Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life

by Nir Eyal

Using a detailed, timeboxed schedule helps clarify the central trust pact between employers and employees.

schedule syncing is essential, whether with a family member or an employer. Regularly aligning expectations around how you’ll spend your time is paramount, and must be done in regular, predictable increments.

Whether at work, at home, or on our own, planning ahead and timeboxing our schedules is an essential step to becoming indistractable.

Part 3 Hack Back External Triggers

Chapter 13 Ask the Critical Question

Similarly, our tech devices can gain unauthorized access to our brains by prompting us to distraction. Facebook’s first president, Sean Parker, admitted as much when he described how the social network was designed to manipulate our behavior. “It’s a social-validation feedback loop,” he said. “Exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”

The Fogg Behavior Model states that for a behavior (B) to occur, three things must be present at the same time: motivation (M), ability (A), and a trigger (T). More succinctly, B = MAT.

Motivation is “the energy for action,

ability relates to facility of action. Quite simply, the harder something is to do, the less likely people are to do it. Conversely, the easier something is to do, the more likely we are to do it.

A trigger to tell us what to do next is always required.

Today, much of our struggle with distraction is a struggle with external triggers.

External triggers can rip us away from our planned tasks.

when people are interrupted during a task, they tend to subsequently make up for lost time by working faster, but the cost is higher levels of stress and frustration.

The more we respond to external triggers, the more we train our brain in a never-endi...

receiving a cell phone notification but not replying to it was just as distracting as responding to a message or call.

“the mere presence of one’s smartphone may impose a ‘brain drain’ as limited-capacity attentional resources are recruited to inhibit automatic attention to one’s phone, and are thus unavailable for engaging with the task at hand.” By having your phone in your field of view, your brain must work hard to ignore it, but if your phone isn’t easily accessible or visually present, your brain is able to focus on the task at hand.

Is this trigger serving me, or am I serving it?

triggers can now be identified for what they rightly are: tools. If we use them properly, they can help us stay on track. If the trigger helps us do the thing we planned to do in our schedule, it’s helping us gain traction. If it leads to distraction, then it isn’t serving us.

Chapter 14 Hack Back Work Interruptions

The misuse of space is often a significant contributing factor.

Open-office floor plans were supposed to foster idea sharing and collaboration. Unfortunately, according to a 2016 metastudy of over three hundred papers, the trend has led to more distraction. Not surprisingly, these interruptions have also been shown to decrease overall employee satisfaction.

the way to reduce unwanted external triggers from other people is to display a clear signal that you do not want to be interrupted.

Chapter 15 Hack Back Email

office workers took an average of sixty-four seconds after checking email to reorient themselves and get back to work.

an astonishing number of workplace emails are an utter waste.

Email is perhaps the mother of all habit-forming products. For one thing, it provides a variable reward.

Second, we have a strong tendency for reciprocity—responding in kind to the actions of another.

email is a tool we have little choice but to use.

The amount of time we spend on email can be boiled down to an equation. The total time spent on email per day (T) is a function of the number of messages received (n) multiplied by the average time (t) spent on each message, so T = n × t.

To receive fewer emails, we must send fewer emails.

to reduce the number of emails I send and receive, I schedule “office hours.” Readers can book a fifteen-minute time slot with me on my website at NirAndFar.com/schedule-time-with-me

You’d be amazed how many things become irrelevant when you give them a little time to breathe.

Difficult questions are better handled in person than over email, where there is more risk of misunderstandings.

asking people to discuss complex matters during regular office hours will lead to better communication and fewer emails.

SLOW DOWN AND DELAY...

fewer emails sent per day results in fewer emails sent back per day.

delaying delivery until Monday prevents you from stressing out your coworkers and helps protect your weekend from relaxation-killing replies.

ELIMINATE UNWANTED MESSAGES

If the email is a newsletter you signed up for in the past but no longer find useful, the best thing you can do is hit the Unsubscribe button at the bottom of the email.

Checking email isn’t so much the problem; it’s the habitual rechecking that gets us into trouble.

PLAY TAG

The most important aspect of an email, from a time management perspective, is how urgently it needs a reply.

The solution to this mania is simple: only touch each email twice. The first time we open an email, before closing it, answer this question: When does this email require a response?

Messages that don’t need a response at all should be deleted or archived immediately.

My daily schedule includes dedicated time for replying to emails I’ve tagged “Today.”

I reserve a three-hour timebox each week to plow through the less urgent messages I’ve tagged “This Week.” Finally,

Chapter 16 Hack Back Group Chat

“What we’ve learned is that group chat used sparingly in a few very specific situations makes a lot of sense,” Fried wrote in an online post. “What makes a lot less sense is chat as the primary, default method of communication inside an organization.

Here are four basic rules for effectively managing group chat: RULE 1: USE IT LIKE A SAUNA

RULE 2: SCHEDULE IT