Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life

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Another aspect I found frustrating about the writing style was the slightly condescending or braggadocious tone that occasionally cropped up (especially when it came to subtly flaunting his wealth). I imagine that wasn’t the intention, but it was hard to ignore when he bragged about what other books he wrote and what companies he invested in. Sometimes people call a meeting to avoid going through the effort of thinking through a problem themselves. Require: agenda and a brief (a proposed solution) International bestselling author, former Stanford lecturer, and behavioral design expert, Nir Eyal, wrote Silicon Valley’s handbook for making technology habit-forming. Five years after publishing Hooked, Eyal reveals distraction’s Achilles’ heel in his groundbreaking new book. Being indistractable is about learning to channel master feelings of dissatisfaction to make things better.

One way to let go of thoughts or feelings that are not helpful is to use the "leaves on the stream" method. Imagine you sitting next to a gently flowing stream with leaves floating by. Put the thought or emotion on one of the leaves and watch the leaf carry on floating on down the river.

Prevent Distraction with Pacts

To prevent distractions with pacts, plan for when you’re likely to get distracted, make unwanted behaviors more difficult, and call yourself “indistractable.”

While I appreciated the “Remember This” section at the end of each chapter because it made highlighting my ebook easy, it almost felt unnecessary because of how short each chapter was and how little content was covered. It’s one thing to tell this to knowledge workers who ride electric scooters to work and stream productivity podcasts into their AirBuds. But tell it to the single working mother who can barely carve out enough “me time” to take a shower. Better yet, tell the tech designers it’s not their fault, that it’s ultimately their users’ responsibility to manage distractions, and that even if their products do distract, the “root cause” of it lies in users themselves. 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. However, you can’t call something a “distraction,” unless you know what it is distracting you from. According to Michael Inzlicht, professor at University of Toronto, willpower is not finite. It's more like an emotion. "Just as we don't 'run out' of joy or anger, willpower ebbs and flows in response to what's happening to us and how we feel." Let go of this belief as it encourages you to believe you have a reason to quit because you have used up your willpower. One way to master internal triggers, says Ian Bogost, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is to reimagine an otherwise boring activity.

Hooked

Living the good life requires not only doing the right things but also not doing the things we know we’ll regret. Being indistractable, according to Eyal, is about understanding the real reasons why we do things against our best interests. Part 1: Master Internal Triggers Contrary to belief, external triggers aren’t always harmful. Of each external trigger, ask: “Is this trigger serving me, or am I serving it?” Does it lead to traction or distraction? If it’s the former, it serves you.