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Introduction: From Hooked to Indistractable
in this day and age, if you are not equipped to manage distraction, your brain will be manipulated by time-wasting diversions.
Chapter 1: What’s Your Superpower?
I kept getting distracted, even without the tech that I thought was the source of the problem.
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.
Chapter 2: Being Indistractable
TRACTION AND DISTRACTION
The challenge, of course, is that our world has always been full of things designed to distract us. Today, people find themselves attached to their mobile phones, but they are only the latest potential hindrance. People complained about the brain-melting power of television since its inception. Before that, it was the telephone, comic books, and the radio. Even the written word was blamed for creating “forgetfulness in the learners’ souls,” according to Socrates. Though some of these things seem dull in comparison to today’s enticements, distractions have and always will be facts of life.
In 1971 the psychologist Herbert A. Simon presciently wrote, “The wealth of information means a dearth of something else . . . a poverty of attention.”
Researchers tell us attention and focus are the raw materials of human creativity and flourishing. In the age of increased automation, the most sought-after jobs are those that require creative problem-solving, novel solutions, and the kind of human ingenuity that comes from focusing deeply on the task at hand.
Socially, we see that close friendships are the bedrock of our psychological and physical health. Loneliness, according to researchers, is more dangerous than obesity. But, of course, we can’t cultivate close friendships if we’re constantly distracted.
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.
Tantalus’s curse is also our curse. We are compelled to reach for things we supposedly need but really don’t. We don’t need to check our email right this second or need to see the latest trending news, no matter how much we feel we must.
Distractions will always exist; managing them is our responsibility.
Being indistractable means striving to do what you say you will do.
Triggers prompt both traction and distraction. External triggers prompt you to action with cues in your environment. Internal triggers prompt you to action with cues within you.
PART 1: MASTER INTERNAL TRIGGERS
Chapter 3: What Motivates Us, Really?
Even when we think we’re seeking pleasure, we’re actually driven by the desire to free ourselves from the pain of wanting.
Simply put, the drive to relieve discomfort is the root cause of all our behavior, while everything else is a proximate cause.
Solely blaming a smartphone for causing distraction is just as flawed as blaming a pedometer for making someone climb too many stairs. Unless we deal with the root causes of our distraction, we’ll continue to find ways to distract ourselves. Distraction, it turns out, isn’t about the distraction itself; rather, it’s about how we respond to it.
Only by understanding our pain can we begin to control it and find better ways to deal with negative urges.
Understand the root cause of distraction. Distraction is about more than your devices. Separate proximate causes from the root cause.
REMEMBER THIS
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.
Anything that stops discomfort is potentially addictive, but that doesn’t make it irresistible. If you know the drivers of your behavior, you can take steps to manage them.
Chapter 4: Time Management Is Pain Management
If distraction costs us time, then time management is pain management.
We’re wired this way for a simple reason. As a study published in the Review of General Psychology notes, “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.
The study’s authors conclude their paper by saying, “People prefer doing to thinking, even if what they are doing is so unpleasant that they would normally pay to avoid it. The untutored mind does not like to be alone with itself.” 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.
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.
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.”
Babies begin to show signs of negativity bias starting at just seven months of age, suggesting this tendency is inborn. As further evidence, researchers believe we tend to have an easier time recalling bad memories than good ones.
Negativity bias almost certainly gave us an evolutionary edge. Good things are nice, but bad things can kill you, which is why we pay attention to and remember the bad stuff first.
The third factor is rumination, our tendency to keep thinking about bad experiences.
This “passive comparison of one’s current situation with some unachieved standard” can manifest in self-critical thoughts such as, “Why can’t I handle things better?” As one study notes, “By reflecting on what went wrong and how to rectify it, people may be able to discover sources of error or alternative strategies, ultimately leading to not repeating mistakes and possibly doing better in the future.” Another potentially useful trait—but, boy, can it make us miserable.
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,
Dissatisfaction and discomfort dominate our brain’s default state, but we can use them to motivate us instead of defeat us.
It is our dissatisfaction that propels us to do everything we do, including to hunt, seek, create, and adapt.
we must disavow the misguided idea that if we’re not happy, we’re not normal—exactly the opposite is true. While this shift in mind-set can be jarring, it can also be incredibly liberating.
It’s good to know that feeling bad isn’t actually bad; it’s exactly what survival of the fittest intended.
REMEMBER THIS
Time management is pain management. Distractions cost us time, and like all actions, they are spurred by the desire to escape discomfort.
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.
Dissatisfaction is responsible for our species’ advancements as much as its faults. It is an innate power that can be channeled to help us make things better.
If we want to master distraction, we must learn to deal with discomfort.
Chapter 5: Deal with Distraction from Within
At the heart of the therapy is learning to notice and accept one’s cravings and to handle them healthfully. Instead of suppressing urges, ACT prescribes a method for stepping back, noticing, observing, and finally letting the desire disappear naturally.
It turns out mental abstinence can backfire.
An endless cycle of resisting, ruminating, and finally giving in to the desire perpetuates the cycle and quite possibly drives many of our unwanted behaviors.
What affected their desire was not how much time had passed after a smoke, but how much time was left before they could smoke again. If, as this study suggests, a craving for something as addictive as nicotine can be manipulated in this way, why can’t we trick our brains into mastering other unhealthy desires? Thankfully, we can!
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.
Chapter 6: Reimagine the Internal Trigger
While we can’t control the feelings and thoughts that pop into our heads, we can control what we do with them.
STEP 1: LOOK FOR THE DISCOMFORT THAT PRECEDES THE DISTRACTION, FOCUSING IN ON THE INTERNAL TRIGGER
A common problem I have while writing is the urge to google something. It’s easy to justify this bad habit as “doing research,” but deep down I know it’s often just a diversion from difficult work.
STEP 2: WRITE DOWN THE TRIGGER
Bricker advises writing down the trigger, whether or not you subsequently give in to the distraction. He recommends noting the time of day, what you were doing, and how you felt when you noticed the internal trigger that led to the distracting behavior “as soon as you are aware of the behavior,” because it’s easier at that point to remember how you felt.
He recommends discussing the urge as if you were an observer, telling yourself something like, “I’m feeling that tension in my chest right now. And there I go, trying to reach for my iPhone.”
The better we are at noticing the behavior, the better we’ll be at managing it over time. “The anxiety goes away, the thought gets weaker or [is] replaced by another thought.”
STEP 3: EXPLORE YOUR SENSATIONS
When similar techniques were applied in a smoking cessation study, the participants who had learned to acknowledge and explore their cravings managed to quit at double the rate of those in the American Lung Association’s best-performing cessation program.
Bricker then recommends getting curious about that sensation. For example, do your fingers twitch when you’re about to be distracted? Do you get a flurry of butterflies in your stomach when you think about work when you’re with your kids? What does it feel like when the feelings crest and then subside? Bricker encourages staying with the feeling before acting on the impulse.
One of Bricker’s favorite techniques is the “leaves on a stream” method. When feeling the uncomfortable internal trigger to do something you’d rather not, “imagine you are seated beside a gently flowing stream,” he says. “Then imagine there are leaves floating down that stream. Place each thought in your mind on each leaf. It could be a memory, a word, a worry, an image. And let each of those leaves float down that stream, swirling away, as you sit and just watch.”
STEP 4: BEWARE OF LIMINAL MOMENTS
Liminal moments are transitions from one thing to another throughout our days. Have you ever picked up your phone while waiting for a traffic light to change, then found yourself still looking at your phone while driving? Or opened a tab in your web browser, got annoyed by how long it’s taking to load, and opened up another page while you waited?
