Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life

by Nir Eyal

According to several recent studies, preaching to others can have a great impact on the motivation and adherence of the teacher.

teaching others provides more motivation for the teacher to change their own behavior than if the teacher learned from an expert.

teaching empowers us to construct a different identity, as shown by the act of helping other people prevent the same mistakes.

Another way to reinforce our identity is through rituals.

rituals “may seem like a waste of time. Yet, as our research suggests, they are quite powerful.”

Though conventional wisdom says our beliefs shape our behaviors, the opposite is also true.

Evidence of the importance of rituals supports the idea of keeping a regular schedule, as described in part two. The more we stick to our plans, the more we reinforce our identity.

By making identity pacts, we are able to build the self-image we want. Whether the behavior is related to what we eat, how we treat others, or how we manage distraction, this technique can help shape our behavior to reflect our values.

Part 5 How to Make Your Workplace Indistractable

Chapter 26 Distraction Is a Sign of Dysfunction

While learning to control distractions on our own is important, what do we do when our jobs repeatedly insist on interrupting our plans?

There is mounting evidence that some organizations make their employees feel a great deal of pain.

a certain kind of work environment can actually cause clinical depression.

two particular conditions that predicted a higher likelihood of developing depression at work.

The first condition involved what the researchers called high “job strain.”

environments where employees were expected to meet high expectations yet lacked the ability to control the outcomes.

The second factor that correlates with workplace depression is an environment with an “effort-reward imbalance,” in which workers don’t see much return for their hard work, be it through increased pay or recognition.

At the heart of both job strain and effort-reward imbalance, according to Stansfeld, is a lack of control.

Technology is not the root cause of distraction at work. The problem goes much deeper.

the pressure employees feel to be constantly on-call gets amplified in what she calls the “cycle of responsiveness.”

The cycle of responsiveness is caused by a cascade of consequences.

Technology such as the mobile phone and Slack may perpetuate the cycle, but the technology itself isn’t the source of the problem; rather, overuse is a symptom.

Dysfunctional work culture is the ...

Chapter 27 Fixing Distraction Is a Test of Company Culture

providing a safe place for open dialogue about all sorts of issues increased employees’ sense of control and turned out to be an unexpected way of improving job satisfaction and staff retention.

Companies consistently confuse the disease of bad culture with symptoms like tech overuse and high employee turnover.

Who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions.

five key dynamics that set successful teams apart.

dependability, structure and clarity, meaning of work, and impact of work.

the fifth dynamic was without doubt the most important and actually underpinned the other four. It was someth...

Psychological safety is the antidote to the depression-inducing work environments

Knowing that your voice matters and that you’re not stuck in an uncaring, unchangeable machine has a positive impact on well-being.

How does a team—or a company, for that matter—create psychological safety? Edmondson provides a three-step answer

Step 1: “Frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem.”

Step 2: “Acknowledge your own fallibility.

Step 3: Finally, leaders must “model curiosity and ask lots of questions.”

organizations—particularly those operating in conditions of high uncertainty and interdependence among team members—need to also have high levels of motivation and psychological safety, a state she calls the “learning zone.”

Chapter 28 The Indistractable Workplace

Companies that make time to discuss their issues are more likely to foster psychological safety and hear the looming problems employees would otherwise keep to themselves.

what matters is that there is an outlet that management cares about, uses, and responds to. It is critical to the well-being of a company and its employees.

Creating the kind of company where people feel comfortable raising concerns without the fear of getting fired takes work and vigilance.

Part 6 How to Raise Indistractable Children (And Why We All Need Psychological Nutrients)

Chapter 29 Avoid Convenient Excuses

As tempting as it may be, destroying a kid’s digital device isn’t helpful. Surrounded by alarming headlines and negative anecdotes, it’s easy to understand why many parents think tech is the source of the trouble with kids these days.

As we’ve learned throughout this book, simple answers to complex questions are often wrong, and it is far too easy to blame behavior parents don’t like on something other than ourselves.

An 1883 medical journal attributed rising rates of suicide and homicide to the new “educational craze,” proclaiming “insanity is increasing . . . with education” and that education would “exhaust the children’s brains and nervous systems.”

Each successive historical age has ardently believed that an unprecedented ‘crisis’ in youth behavior is taking place,” Oxford historian Abigail Wills writes in an article for BBC’s online history magazine. “We are not unique; our fears do not differ significantly from those of our predecessors.”

A closer read of the studies linking screen time with depression finds correlation only with extreme amounts of time spent online.

A study conducted by Andrew Przybylski at the Oxford Internet Institute found that mental well-being actually increased with moderate amounts of screen time.

When kids act in ways we don’t like, parents desperately ask, “Why is my kid acting this way?” There’s certainty in a scapegoat, and we often cling to simple answers because they serve a story we want to believe—that kids do strange things because of something outside our control, which means that those behaviors are not really their (or our) fault.