eyal uses the Hook Model to show how to create a product or game that become habit forming for users, that have a long term competitive advantage and are more likely to generate word of mouth.

The Hook Model

The Hook Model describes an experience designed to connect the user’s problem to a solution frequently enough to form a habit. Eyal defines habits as behaviors done with little or no conscious thought. The convergence of access, data, and speed is making the world a more habit-forming place. – Businesses that create customer habits gain a significant competitive advantage. It has four phases: trigger, action, variable reward, and investment. Continue reading “The secret to creating a hit habit-forming product or game”

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Author Lloyd MelnickPosted on June 17, 2014July 23, 2014Categories General Social Games Business, Growth, LTVTags Actions, Hook Model, Hooked, investment, Nir Eyal, Triggers, Variable Rewards7 Comments on The secret to creating a hit habit-forming product or game

Get my book on LTV

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Lloyd Melnick

This is Lloyd Melnick’s personal blog.  All views and opinions expressed on this website are mine alone and do not represent those of people, institutions or organizations that I may or may not be associated with in professional or personal capacity.

I am a serial builder of businesses (senior leadership on three exits worth over $700 million), successful in big (Disney, Stars Group/PokerStars, Zynga) and small companies (Merscom, Spooky Cool Labs) with over 20 years experience in the gaming and casino space.  Currently, I am on the Board of Directors of Murka and GM of VGW’s Chumba Casino

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