Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life

by Nir Eyal

To hack back, schedule time in your day to catch up on group chats, just as you would for any other task in your timeboxed calendar.

RULE 3: BE PICKY

The key is to make sure that everyone present is able to add and extract value from being a part of the conversation.

RULE 4: USE IT SELECTIVELY

Group chat is best avoided altogether when discussing sensitive topics. Remember that the ability to directly observe another person’s mood, tone, and nonverbal si...

Instead of using group chat for long arguments and hurried decisions, it’s better to ask participants in the conversation to articulate their point in a document and share it after they’ve compiled their thoughts.

Chapter 17 Hack Back Meetings

too often people schedule a meeting to avoid having to put in the effort of solving a problem for themselves.

meetings should not be used as a distraction from doing the hard work of thinking.

The primary objective of most meetings should be to gain consensus around a decision, not to create an echo chamber for the meeting organizer’s own thoughts.

One of the easiest ways to prevent superfluous meetings is to require two things of anyone who calls one. First, meeting organizers must circulate an agenda of what problem will be discussed. No agenda, no meeting. Second, they must give their best shot at a solution in the form of a brief, written digest.

Requiring an agenda and a brief not only saves everyone time by getting to the answer faster but also cuts down on unnecessary meetings by adding a bit of effort on the part of the organizer before calling one.

Whether online or offline, the same rules of being selective about who attends and making sure to get in and out quickly apply.

To stay indistractable in meetings, we must rid them of nearly all screens.

In order to ensure that meeting time isn’t wasted, we need to introduce new customs and rules.

First, every conference room should have a charging station for devices, but make sure it is just out of everyone’s reach.

the uncomfortable truth is that we like to have our phones, tablets, and laptops in meetings not for the sake of productivity but for psychological escape.

Chapter 18 Hack Back Your Smartphone

We can get the best out of our devices without letting them get the best of us. By hacking back our phones, we can short-circuit the external triggers that spark harmful behaviors.

Here are my four steps to hacking back your smartphone and saving yourself countless hours of mindless phone time.

STEP 1: REMOVE

The first step to managing distraction on our phones is to remove the apps we no longer need.

STEP 2: REPLACE

The idea here is to find the best time and place to do the things you want to do. Just because your phone can seemingly do everything doesn’t mean it should.

STEP 3: REARRANGE

The aim is that nothing on our phones is able to pull us away from traction when we unlock our devices.

Stubblebine recommends sorting your apps into three categories: “Primary Tools,” “Aspirations,” and “Slot Machines.”

Primary Tools “help you accomplish defined tasks that you rely on frequently:

Aspirations “the things you want to spend time doing: meditation, yoga, exercise, reading books, or listening to podcasts.

Slot Machines as “the apps that you open and get lost in: email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.”

He recommends rearranging your phone’s home screen so it only displays your Primary T...

“think of your home page as a group of apps that you feel you are in charge of. If the app triggers any mindless checking from ...

STEP 4: RECLAIM

In my experience, it is worth adjusting two kinds of notification permissions:

1. Sound—An audible notification is the most intrusive.

2. Sight—After sound, visual triggers are the second most intrusive form of interruption.

reclaiming your phone’s external triggers does require a bit of maintenance. For instance, every time we install a new app, we need to adjust its notifications permission settings.

Chapter 19 Hack Back Your Desktop

people performed poorly on cognitive tasks when objects in their field of vision were in disarray as opposed to neatly arranged. The same effect applies to digital environments,

our brains have a tougher time finding things when they are positioned in a disorganized manner, which means every errant icon, open tab, or unnecessary bookmark serves as a nagging reminder of things left undone or unexplored.

Removing unnecessary external triggers from our line of sight declutters our workspace and frees the mind to concentrate on what’s really important.

Chapter 20 Hack Back Online Articles

I never read articles in my web browser.

whenever I discover a new article, I no longer read it in my web browser right away. Instead, I’ve time-shifted when and how I read online, thereby removing the temptation to read for longer than I intend.

when used correctly, multitasking can let us get more out of our schedules with little extra effort.

To multitask the right way, we need to understand our brain’s limitations that prevent us from doing more than one thing at the same time. First, the brain has a limit on its processing horsepower—the more concentration a task requires, the less room it has for anything else.

Second, the brain has a limited number of attention channels, and it can only make sense of one sensory signal at a time.

we are perfectly capable of processing multichannel inputs.

As long as we’re not required to concentrate too much on any one channel, we’re able to do more than one thing at a time.

walking, even if done slowly and on a treadmill, improved performance on a creativity test when compared to sitting down.