A technique I’ve found particularly helpful for dealing with this distraction trap is the “ten-minute rule.” If I find myself wanting to check my phone as a pacification device when I can’t think of anything better to do, I tell myself it’s fine to give in, but not right now. I have to wait just ten minutes.
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.
Oliver Burkeman wrote in the Guardian, “It’s a curious truth that when you gently pay attention to negative emotions, they tend to dissipate—but positive ones expand.”
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.
Chapter 7: Reimagine the Task
Given what we know about our propensity for distraction when we’re uncomfortable, reimagining difficult work as fun could prove incredibly empowering.
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.
We can use the same neural hardwiring that keeps us hooked to media to keep us engaged in an otherwise unpleasant task.
Operating under constraints, Bogost says, is the key to creativity and fun. Finding the optimal path for the mower or beating a record time are other ways to create an imaginary playground.
For me, I learned to stay focused on the tedious work of writing books by finding the mystery in my work. I write to answer interesting questions and discover novel solutions to old problems.
To use a popular aphorism, “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” Today, I write for the fun of it. Of course, it’s also my profession, but by finding the fun I’m able to do my work without getting as distracted as I once did.
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.
But remember: finding novelty is only possible when we give ourselves the time to focus intently on a task and look hard for the variability.
REMEMBER THIS
We can master internal triggers by reimagining an otherwise dreary task. Fun and play can be used as tools to keep us focused.
Play doesn’t have to be pleasurable. It just has to hold our attention.
Deliberateness and novelty can be added to any task to make it fun.
Chapter 8: Reimagine Your Temperament
In a study conducted by the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and her colleagues, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dweck concluded that signs of ego depletion were observed only in those test subjects who believed willpower was a limited resource. It wasn’t the sugar in the lemonade but the belief in its impact that gave participants an extra boost.
People who did not see willpower as a finite resource did not show signs of ego depletion.
He believes that willpower is not a finite resource but instead acts 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.
Seeing the link between temperament and willpower through a different lens has profound implications on the way we focus our attention. For one, if mental energy is more like an emotion than fuel in a tank, it can be managed and utilized as such.
Several recent studies have found a strong connection between the way we think about other aspects of human nature and our ability to follow through.
Participants who indicate they feel more powerful as time passes increase their odds of quitting. In contrast, studies of methamphetamine users and cigarette smokers found that those who believed they were powerless to resist were most likely to fall off the wagon after quitting.
A study published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs found that individuals who believed they were powerless to fight their cravings were much more likely to drink again.
Addicts’ beliefs regarding their powerlessness was just as significant in determining whether they would relapse after treatment as their level of physical dependence. Just let that sink in—mind-set mattered as much as physical dependence! What we say to ourselves is vitally important. Labeling yourself as having poor self-control actually leads to less self-control.
Rather than telling ourselves we failed because we’re somehow deficient, we should offer self-compassion by speaking to ourselves with kindness when we experience setbacks.
Several studies have found people who are more self-compassionate experience a greater sense of well-being. A 2015 review of seventy-nine studies looking at the responses of over sixteen thousand volunteers found that people who have “a positive and caring attitude . . . toward her- or himself in the face of failures and individual shortcomings” tend to be happier.
Another study found that people’s tendency to self-blame, along with how much they ruminated on a problem, could almost completely mediate the most common factors associated with depression and anxiety.
The good news is that we can change the way we talk to ourselves in order to harness the power of self-compassion. This doesn’t mean we won’t mess up; we all do. Everyone struggles with distraction from one thing or another.
The important thing is to take responsibility for our actions without heaping on the toxic guilt that makes us feel even worse and can, ironically, lead us to seek even more distraction in order to escape the pain of shame.
Self-compassion makes people more resilient to letdowns by breaking the vicious cycle of stress that often accompanies failure.
A good rule of thumb is to talk to yourself the way you might talk to a friend.
Since we know so much about ourselves, we tend to be our own worst critics, but if we talk to ourselves the way we’d help a friend, we can see the situation for what it really is.
REMEMBER THIS
Thankfully, you don’t have to believe everything you think; you are only powerless if you think you are.
Reimagining our temperament can help us manage our internal triggers.
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.
Practice self-compassion. Talk to yourself the way you’d talk to a friend. People who are more self-compassionate are more resilient.
PART 2: MAKE TIME FOR TRACTION
Chapter 9: Turn Your Values into Time
The German writer and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe believed he could predict someone’s future based on one simple fact. “If I know how you spend your time,” he wrote, “then I know what might become of you.”
The Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote, “People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time, they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.”
If we don’t plan our days, someone else will.
Instead of starting with what we’re going to do, we should begin with why we’re going to do it. And to do that, we must begin with our values.
If we chronically neglect our values, we become something we’re not proud of—our lives feel out of balance and diminished. Ironically, this ugly feeling makes us more likely to seek distractions to escape our dissatisfaction without actually solving the problem.
Without planning ahead, it’s impossible to tell the difference between traction and distraction.
You can’t call something a distraction unless you know what it’s distracting you from.
I know many of us bristle at the idea of keeping a schedule because we don’t want to feel hampered, but oddly enough, we actually perform better under constraints. This is because limitations give us a structure, while a blank schedule and a mile-long to-do list torments us with too many choices.
The goal is to eliminate all white space on your calendar so you’re left with a template for how you intend to spend your time each day.
It doesn’t so much matter what you do with your time; rather, success is measured by whether you did what you planned to do. It’s fine to watch a video, scroll social media, daydream, or take a nap, as long as that’s what you planned to do. Alternatively, checking work email, a seemingly productive task, is a distraction if it’s done when you intended to spend time with your family or work on a presentation.
How much time in each domain would allow you to be consistent with your values? Start by creating a weekly calendar template for your perfect week. You’ll find a blank template in the appendix and a free online tool at NirAndFar.com/Indistractable.
Next, book fifteen minutes on your schedule every week to reflect and refine your calendar by asking two questions:
Question 1 (Reflect): “When in my schedule did I do what I said I would do and when did I get distracted?” Answering this question requires you to look back at the past week.
Question 2 (Refine): “Are there changes I can make to my calendar that will give me the time I need to better live out my values?” Maybe something unexpected came up, or perhaps there was a problem with how you planned your day.
Timeboxing enables us to think of each week as a mini-experiment. The goal is to figure out where your schedule didn’t work out in the prior week so you can make it easier to follow the next time around.
Approaching the exercise of making a schedule as a curious scientist, rather than a drill sergeant, gives us the freedom to get better with each iteration.
Being indistractable is largely about making sure you make time for traction each day and eliminating the distraction that keeps you from living the life you want—one that involves taking care of yourself, your relationships, and your work.
REMEMBER THIS
You can’t call something a distraction unless you know what it is distracting you from. Planning ahead is the only way to know the difference between traction and distraction.
Does your calendar reflect your values? To be the person you want to be, you have to make time to live your values.
Timebox your day. The three life domains of you, relationships, and work provide a framework for planning how to spend your time.
Reflect and refine. Revise your schedule regularly, but you must commit to it once it’s set.
Chapter 10: Control the Inputs, Not the Outcomes
Like every valuable thing, you require maintenance and care, which takes time. Just as you wouldn’t blow off a meeting with your boss, you should never bail on appointments you make with yourself. After all, who’s more critical to helping you live the kind of life you want than you?
Once I realized my rumination was itself a distraction, I began to deal with it in a healthier manner. Specifically, if I woke up, I’d repeat a simple mantra, “The body gets what the body needs.” That subtle mind-set shift took the pressure off by no longer making sleep a requirement.
when it comes to our time, we should stop worrying about outcomes we can’t control and instead focus on the inputs we can. The positive results of the time we spend doing something is a hope, not a certainty.
