Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life

by Nir Eyal

Bryan concluded, “People may be more likely to vote when voting is represented as an expression of self—as symbolic of a person’s fundamental character—rather than as simply a behavior.” Our self-image has a sizable impact on our behavior and has implications well beyond the voting booth. Identity is another cognitive shortcut that helps our brains make otherwise difficult choices in advance, thereby streamlining decision-making.

By aligning our behaviors to our identity, we make choices based on who we believe we are. With that in mind, what identity should we take on to help fight distraction? It should now be clear why this book is titled Indistractable. Welcome to your new moniker! By thinking of yourself as indistractable, you empower yourself through your new identity. You can also use this identity as a rationale to tell others why you do “strange” things like meticulously plan your time, refuse to respond to every notification immediately, or put a sign on your screen when you don’t want to be disturbed. These acts are no more unusual than other expressions of identity, like wearing religious garb or eating a particular diet. It’s time to be indistractable and proud!

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

Individuals on teams with higher psychological safety are less likely to leave Google, they’re more likely to harness the power of diverse ideas from their teammates, they bring in more revenue, and they’re rated as effective twice as often by executives.

create psychological safety? Edmondson provides a three-step answer in her talk: • Step 1: “Frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem.” Because the future is uncertain, emphasize that “we’ve got to have everyone’s brains and voices in the game.” • Step 2: “Acknowledge your own fallibility.” Managers need to let people know that nobody has all the answers—we’re in this together. • Step 3: Finally, leaders must “model curiosity and ask lots of questions.”

Whether employees’ feedback is heard during small group meetings, like those facilitated by Perlow at BCG, or over group-chat channels at Slack isn’t the point; 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.

same study found that kids who spent two hours or less online per day did not have higher rates of depression and anxiety compared to controls. A study conducted by Andrew Przybylski at the Oxford Internet Institute found that mental well-being actually increased with moderate amounts of screen time. “Even at exceptional levels, we’re talking about a very small impact,” stated Przybylski. “It’s about a third as bad as missing breakfast or not getting eight hours sleep.”

Just as the human body requires three macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates, and fat) to run properly, Ryan and Deci proposed the human psyche needs three things to flourish: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. When the body is starved, it elicits hunger pangs; when the psyche is undernourished, it produces anxiety, restlessness, and other symptoms that something is missing.

Robert Epstein, the researcher who wrote “The Myth of the Teen Brain” in Scientific American, has a similar conclusion: “Surveys I have conducted show that teens in the U.S. are subjected to more than ten times as many restrictions as are mainstream adults, twice as many restrictions as active-duty U.S. Marines, and even twice as many restrictions as incarcerated felons.” While such a restrictive environment isn’t every American student’s experience, it’s clear why so many struggle to stay motivated in the classroom: their need for autonomy to explore their interests is unfulfilled.

Unlike their offline lives, kids have a tremendous amount of freedom online; they have the autonomy to call the shots and experiment with creative strategies to solve problems. “In internet spaces, there tends to be myriad choices and opportunities, and a lot less adult control and surveillance,” says Ryan. “One can thus feel freedom, competence, and connection online, especially when the teenager’s contrasting environments are overly controlling, restrictive, or understimulating.” Ironically, when parents grow concerned with how much time their kids spend online, they often impose even more rules—a tactic that tends to backfire. Instead of more ways to limit your kids’ autonomy, Ryan advises seeking to understand the underlying needs and associated internal triggers driving them to digital distraction.

