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by
Nir Eyal
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September 17 - December 3, 2019
“I can think of no more important skill than focus and no better teacher than Nir Eyal. Being indistractable is the skill of the century.” —Shane Parrish, founder of Farnam Street
“As a lifelong procrastinator, I’m painfully aware of how much productivity-related advice there is out there and how little of it is actually helpful. Indistractable is an exception.” —Tim Urban, author of WaitButWhy.com
“Indistractable is filled with both wisdom and humor. This is a valuable read for anyone navigating our modern world.” —Richard M. Ryan, cofounder of self-determination theory
But there’s also a dark side. As philosopher Paul Virilio wrote, “When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck.” In the case of user-friendly products and services, what makes some products engaging and easy to use can also make them distracting.
The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. Planning ahead ensures you will follow through.
I discovered that living the life we want requires not only doing the right things; it also requires we stop doing the wrong things that take us off track.
We need to learn how to avoid distraction. Living the lives we want not only requires doing the right things but also necessitates not doing the things we know we’ll regret.
The problem is deeper than tech. Being indistractable isn’t about being a Luddite. It’s about understanding the real reasons why we do things against our best interests.
We are constantly reaching for something: more money, more experiences, more knowledge, more status, more stuff.
In 1971 the psychologist Herbert A. Simon presciently wrote, “The wealth of information means a dearth of something else . . . a poverty of attention.”
The curse is not that Tantalus spends all eternity reaching for things just out of reach, but rather his obliviousness to the greater folly of his actions. Tantalus’s curse was his blindness to the fact he didn’t need those things in the first place. That’s the real moral of the story.
Distraction stops you from achieving your goals. It is any action that moves you away from what you really want.
As a company founded by former video game designers, Striiv utilizes behavioral design tactics to compel customers to be more physically active.
Even when we think we’re seeking pleasure, we’re actually driven by the desire to free ourselves from the pain of wanting.
Most people don’t want to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that distraction is always an unhealthy escape from reality.
All motivation is a desire to escape discomfort. If a behavior was previously effective at providing relief, we’re likely to continue using it as a tool to escape discomfort.
If distraction costs us time, then time management is pain management.
If satisfaction and pleasure were permanent, there might be little incentive to continue seeking further benefits or advances.
In other words, feeling contented wasn’t good for the species.
Four psychological factors make satisfaction temporary.
Let’s begin with the first factor: boredom. The lengths people will go to avoid boredom is shocking, sometimes literally.
It’s no surprise, therefore, that most of the top twenty-five websites in America sell escape from our daily drudgery, whether through shopping, celebrity gossip, or bite-sized doses of social interaction.
The second psychological factor driving us to distraction is negativity bias, “a phenomenon in which negative events are more salient and demand attention more powerfully than neutral or positive events.”
The third factor is rumination, our tendency to keep thinking about bad experiences.
But a fourth factor may be the cruelest of all. Hedonic adaptation, the tendency to quickly return to a baseline level of satisfaction, no matter what happens to us in life, is Mother Nature’s bait and switch.
The author of one study explains that as “new goals continually capture one’s attention, one constantly strives to be happy without realizing that in the long run such efforts are futile.”
It is our dissatisfaction that propels us to do everything we do, including to hunt, seek, create, and adapt.
Evolution favored dissatisfaction over contentment. Our tendencies toward boredom, negativity bias, rumination, and hedonic adaptation conspire to make sure we’re never satisfied for long.
If we want to master distraction, we must learn to deal with discomfort.
Without techniques for disarming temptation, mental abstinence can backfire. Resisting an urge can trigger rumination and make the desire grow stronger.
We can manage distractions that originate from within by changing how we think about them. We can reimagine the trigger, the task, and our temperament.
A technique I’ve found particularly helpful for dealing with this distraction trap is the “ten-minute rule.”
This rule allows time to do what some behavioral psychologists call “surfing the urge.” When an urge takes hold, noticing the sensations and riding them like a wave—neither pushing them away nor acting on them—helps us cope until the feelings subside.
By reimagining an uncomfortable internal trigger, we can disarm it. • Step 1. Look for the emotion preceding distraction. • Step 2. Write down the internal trigger. • Step 3. Explore the negative sensation with curiosity instead of contempt. • Step 4. Be extra cautious during liminal moments.
Fun and play don’t have to make us feel good per se; rather, they can be used as tools to keep us focused.
Bogost tells us that “fun is the aftermath of deliberately manipulating a familiar situation in a new way.”
The answer, therefore, is to focus on the task itself. Instead of running away from our pain or using rewards like prizes and treats to help motivate us, the idea is to pay such close attention that you find new challenges you didn’t see before. Those new challenges provide the novelty to engage our attention and maintain focus when tempted by distraction.
“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”
Fun is looking for the variability in something other people don’t notice. It’s breaking through the boredom and monotony to discover its hidden beauty.
We can master internal triggers by reimagining an otherwise dreary task. Fun and play can be used as tools to keep us focused.
One of the most pervasive bits of folk psychology is the belief that self-control is limited—that, by the nature of our temperament, we only have so much willpower available to us. Furthermore, the thinking goes, we are liable to run out of willpower when we exert ourselves. Psychologists have a name for this phenomenon: ego depletion.
We don’t get better without practice, which can be difficult at times.
We don’t run out of willpower. Believing we do makes us less likely to accomplish our goals by providing a rationale to quit when we could otherwise persist.
What we say to ourselves matters. Labeling yourself as having poor self-control is self-defeating.
The most effective way to make time for traction is through “timeboxing.”
Timebox your day. The three life domains of you, relationships, and work provide a framework for planning how to spend your time.
Exercise, sleep, healthy meals, and time spent reading or listening to an audiobook are all ways to invest in ourselves.
Schedule time for yourself first. You are at the center of the three life domains. Without allocating time for yourself, the other two domains suffer.