The one thing we control is the time we put into a task.
Whether I’m able to fall asleep at any given moment or whether a breakthrough idea for my next book comes to me when I sit down at my desk isn’t entirely up to me, but one thing is for certain: I won’t do what I want to do if I’m not in the right place at the right time, whether that’s in bed when I want to sleep or at my desk when I want to do good work. Not showing up guarantees failure.
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.
Show up when you say you will. You can’t always control what you get out of time you spend, but you can control how much time you put into a task.
REMEMBER THIS
Input is much more certain than outcome. When it comes to living the life you want, making sure you allocate time to living your values is the only thing you should focus on.
Chapter 11: Schedule Important Relationships
In business, a residual beneficiary is the chump who gets whatever is left over when a company is liquidated—typically, not much. In life, our loved ones deserve better, and yet, if we’re not careful with how we plan our time, residual beneficiaries are exactly what they become.
To combat this problem, I’ve intentionally scheduled time with my daughter every week. Much like I schedule time for a business meeting or time for myself, I block out time on my schedule to be with her.
To make sure we always have something fun to do, we spent one afternoon writing down over a hundred things to do together in town, each one on a separate little strip of paper. Then, we rolled up all the little strips and placed them inside our “fun jar.” Now, every Friday afternoon, we simply pull an activity from the fun jar and do it.
I’ve made it a priority in my weekly schedule to live up to my values.
my wife, Julie, and I make sure we have time scheduled for each other. Twice a month, we plan a special date.
Several studies show that among heterosexual couples, husbands don’t do their fair share of the housework,
Julie couldn’t tell me how I could help because she already had a dozen things on her mind. She wanted me to take initiative, to jump in and start helping out.
We agreed to split the household jobs and, most important, timeboxed the tasks on our schedules, leaving no doubt about when they would get done.
Lockman’s research supports this benefit: “A growing body of research in family and clinical studies demonstrates that spousal equality promotes marital success and that inequality undermines it.”
The people we love most should not be content getting whatever time is left over. Everyone benefits when we hold time on our schedule to live up to our values and do our share.
Since 1938, researchers have been following the physical health and social habits of 724 men. Robert Waldinger, the study’s current director, said in a TEDx talk, “The clearest message that we get from this seventy-five-year study is this: good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.”
Socially disconnected people are, according to Waldinger, “less happy; their health declines earlier in midlife; their brain functioning declines sooner; [and] they live shorter lives than people who are not lonely.”
Waldinger warned, “It’s not just the number of friends you have . . . It’s the quality of your close relationships that matters.”
William Rawlins, a professor of interpersonal communications at Ohio University who studies the way people interact over the course of their lives, told the Atlantic that satisfying friendships need three things: “somebody to talk to, someone to depend on, and someone to enjoy.”
Unfortunately, the less time we invest in people, the easier it is to make do without them, until one day it is too awkward to reconnect.
This is how friendships die—they starve to death.
For our gathering, four couples, my wife and me included, meet every two weeks to talk about one question over a picnic lunch. The question might range from a deep inquiry like, “What is one thing you are thankful your parents taught you?” to a more practical question like, “Should we push our kids to learn things they don’t want, like playing the piano?”
REMEMBER THIS
The people you love deserve more than getting whatever time is left over. If someone is important to you, make regular time for them on your calendar.
Go beyond scheduling date days with your significant other. Put domestic chores on your calendar to ensure an equitable split.
A lack of close friendships may be hazardous to your health. Ensure you maintain important relationships by scheduling time for regular get-togethers.
Chapter 12: Sync with Stakeholders at Work
studies have found that workers who spend more than fifty-five hours per week on the job have reduced productivity; this problem is further compounded by their making more mistakes and inflicting more useless work on their colleagues, resulting in more time spent to get even less done.
Using a detailed, timeboxed schedule helps clarify the central trust pact between employers and employees.
schedule syncing is essential, whether with a family member or an employer. Regularly aligning expectations around how you’ll spend your time is paramount, and must be done in regular, predictable increments.
There’s no mystery about what’s getting done when there’s transparency in your schedule.
REMEMBER THIS
Syncing your schedule with stakeholders at work is critical for making time for traction in your day. Without visibility into how you spend your time, colleagues and managers are more likely to distract you with superfluous tasks.
Sync as frequently as your schedule changes. If your schedule template changes from day to day, have a daily check-in. However, most people find a weekly alignment is sufficient.
PART 3: HACK BACK EXTERNAL TRIGGERS
Chapter 13: Ask the Critical Question
In 2007, B. J. Fogg, founder of Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab, taught a class on “mass interpersonal persuasion.” Several of the students in attendance would later pursue careers applying his methods at companies like Facebook and Uber. Mike Krieger, a cofounder of Instagram, created a prototype of the app in Fogg’s class that he eventually sold for $1 billion.
The Fogg Behavior Model states that for a behavior (B) to occur, three things must be present at the same time: motivation (M), ability (A), and a trigger (T). More succinctly, B = MAT.
Motivation is “the energy for action,” according to Edward Deci,
in Fogg’s formula, ability relates to facility of action. Quite simply, the harder something is to do, the less likely people are to do it. Conversely, the easier something is to do, the more likely we are to do it.
Today, much of our struggle with distraction is a struggle with external triggers.
“Push notifications proved to be a marketer’s dream: They’re functionally impossible to tell apart from a text or email without looking, so you have to look before you can dismiss.”
Researchers have found that when people are interrupted during a task, they tend to subsequently make up for lost time by working faster, but the cost is higher levels of stress and frustration.
The more we respond to external triggers, the more we train our brain in a never-ending stimulus–response loop. We condition ourselves to respond instantly. Soon, it feels impossible to do what we’ve planned because we’re constantly reacting to external triggers instead of attending to what’s in front of us.
A study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance found that receiving a cell phone notification but not replying to it was just as distracting as responding to a message or call.
By having your phone in your field of view, your brain must work hard to ignore it, but if your phone isn’t easily accessible or visually present, your brain is able to focus on the task at hand.
Is this trigger serving me, or am I serving it? Viewed through the lens of this critical question, triggers can now be identified for what they rightly are: tools. If we use them properly, they can help us stay on track. If the trigger helps us do the thing we planned to do in our schedule, it’s helping us gain traction. If it leads to distraction, then it isn’t serving us.
REMEMBER THIS
External triggers often lead to distraction. Cues in our environment like the pings, dings, and rings from devices, as well as interruptions from other people, frequently take us off track.
External triggers aren’t always harmful. If an external trigger leads us to traction, it serves us.
We must ask ourselves: Is this trigger serving me, or am I serving it? Then we can hack back the external triggers that don’t serve us.
Chapter 14: Hack Back Work Interruptions
If medical error was a disease, it would rank as the third leading cause of death in the U.S.
Open-office floor plans were supposed to foster idea sharing and collaboration. Unfortunately, according to a 2016 meta-study of over three hundred papers, the trend has led to more distraction. Not surprisingly, these interruptions have also been shown to decrease overall employee satisfaction.
She calls it the “concentration crown,” and the built-in LEDs light up her head to send an impossible-to-ignore message. When she wears it, she’s clearly letting our daughter (and me) know not to interrupt her unless it’s an emergency. It works like a charm.
When working from home, family members can be a source of distraction. My wife’s “concentration crown” lets us know she is indistractable.
REMEMBER THIS
Interruptions lead to mistakes. You can’t do your best work if you’re frequently distracted.