If a child isn’t doing well in school and doesn’t get the necessary individualized support, they start to believe that achieving competence is impossible, so they stop trying. In the absence of competency in the classroom, kids turn to other outlets to experience the feeling of growth and development. Companies making games, apps, and other potential distractions are happy to fill that void

Whereas previous generations were allowed to simply play after school and form close social bonds, many children today are raised by parents who restrict outdoor play because of “child predators, road traffic, and bullies,”

“What the data show,” says Ryan, “is that kids who aren’t feeling relatedness, who are feeling isolated or excluded in school are going to be more drawn to media where they can get connections with other people and find subgroups they can identify with. So that’s both a plus and a minus.” The loss of in-person play has real costs according to Gray, given that “learning to get along and cooperate with others as equals may be the most crucial evolutionary function of human social play.”

as a society, we have come to the conclusion that to protect children from danger and to educate them, we must deprive them of the very activity that makes them happiest and place them for ever more hours in settings where they are more or less continually directed and evaluated by adults, settings almost designed to produce anxiety and depression.

Getz wants her daughters to continue to ask themselves questions to self-monitor and self-regulate their behavior: “Is my behavior working for me? Am I proud of myself, in the way I’m behaving?” she asks them to ask themselves. “I work with a lot of teenagers who will often tell me that they don’t want to be distracted, they don’t want to be sucked into all this stuff, but they just don’t know how to stop.”

To help children learn self-regulation, we must teach them how to make time for traction. We can encourage regular discussions about our values and theirs, and teach them how to set aside time to be the people they want to be.

goal here is to teach them to spend their time mindfully by reserving a place for important activities on their weekly schedules. Remember, their schedules (like ours) should be assessed and adjusted weekly to ensure that their time is spent living out their values. Playing Fortnite, for instance, is fine if the time has been allocated to it in advance. With a timeboxed schedule that includes time for digital devices, kids know that they’ll have time to do the things they enjoy. I advised her to change the context of their family conversations around tech—from her screaming “No!” to teaching her kids to tell themselves, “Not yet.”

Empowering children with the autonomy to control their own time is a tremendous gift. Even if they fail from time to time, failure is part of the learning process.

As a family, play can and should extend beyond mealtimes. In my household, we’ve established a weekly “Sunday Funday,” where we rotate the responsibility to plan a three-hour activity. When it’s my turn, I might take the family to the park for a long conversation while we walk. My daughter typically requests to play a board game when it’s her turn to pick. My wife often proposes a trip to a local farmers’ market to discover and sample new foods. Whatever the choice, the idea is to regularly set aside time together to feed our need for relatedness.

It’s OK to let your kids fail. Failure is how we learn. Show kids how to adjust their schedules to make time to live up to their values.

Test for tech readiness. A good measure of a child’s readiness is the ability to manage distraction by using the settings on the device to turn off external triggers.

Don’t be the unwanted external trigger. Respect their time and don’t interrupt them when they have scheduled time to focus on something, be that work or play.

We also explained that the apps and videos on the iPad were made by some very smart people and were intentionally designed to keep her hooked and habitually watching. It’s important that our kids understand the motives of the gaming companies and social networks—while these products sell us fun and connection, they also profit from our time and attention. This might seem like a lot to teach a five-year-old, but we felt a strong need to equip her with the ability to make decisions about her screen usage and enforce her own rules.

Don’t underestimate your child’s ability to precommit and follow through. Even young children can learn to use precommitments as long as they set the rules and know how to use a timer or some other binding system. • Consumer skepticism is healthy. Understanding that companies are motivated to keep kids spending time watching or playing is an important part of teaching media literacy. • Put the kids in charge. It’s only when kids practice monitoring their own behavior that they learn how to manage their own time and attention.

All external triggers—whether coming from our phones or our kids’—deserve scrutiny to determine whether they are serving us. Our children are also better served when they learn to take care of themselves, and by watching their parents model fellowship, they learn the importance of tuning out distraction to focus on friends. If we are not intentional about making the time and space for distraction-free discussions, we risk losing the opportunity to truly know others and allow them to truly know us.

five years of researching and writing this book have taught me how to fight distraction and win. Distractions still happen, but now I know what to do about them so they don’t keep happening. These techniques have allowed me to take control of my life in ways I never could before. I’m as honest with myself as I am with others, I live up to my values, I fulfill my commitments to the people I love, and am more professionally productive than ever.