Open-office floor plans increase distraction.
Defend your focus. Signal when you do not want to be interrupted. Use a screen sign or some other clear cue to let people know you are indistractable.
Chapter 15: Hack Back Email
study published in the International Journal of Information Management found office workers took an average of sixty-four seconds after checking email to reorient themselves and get back to work.
researchers writing in the Harvard Business Review have concluded that an astonishing number of workplace emails are an utter waste. When it comes to the hours managers spend on email, they estimate that “25 percent of that time is consumed reading emails that should not have been sent to that particular manager and 25 percent is spent responding to emails that the manager should never have answered.”
As the psychologist B. F. Skinner famously discovered, pigeons pecked at levers more often when given a reward on a variable schedule of reinforcement. Similarly, email’s uncertainty keeps us checking and pecking.
we have a strong tendency for reciprocity—responding in kind to the actions of another. When someone says “Hello” or extends their hand to shake our own, we feel the urge to reciprocate—not doing so breaks a strong social norm and feels cold. Though the grace of reciprocity works well in person, it can lead to a host of problems online.
To receive fewer emails, we must send fewer emails.
Most emails we send and receive are not urgent. Yet our brain’s weakness for variable rewards makes us treat every message, regardless of form, as if it’s time sensitive.
OPEN UP OFFICE HOURS
You’d be amazed how many things become irrelevant when you give them a little time to breathe.
After all, who made the rule that every email needs to be sent as soon as you’re done writing it? Thankfully, technology can help. Instead of banging out a reply and hitting send right away, email programs like Microsoft Office and tools like Mixmax for Gmail allow us to delay a message’s delivery.
while you might enjoy clearing out your inbox on a Friday afternoon, delaying delivery until Monday prevents you from stressing out your coworkers and helps protect your weekend from relaxation-killing replies.
I use SaneBox, a simple program that runs in the background as I use email. Whenever I encounter an email I absolutely never want to hear from again, I click a button to send that sender’s email to my Sane-BlackHole folder. Once there, SaneBox’s software ensures I’ll never hear from that sender again.
There’s mounting evidence that processing your email in batches is much more efficient and less stress inducing than checking it throughout the day.
REMEMBER THIS
Break down the problem. Time spent on email (T) is a function of the number of messages received (n) multiplied by the average time (t) spent per message: T = n × t.
Reduce the number of messages received. Schedule office hours, delay when messages are sent, and reduce time-wasting messages from reaching your inbox.
Spend less time on each message. Label emails by when each message needs a response. Reply to emails during a scheduled time on your calendar.
Chapter 16: Hack Back Group Chat
Jason Fried says group chat is “like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda.”
Here are four basic rules for effectively managing group chat:
RULE 1: USE IT LIKE A SAUNA
“treat chat like a sauna—stay a while but then get out . . . it’s unhealthy to stay too long.”
RULE 2: SCHEDULE IT
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
When it comes to group chat, be selective about who’s invited to the conversation. Fried advises, “Don’t get everyone on the line. The smaller the chat, the better the chat.”
RULE 4: USE IT SELECTIVELY
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.
The secret lies in the answer to our critical question: Are these triggers serving me, or am I serving them? We should use group chat where it helps us gain traction and weed out the external triggers that lead to distraction.
Real-time communication channels should be used sparingly. Time spent communicating should not come at the sacrifice of time spent concentrating.
REMEMBER THIS
Company culture matters. Changing group chat practices may involve questioning company norms. We’ll discuss this topic in part five.
Different communication channels have different uses. Rather than use every technology as an always-on channel, use the best tools for the job.
Get in and get out. Group chat is great for replacing in-person meetings but terrible if it becomes an all-day affair.
Chapter 17: Hack Back Meetings
Part of the problem is that too often people schedule a meeting to avoid having to put in the effort of solving a problem for themselves.
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. The digest need not be more than a page or two discussing the problem, their reasoning, and their recommendation.
When I taught at the Stanford design school, I consistently saw how teams who brainstormed individually before coming together not only generated better ideas but were also more likely to have a wider diversity of solutions as they were less likely to be overrun by the louder, more dominating members of the group.
To stay indistractable in meetings, we must rid them of nearly all screens. I’ve conducted countless workshops and have observed a stark difference between meetings in which tech use was permitted versus those that were device free, and meetings without screens generated far more engaged discussion and better outcomes.
If we are going to spend our time in a meeting, we must make sure that we are present, both in body and mind.
While there are specific exceptions to these customs based on the business, the only things attendees really need in a meeting are paper, a pen, and perhaps some sticky notes.
If slides need to be presented on screen, designate one member of the team to present from their computer or have a dedicated laptop that stays in the meeting room.
Our technology gives us a way of being physically present but mentally absent;
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. Meetings can be unbearably tense, socially awkward, and exceedingly boring—devices provide a way to manage our uncomfortable internal triggers.
REMEMBER THIS
Make it harder to call a meeting. To call a meeting, the organizer must circulate an agenda and briefing document.
Meetings are for consensus building. With few exceptions, creative problem-solving should occur before the meeting, individually or in very small groups.
Be fully present. People use devices during meetings to escape monotony and boredom, which subsequently makes meetings even worse.
Have one laptop per meeting. Devices in everyone’s hands makes it more difficult to achieve the purpose of the meeting. With the exception of one laptop in the room for presenting information and taking notes, leave devices outside.
Chapter 18: Hack Back Your Smartphone
The good news is, being dependent is not the same thing as being addicted.
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
Just because your phone can seemingly do everything doesn’t mean it should.
When I started wearing a watch again, I noticed that I checked my phone far less frequently. A quick glance at my wrist told me what I needed to know and no more.
As someone who hates being late, I used to glance at my phone throughout the day, which far too often caused me to get sucked into a notification on my phone’s lock screen. When I started wearing a watch again, I noticed that I checked my phone far less frequently. A quick glance at my wrist told me what I needed to know and no more.
STEP 3: REARRANGE
He recommends rearranging your phone’s home screen so it only displays your Primary Tools and your Aspirations.
Tony Stubblebine, editor in chief of the popular Medium publication Better Humans, calls his phone’s setup the “Essential Home Screen.”
Stubblebine recommends sorting your apps into three categories: “Primary Tools,” “Aspirations,” and “Slot Machines.”
STEP 4: RECLAIM
If you use an Apple iPhone, go to Settings and select the Notifications option, or if you’re on an Android device, find the Apps section in Settings. From there, adjust each app’s individual notification permissions to your preferences.
Chapter 19: Hack Back Your Desktop
A study by researchers at Princeton University found 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, according to a study published in the academic journal Behaviour & Information Technology.
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
Generally speaking, we commit more errors when juggling many tasks at the same time, and we also take longer—sometimes double the time—to complete the tasks.
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.
A recent study found walking, even if done slowly and on a treadmill, improved performance on a creativity test when compared to sitting down.
Listening to a nonfiction audiobook on the way to work is a good example of making the most of a commute while investing time in self-improvement.
Katherine Milkman at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School has shown how leveraging a behavior we want to do can help us do things we know we should do.
In her study, Milkman gave participants an iPod loaded with an audiobook they could only listen to at the gym. Milkman chose books like The Hunger Games and Twilight that she knew had story lines likely to keep people wanting more. The results were amazing: “Participants who had access to the audiobooks only at the gym made 51 percent more gym visits than those in the control group.” Milkman’s technique is called “temptation bundling” and can be used whenever we want to use the rewards from one behavior to incentivize another.
Every time I go to the gym or take a long walk, I get to listen to articles read to me through the Pocket app’s text-to-speech capabilities. The built-in reading feature is astounding,
Make a rule. Promise yourself you’ll save interesting content for later by using an app like Pocket.
Online articles are full of potentially distracting external triggers. Open tabs can pull us off course and tend to suck us down a time-wasting content vortex.
Surprise! You can multitask. Use multichannel multitasking like listening to articles while working out or taking walking meetings.
Chapter 21: Hack Back Feeds
Feeds, like the ones we scroll through on social media, are designed to keep you engaged. Feeds are full of external triggers that can drive us to distraction.
A free web browser extension called News Feed Eradicator for Facebook does exactly what it says; it eliminates the source of countless alluring external triggers and replaces them with an inspirational quote.
If that tool doesn’t strike your fancy, another free technology called Todobook replaces the Facebook News Feed with the user’s to-do list. Instead of scrolling the feed, we see tasks that we planned to do for the day, and only when we’ve completed our to-do list does the News Feed unlock.
Personally, I still use Facebook, but now I use it the way I want instead of the way Facebook intended. When I want to see updates from a certain friend or participate in the discussion happening in a particular Facebook group, I go straight to the page I want instead of having to wrestle myself away from the News Feed.
By avoiding the feed, I’m much more likely to use social media mindfully while still allowing time to connect with others proactively.
PART 4: PREVENT DISTRACTION WITH PACTS
Chapter 22: The Power of Precommitments
we must learn a powerful technique called a “precommitment,” which involves removing a future choice in order to overcome our impulsivity.
A “Ulysses pact” is defined as “a freely made decision that is designed and intended to bind oneself in the future,”
Being indistractable does not only require keeping distraction out. It also necessitates reining ourselves in.
Precommitments should only be used after the other three indistractable strategies have already been applied. Don’t skip the first three steps.
Precommitments can reduce the likelihood of distraction. They help us stick with decisions we’ve made in advance.
Chapter 23: Prevent Distraction with Effort Pacts
An effort pact prevents distraction by making unwanted behaviors more difficult to do.
In previous generations, social pressure helped us stay on task—before the invention of the personal computer, procrastinating at our desks was obvious to the entire office.
Scheduling time with a friend for focused work proved to be an effective way to commit to doing what mattered most.
When Taylor went away to speak at a conference for a week, I needed to re-create the experience of making an effort pact with another person. Thankfully, I found Focusmate.
In the age of the personal computer, social pressure to stay on task has largely disappeared. No one can see what you’re working on, so it’s easier to slack off. Working next to a colleague or friend for a set period of time can be a highly effective effort pact.
You can use tech to stay off tech. Apps like SelfControl, Forest, and Focusmate can help you make effort pacts.
Chapter 24: Prevent Distraction with Price Pacts
A price pact is a type of precommitment that involves putting money on the line to encourage us to do what we say we will. Stick to your intended behavior, and you keep the cash; but get distracted, and you forfeit the funds. It sounds harsh, but the results are stunning.
“people are typically more motivated to avoid losses than to seek gains.” Losing hurts more than winning feels good. This irrational tendency, known as “loss aversion,” is a cornerstone of behavioral economics.
After making time in my timeboxed schedule, I taped a crisp hundred-dollar bill to the calendar on my wall, next to the date of my upcoming workout. Then I bought a ninety-nine-cent lighter and placed it nearby. Every day, I had a choice to make: I would either burn the calories by exercising or burn the hundred-dollar bill. Unless I was certifiably sick, those were the only two options I allowed myself.
I know what you’re thinking: “That’s too extreme! You can’t burn money like that!” That’s exactly my point. I’ve used this “burn or burn” technique for over three years and have gained twelve pounds of muscle, without ever burning the hundred dollars.
My “burn or burn” calendar is one of the first things I see in the morning. It reminds me that I need to either burn calories or burn the hundred-dollar bill.
But a price pact need not be limited to smoking cessation, weight loss, or fitness goals; in fact, I found it helpful for achieving my professional ambitions as well.
I asked my friend Mark to be my accountability partner in my price pact; if I didn’t finish a first draft of this book by a set date, I had to pay him $10,000.
A price pact is effective because it moves the pain of losing to the present moment, as opposed to a far-off future.
To experience the best results with price pacts, we need to be aware of and plan for their pitfalls:
PITFALL 1: PRICE PACTS AREN’T GOOD AT CHANGING BEHAVIORS WITH EXTERNAL TRIGGERS YOU CAN’T ESCAPE
This kind of precommitment is not recommended when you can’t remove the external trigger associated with the behavior. For example, nail biting is a devilishly hard habit to break because biters are constantly tempted whenever they become aware of their hands. Such body-focused repetitive behaviors are not good candidates for price pacts.
Price pacts only work when you can tune out or turn off the external triggers.
PITFALL 2: PRICE PACTS SHOULD ONLY BE USED FOR SHORT TASKS
If we are bound by a pact for too long, we begin to associate it with punishment, which can spawn counterproductive effects, such as resentment of the task or goal.
PITFALL 3: ENTERING A PRICE PACT IS SCARY
Expect some trepidation when entering into a price pact, but do it anyway.
PITFALL 4: PRICE PACTS AREN’T FOR PEOPLE WHO BEAT THEMSELVES UP
It’s critical to know how to bounce back from failure—as we learned in chapter eight, responding to setbacks with self-compassion instead of self-criticism is the way to get back on track. While trying a price pact, make sure you are able to be kind to yourself and understand that you can always adjust the program to give it another go.
REMEMBER THIS
A price pact adds a cost to getting distracted. It has been shown to be a highly effective motivator.
Price pacts are most effective when you can remove the external triggers that lead to distraction.
Price pacts work best when the distraction is temporary.
Price pacts can be difficult to start. We fear making a price pact because we know we’ll have to actually do the thing we’re scared to do.
Learn self-compassion before making a price pact.
Chapter 25: Prevent Distraction with Identity Pacts
They found that those shown the survey about being a “voter” were much more likely to vote than those who were asked how likely they were “to vote.”
Identity is another cognitive shortcut that helps our brains make otherwise difficult choices in advance, thereby streamlining decision-making.
Our perception of who we are changes what we do.
To leverage the power of identity to prevent distraction, we can enter into what I call an “identity pact,” which is a precommitment to a self-image that helps us pursue what we really want.
By aligning our behaviors to our identity, we make choices based on who we believe we are.
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
Telling others about your new identity is a great way to solidify your pact.
Their results consistently show that teaching others provides more motivation for the teacher to change their own behavior than if the teacher learned from an expert.
According to several recent studies, preaching to others can have a great impact on the motivation and adherence of the teacher.
Another way to reinforce our identity is through rituals. Let’s look again at religion. Many religious practices aren’t easy, at least not for outsiders.
Professor Gino believes rituals “may seem like a waste of time. Yet, as our research suggests, they are quite powerful.” She continues, “Even when they are not embedded in years of tradition, simple rituals can help us build personal discipline and self-control.”
New research suggests that secular rituals, in the workplace and in everyday life, can have a powerful effect.
I use my phone’s Do Not Disturb function to send an auto-reply message stating that I’m indistractable to anyone who might contact me during my focused time. I even printed T-shirts with Indistractable across the chest to reinforce my identity whenever I look in the mirror or someone asks me about my shirt
Though conventional wisdom says our beliefs shape our behaviors, the opposite is also true.
Though we often assume our identity is fixed, our self-image is, in fact, flexible and is nothing more than a construct in our minds. It’s a habit of thought, and, as we’ve learned, habits can be changed for the better.
REMEMBER THIS
Identity greatly influences our behavior. People tend to align their actions with how they see themselves.
An identity pact is a precommitment to a self-image. You can prevent distraction by acting in line with your identity.
Become a noun. By assigning yourself a moniker, you increase the likelihood of following through with behaviors consistent with what you call yourself. Call yourself “indistractable.”
Share with others. Teaching others solidifies your commitment, even if you’re still struggling. A great way to be indistractable is to tell friends about what you learned in this book and the changes you’re making in your life.
Adopt rituals. Repeating mantras, keeping a timeboxed schedule, or performing other routines reinforces your identity and influences your future actions.
PART 5: HOW TO MAKE YOUR WORKPLACE INDISTRACTABLE
Chapter 26: Distraction Is a Sign of Dysfunction
a 2006 meta-analysis by Stephen Stansfeld and Bridget Candy at University College London found that a certain kind of work environment can actually cause clinical depression.
The first condition involved what the researchers called high “job strain.” This factor was found in environments where employees were expected to meet high expectations yet lacked the ability to control the outcomes. Stansfeld added that this strain can be felt in white-collar as well as blue-collar jobs, and likened the feeling to working on a factory production line without a way to adjust the production pace, even when things go wrong.
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.
Leslie Perlow, a consultant turned professor at Harvard Business School, led an extensive four-year study that she documented in her book Sleeping with Your Smartphone.
Answering emails during your child’s soccer game trains colleagues to expect quick responses during times that were previously off-limits; as a result, requests from the office mutate personal or family time into work time.
REMEMBER THIS
Jobs where employees encounter high expectations and low control have been shown to lead to symptoms of depression.
Depression-like symptoms are painful. When people feel bad, they use distractions to avoid their pain and regain a sense of control.
Tech overuse at work is a symptom of a dysfunctional company culture.
More tech use makes the underlying problems worse, perpetuating a “cycle of responsiveness.”
Chapter 27: Fixing Distraction Is a Test of Company Culture
A common workplace dilemma that was often dismissed as “the way things had to be” could be solved if people had a safe space to talk about the issue, without fear of being labeled as “lazy” for wanting to turn off their phones and computers for a few hours.
What had started as a discussion about disconnecting became a forum for open dialogue.
Companies consistently confuse the disease of bad culture with symptoms like tech overuse and high employee turnover.
Google recently set out to understand the drivers of employee retention and the quality of team outcomes. The search giantannounced the results of a two-year study to understand, once and for all, the answer to the question “What makes a Google team effective?”
As Julia Rozovsky, a researcher on the project, writes: “Take one Rhodes Scholar, two extroverts, one engineer who rocks at AngularJS, and a PhD. Voila. Dream team assembled, right? We were dead wrong. Who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions.”
The researchers found five key dynamics that set successful teams apart. The first four were dependability, structure and clarity, meaning of work, and impact of work. However, the fifth dynamic was without doubt the most important and actually underpinned the other four. It was something called psychological safety.
In her TEDx talk, Edmondson defines psychological safety as “a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.”
Rozovsky explains, 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.
the safer team members feel with one another, the more likely they are to admit mistakes, to partner, and to take on new roles.
Rozovsky continues, Turns out, we’re all reluctant to engage in behaviors that could negatively influence how others perceive our competence, awareness, and positivity. Although this kind of self-protection is a natural strategy in the workplace, it is detrimental to effective teamwork. On the flip side, the safer team members feel with one another, the more likely they are to admit mistakes, to partner, and to take on new roles.
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 in her talk:
Step 1: “Frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem.”
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.”
REMEMBER THIS
Don’t suffer in silence. A workplace where people can’t talk about technology overuse is also one where people keep other important issues (and insights) to themselves.
Knowing that your voice matters is essential. Teams that foster psychological safety and facilitate regular open discussions about concerns not only have fewer problems with distraction but also have happier employees and customers.
Chapter 28: The Indistractable Workplace
If there’s one technology that embodies the unreasonable demands of the always-on work culture that pervades so many companies today, it’s Slack. The group-chat app can make users feel tethered to their devices, often at the expense of doing more important tasks.
The platform’s employees, of course, use Slack—they use it a lot. And if distraction is caused by technology, then they should surely suffer the consequences. Surprisingly, according to media reports and Slack employees I spoke with, the company doesn’t have that problem.
If you were to walk around Slack’s company headquarters in San Francisco, you’d notice a peculiar slogan on the hallway walls. White letters on a bright pink background blare, “Work hard and go home.”
By 6:30 pm, “Slack’s offices have pretty much cleared out.” And according to the article, “That’s how [Slack CEO] Butterfield wants it.”
Slack’s corporate culture is an example of a work environment that hasn’t succumbed to the maddening cycle of responsiveness endemic to so many organizations today.
In an interview with OpenView Labs, Bill Macaitis, who served as Slack’s chief revenue officer and chief marketing officer, states, “You need to have uninterrupted work time . . . This is why—whether I’m dealing with Slack or email—I always block off time to go in and check messages and then return to uninterrupted work.”
Shevat echoes Macaitis’s sentiment. At Slack, he said, “It’s okay to be offline.” He is religious about giving his coworkers his complete attention when meeting in person. “When I give someone my time, I’m focused 100 percent and never open a phone during a meeting. That is super important for me.”
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.
At Slack, there’s a channel for everything, he says. “We have a channel for people who want to get lunch together, a channel for sharing pet photos, even a Star Wars channel.”
There is a dedicated channel called #slack-culture and another called #exec-ama where executives invite employees to “ask me anything.” Shevat says, “People will post all sorts of suggestions and are encouraged to do so.”
REMEMBER THIS
Indistractable organizations, like Slack and BCG, foster psychological safety, provide a place for open discussions about concerns, and, most important, have leaders who exemplify the importance of doing focused work.
PART 6: HOW TO RAISE INDISTRACTABLE CHILDREN (AND WHY WE ALL NEED PSYCHOLOGICAL NUTRIENTS)
Chapter 29: Avoid Convenient Excuses
simple answers to complex questions are often wrong,
Interestingly, though the so-called sugar high is a myth for kids, it does have a real effect on parents.
A study found that mothers, when told that their sons were given sugar, rated their child’s behavior as more hyperactive—despite that child having been given a placebo. In fact, videotapes of the mothers’ interactions with their sons revealed that they were more likely to trail their children and criticize them when they believed they were “high” on sugar—again, despite the fact that their sons hadn’t eaten any.
Everyone knows that teenagers act horribly toward their parents because their raging hormones and underdeveloped brains make them act that way. Wrong. Studies have found that teenagers in many societies, particularly pre-industrialized ones, don’t act especially rebelliously and, conversely, spend “almost all their time with adults.”
In an article titled “The Myth of the Teen Brain,” Robert Epstein writes, “Many historians note that through most of recorded human history, the teen years were a relatively peaceful time of transition to adulthood.”
technological leaps are often followed by moral panics.
Many experts believe the discussion regarding whether tech is harmful is more nuanced than alarmists let on.
One of many studies not cherry-picked was conducted by Christopher Ferguson and published in Psychiatric Quarterly. It found only a negligible relationship between screen time and depression.
A closer read of the studies linking screen time with depression finds correlation only with extreme amounts of time spent online. Teenage girls who spent over five hours per day online tended to have more depressive or suicidal thoughts, but common sense would have us ask whether the kids who have a propensity to spend excessive amounts of time online might also have other problems in their lives. Perhaps five hours a day on any form of media is a symptom of a larger problem.
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.
If we are going to help our kids take responsibility for their choices, we need to stop making convenient excuses for them—and for ourselves.
REMEMBER THIS
Stop deflecting blame. When kids don’t act the way parents want, it’s natural to look for answers that help parents divert responsibility.
Techno-panics are nothing new. From the book, to the radio, to video games, the history of parenting is strewn with moral panic over things supposedly making kids act in strange ways.
Tech isn’t evil. Used in the right way and in the right amounts, kids’ tech use can be beneficial, while too much (or too little) can have slightly harmful effects.
Teach kids to be indistractable. Teaching children how to manage distraction will benefit them throughout their lives.
Chapter 30: Understand Their Internal Triggers
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. When kids aren’t getting the psychological nutrients they need, self-determination theory explains why they might overdo unhealthy behaviors, such as spending too much time in front of screens.
Without sufficient amounts of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, kids turn to distractions for psychological nourishment.
LESSON 1: KIDS NEED AUTONOMY—VOLITION AND FREEDOM OF CONTROL OVER THEIR CHOICES
“showed more sustained attention and learning than their counterparts from Mayan families with extensive involvement in Western schooling.” In other words, less schooling meant more focus. How could that be? Psychologist Suzanne Gaskins has studied Mayan villages for decades and told NPR that Mayan parents give their kids a tremendous amount of freedom.
Mayan parents “feel very strongly that every child knows best what they want and that goals can be achieved only when a child wants it.”
According to Rogoff, “It may be the case that children give up control of their attention when it’s always managed by an adult.” In other words, kids can become conditioned to lose control of their attention and become highly distractible as a result.
“Whenever children enter middle school, whenever they start leaving home-based classrooms and go into the more police-state style of schools, where bells are ringing, detentions are happening, punishment is occurring, they’re learning right then that this is not an intrinsically motivating environment,”
“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.”
“We’re doing a lot of controlling them in their school environments and it’s no surprise that they should then want to turn to an environment where they can feel a lot of agency and a lot of autonomy in what they’re doing,” Ryan says. “We think of [tech use] as kind of an evil in the world, but it’s an evil we have created a gravitational pull around by the alternatives we’ve set up.”
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.
“What we’ve found is that parents who address internet use or screen time with kids in an autonomy-supported way have kids who are more self-regulated with respect to it, so less likely to use screen time for excessive hours,” he says.
LESSON 2: CHILDREN STRIVE FOR COMPETENCE—MASTERY, PROGRESSION, ACHIEVEMENT, AND GROWTH
Ryan warns, “We’re giving messages of ‘you’re not competent at what you’re doing at school,’ to so many kids.” He points to the rise of standardized testing as part of the problem.
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 by selling ready-made solutions for the “psychological nutrients” kids lack.
LESSON 3: THEY SEEK RELATEDNESS—FEELING IMPORTANT TO OTHERS AND THAT OTHERS ARE IMPORTANT TO THEM
Spending time with peers has always been a formative part of growing up. For kids, much of the opportunity to develop social skills centers around chances to play with others.
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,” according to a survey of parents in an Atlantic article. These concerns were mentioned even though kids today are statistically the safest generation in American history.
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.”
Since about 1955 . . . children’s free play has been continually declining, at least partly because adults have exerted ever-increasing control over children’s activities . . . Somehow, 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.
We call this the ‘need density hypothesis,’” says Ryan. “The more you’re not getting needs satisfied in life, reciprocally, the more you’re going to get them satisfied in virtual realities.”
Ryan isn’t against setting limits on tech use but thinks such limits should be set with the child, and not arbitrarily enforced because you think you know best. “Part of what you want your kid to get from that is not just less screen time, but an understanding of why,” he says. The more you talk with your kids about the costs of too much tech use and the more you make decisions with them, as opposed to for them, the more willing they will be to listen to your guidance.
Just as we saw in the previous section how good bosses model disconnecting from distraction, parents should model how to be indistractable.
Easing up on structured academic or athletic activities and giving them more time for free play may help them find the connections they otherwise look for online.
Knowing what’s really driving their overuse of technology is the first step to helping kids build resilience instead of escaping discomfort through distraction. Once our kids feel understood, they can begin planning how best to spend their time.
REMEMBER THIS
Internal triggers drive behavior. To understand how to help kids manage distraction, we need to start by understanding the source of the problem.
Our kids need psychological nutrients. According to a widely accepted theory of human motivation, all people need three things to thrive: a sense of autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
Distractions satisfy deficiencies. When our kids’ psychological needs are not met in the real world, they go looking for satisfaction—often in virtual environments.
Kids need alternatives. Parents and guardians can take steps to help kids find balance between their online and offline worlds by providing more offline opportunities to find autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
The four-part Indistractable Model is valuable for kids as well. Teach them methods for handling distraction, and, most important, model being indistractable yourself.
Chapter 31: Make Time for Traction Together
Getz got her first phone (a corded one for her room) as a teenager. The moment she got it, she closed the door and spent the entire weekend locked in her room, talking with friends instead of spending time with her family. When she got home from school the next Monday, her door had been taken off the hinges. “It’s not the phone’s fault you’re behaving like an a-hole,” her father chided her. “You closed the door and you closed all of us out.”
While Getz doesn’t recommend her father’s aggressive tactics or tone, his focus on the effect her behavior had on others rather than the phone itself proved instructive. “Make [the conversation] about how you’re treating and interacting with the people around you,” she advises, as opposed to blaming the tool.
The girls’ tech overuse came to a head when Getz returned from a run to find her kids glued to their screens. Neither was ready to leave for their family outing, as had been agreed upon. Rather than losing her cool and punitively announcing strict house rules around the kids’ use of devices, Getz decided it was time for a family talk.
Getz acknowledges that admitting you don’t have all the answers is a great way to involve the kids in finding new solutions.
while my wife and I don’t enforce a strict bedtime for our daughter, we made it a point to expose her to research findings showing the importance of ample sleep during adolescent years. After she realized that sleep was important to her well-being, it didn’t take much for her to conclude that screen time after 9 pm on a school night was a bad idea—a distraction from her value of staying healthy.
When it comes to the “work” domain in kids’ lives, for the typical American child, work is synonymous with school-related responsibilities and household chores.
Without a clear plan, many kids are left to make impulsive decisions that often involve digital distraction.
She bemoaned the mind-altering influence of her kids’ obsession with the latest techno-villain: the online game Fortnite. “They can’t stop!” she told me.
My advice involved a few unorthodox ideas. First, I advised her to have a conversation with her sons and to listen to them without judgment. Potential questions to ask included the following: Is keeping up with their schoolwork consistent with their values? Do they know why they are asked to do their homework? What are the consequences of not doing their assignments? Are they OK with those consequences, both short term (getting a bad grade) and long term (settling for a low-skilled job)?
“If the only reason they study is to get you off their backs, what will they do when they get to college or start a job and you’re not around? Maybe they need to know what failure feels like sooner rather than later.” I advised her that teenagers are generally old enough to make decisions about how they spend their time. If that means flunking a test, then so be it. Coercion may be a band-aid solution, but it is certainly not a remedy.
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.
I advised her to make sure her kids’ days include plenty of time for play, both with their friends and with their parents. Her boys were using Fortnite to have fun with their buddies, and would continue to play online without an offline alternative.
Conscious parents can bring back playtime for kids of all ages by deliberately making time for it in their weekly schedules and seeking out other parents who understand the importance of unstructured play and schedule regular get-togethers to let the kids hang out, just as you would make time for a jog in the park or a jam session in the garage.
unstructured play is arguably their most important extracurricular activity.
Studies demonstrate that children who eat regularly with their families show lower rates of drug use, depression, school problems, and eating disorders.
it’s better to set aside an evening, even if only once a week, for a device-free family meal. As our kids develop, we can invite them to shape these family meal experiences by suggesting menu themes like “Finger-Food Fridays,” cooking together, or contributing conversation topics.
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.
REMEMBER THIS
Teach traction. With so many potential distractions in kids’ lives, teaching them how to make time for traction is critical.
Just as with our own timeboxed schedules, kids can learn how to make time for what’s important to them. If they don’t learn to make their own plans in advance, kids will turn to distractions.
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.
Chapter 32: Help Them with External Triggers
Many parents don’t consider whether their children are ready for a device with potentially damaging consequences and give in to the protest that “everyone in my class has a smartphone and an Instagram account.”
As parents, we often forget that a kid wanting something “really, really badly” is not a good enough reason.
Instead of giving our kids a fully functional pinging and dinging smartphone, it’s better to start with a feature phone that only makes calls and sends text messages.
If location tracking is a priority, a GPS-enabled wristwatch like the GizmoWatch keeps track of kids through an app on parents’ phones but only allows incoming and outgoing calls to and from select numbers.
As kids get older, a good test of whether they are ready for a particular device is their ability to understand and use the built-in settings for turning off external triggers.
Though parents tend to fixate on the latest technology craze, we often forget about older technologies, which can be just as much of a problem. There’s little justification for allowing kids to have a television, laptop, or any other potentially distracting external trigger in their rooms;
Kids also need plenty of sleep, and anything that flickers, beeps, or buzzes during the night is a distraction.
If they are spending time on homework according to their timeboxed schedules, we must, of course, minimize distraction. But the same rule applies to scheduled time with their friends or playing video games. If they’ve made their plans in advance and with intent, it’s your job to honor that plan and leave them alone.
REMEMBER THIS
Teach your children to swim before they dive in. Like swimming in a pool, children should not be allowed to partake in certain risky behaviors before they are ready.
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.
Kids need sleep. There is little justification for having a television or other potential distractions in a kid’s room overnight. Make sure nothing gets in the way of them getting good rest.
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.
Chapter 33: Teach Them to Make Their Own Pacts
It was her job to know when to stop because she couldn’t rely upon the app makers or her parents to tell her when she’d had enough.
“How do you plan to make sure you don’t watch for more than forty-five minutes per day?” I asked. Not wanting to lose the negotiation that she clearly felt she was winning, she proposed using a kitchen timer she could set herself. “Sounds good,” I agreed. “But if Mommy and Daddy notice you’re not able to keep the promise you made to yourself and to us, we’ll have to revisit this discussion,” I said, and she agreed.
When parents impose limits without their kids’ input, they are setting them up to be resentful and incentivizing them to cheat the system.
It’s only when kids can monitor their own behavior that they learn the skills they need to be indistractable—even when their parents aren’t around.
Discussions and, at times, respectful disagreements are a sign of a healthy family.
REMEMBER THIS
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.
PART 7: HOW TO HAVE INDISTRACTABLE RELATIONSHIPS
Chapter 34: Spread Social Antibodies Among Friends
I remember my parents keeping ashtrays around the house in my childhood, despite being nonsmokers. At the time, people smoked indoors, around children, at the office—wherever they pleased.
Today, however, things are very different. I’ve never owned an ashtray. No one has ever asked to smoke in my home; they already know the answer. It scares me to imagine the look on my wife’s face if someone were to light up on our living room couch—that person wouldn’t be in our house or our circle of friends for long.
How did the norms around smoking change so dramatically in the course of just one generation? According to Graham’s theory, people adopted social antibodies to protect themselves, similar to the way our bodies fight back against bacteria and viruses that can harm us.
The remedy for distraction in social situations involves the development of new norms that make it taboo to check one’s phone when in the company of others.
To help keep things cordial, a simple and effective approach is to ask a direct question that can snap the offender out of the phone zone by giving him two simple options: (1) excuse himself to attend to the crisis happening on his device or (2) kindly put away his phone. The question goes like this: “I see you’re on your phone. Is everything OK?”
Remember to be sincere—after all, there might really be an emergency. But more often than not, he’ll mutter a little excuse, tuck his phone back into his pocket, and start enjoying the night again. Victory is yours! You’ve succeeded in tactfully spreading the social antibody against “phubbing,” a word coined by the ad agency McCann for the Macquarie Dictionary.
Phubbing, a portmanteau of phone and snubbing, means “to ignore (a person or one’s surroundings) when in a social situation by busying oneself with a phone or other mobile device.” The dictionary assembled experts to create the word in order to give people a way to call out the problem.
Modern technologies like smartphones, tablets, and laptops aren’t the only sources of distraction in social situations.
Many restaurants have wall-to-wall television sets, each with a different channel flashing headline news or a sports game that can easily disrupt conversations. Because of our acceptance of having televisions playing in the background in social settings, they can be equally, if not more, pernicious at distracting our attention away from the people we’re with.
Such an innocent interruption has the ability to derail an important and sensitive conversation—the kind that solidifies close friendships. The next time we had dinner together, we made sure to put everything the kids would need, including food and drinks, in another room. The kids received clear instructions not to interrupt the adults unless someone was bleeding.
REMEMBER THIS
Distraction in social situations can keep us from being fully present with important people in our lives. Interruptions degrade our ability to form close social bonds.
Block the spread of unhealthy behaviors. “Social antibodies” are ways groups protect themselves from harmful behaviors by making them taboo.
Develop new social norms. We can tackle distraction among friends the same way we beat social smoking, by making it unacceptable to use devices in social situations. Prepare a few tactful phrases—like asking, “Is everything OK?”—to discourage phone usage among friends.
Chapter 35: Be an Indistractable Lover
Slipping under the covers, we exchanged glances and knew it was time to do what comes naturally for a couple in bed—she began to fondle her cell phone, while I tenderly stroked the screen of my iPad. Ooh, it felt so good.
We were having a love affair with our gadgets. Apparently, we weren’t the only ones substituting Facebook for foreplay. According to one survey, “Almost a third of Americans would rather give up sex for a year than part with their mobile phone for that long.
We decided to move our phones from our bedroom to the living room, and with the external triggers gone, we regained a bit more control over our techno-infidelity.
After a few late nights on our machines, we sheepishly admitted that we had failed. Embarrassed but determined to understand where we’d gone wrong, we realized we had skipped a critical step. We hadn’t learned to deal with the discomfort that had drawn us back in. With self-compassion, this time, we decided to start by finding ways to manage the internal triggers driving our unwanted behaviors
We implemented a ten-minute rule and promised that if we really wanted to use a device in the evening, we would wait ten minutes before doing so. The rule allowed us time to “surf the urge” and insert a pause to interrupt the otherwise mindless habit.
We also connected our internet router and monitors to seven-dollar timer outlets purchased at a local hardware store and set them to turn off at 10 pm each night. Using this effort pact meant that in order to “cheat” we would have to uncomfortably contort behind our desks and flip the override switch
Distractions can take a toll on even our most intimate relationships; the cost of being able to connect with anyone in the world is that we might not be fully present with the person physically next to us.
“Being indistractable means striving to do what you say you will do.” To strive means “to struggle or fight vigorously.” It does not mean being perfect or never failing.
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.
REMEMBER THIS
Distraction can be an impediment in our most intimate relationships. Instant digital connectivity can come at the expense of being fully present with those beside us.
Indistractable partners reclaim time for togetherness. Following the four steps to becoming indistractable can ensure you make time for your partner.
Disclaimer: I don't always agree with the content of the book, the purpose of sharing my highlights is to help you decide whether to buy the book or not.
