Indistractable Book Summary - Indistractable Book explained in key points

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Indistractable summary

Name: Indistractable
Rating: 4.4 (945 reviews)
Author: Nir Eyal

Nir Eyal

How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life

4.4 (945 ratings)

23 mins

Table of Contents

Indistractable
summarized in 8 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 8

What’s in it for me? A guide to defeating distraction.

The ability to remain focused is a key to professional and personal success. If you are distracted, you’re hardly likely to finish that future best-seller you’ve been working on, get your brilliant business plan on paper or simply savor the time spent with your loved ones.

The world is full of distraction. Employers impose demands on us even when we are not in the office, and as technology makes ever greater inroads into our personal lives, our attention is often redirected away from what we really want. So how on earth are you supposed to stay productive and sane?

Nir Eyal, the bestselling author of Hooked, a study of habit-forming products like Facebook and Twitter, has found the antidote to distraction. Eyal calls it becoming “indistractable.” In these blinks, we’ll explore how you can master this “skill of the century,” learn to tune out distraction and focus your attention on the things that really matter.

Along the way, you’ll find out

why wasting time on digital devices is a symptom rather than the cause of distraction;
what to do about dysfunctional office cultures that prevent you from getting on with your work; and
how to recognize and overcome both internal and external sources of distraction.

Distraction starts from within.

Why are we prone to distraction? One common answer is technology. If you’ve ever tried to give up your digital devices and gadgets, you’ll know that not using them doesn’t necessarily stop you from procrastinating. Whether it’s doodling on a piece of paper or counting the books on your shelf, brains are masters at inventing forms of distraction.

To understand what is going on when we are distracted, we need to talk about triggers – stimuli that spur us into action or tell us to do something. These come in two forms. External triggers come from the outside world – think pop-up notifications on your laptop. Internal triggers, like feeling bored or stressed, come from within.

Triggers can either lead to traction or distraction. The former pulls us forward, triggering us to pursue our goals and ambitions. Distraction does the opposite; it drags us away from those goals.

That’s why technology alone can’t be blamed for distraction. In reality, distraction always has internal sources. Distraction is about escaping something uncomfortable such as a rumbling stomach or marital problems or deep dissatisfaction with your career. Tech is only a proximate cause. We blame it for our inability to get things done and fail to look at the underlying problem.

The bad news is that we are evolutionarily hardwired for discomfort. Our ancestors kept learning, growing and, ultimately, surviving because they weren’t content with their lot. Today, thousands of years later, that heritage shows through in our tendency to see things in a negative light, ruminate on painful experiences and quickly grow bored of new situations.

This makes us vulnerable to distraction. But here’s the good news: we don’t have to be slaves to our negative feelings – we can also harness them. Let’s find out how.

Master your internal triggers by reassessing them.

Picture the scene. You are sitting at your desk when you suddenly feel that familiar twinge of boredom. Before you know it, you’re ten minutes into another Instagram binge or email purge. It happens to most of us every day. Don’t worry – there are ways to beat these internal triggers.

Start by changing the way you think about triggers. How? One way is to record them. Next time you feel yourself succumbing to distraction, grab a pen and some paper and write down what you are feeling and what triggered it. Maybe it was a sudden wave of anxiety; maybe it was that your boss made you angry. Note down when it occurred and how you felt once you noticed the trigger.

Safeguard time each week for yourself, your relationships and your work.

If you don’t know what you’re striving toward, it’s impossible to tell what distraction is actually preventing you from achieving. That is why it’s so important to have a plan.

The key to effective planning is timeboxing, or setting aside specific “slots” in your weekly schedule for the completion of particular tasks.

Safeguard your focus by cutting back office distractions and emails.

So far we have looked at beating internal triggers to get the most traction in our daily lives. In this blink, we will zoom out and show you how to manage the multitude of external triggers in the world around you. Like coders who hack software, you’ll break the code and rewrite it to your own advantage.

This can be surprisingly simple. Take an example from the aviation industry. In the 1980s, countries began creating new regulations that explicitly forbade cabin crews and other staff from distracting pilots during take-off and landing, the most dangerous parts of a flight.

Meetings, chats, newsfeeds and clunky homescreens can all be hacked back.

Emails aren’t the only distraction in the workplace – pointless meetings that lead nowhere often devour even more of your precious time. Luckily, there’s an easy way of fixing this common office issue.

The secret is organization. All it takes is a policy stating meetings can only go ahead once the person calling the gathering has circulated a detailed agenda and a brief digest showing what steps they have taken to solve the problem. This raises the cost of preparation and reduces the likelihood of colleagues scheduling unnecessary sit-downs.

Use pacts to prevent distraction.

By now you are ready to keep vexing distractions at bay. But this isn’t a battle you can win in a day. If you want to stay indistractable, you’ll be fighting the good fight every day. That is not as daunting as it might sound – in fact, there are plenty of tricks to help you do just that.

Take effort pacts. This is a strategy to make unwanted behavior more difficult. Apps can actually help you here. SelfControl, for example, blocks your access to distracting websites and allows you to create “time out” periods for checking your emails.

Distraction at work is a symptom of dysfunctional work culture.

Some causes of distraction are personal; others are structural. In this blink, we’ll take a look at the latter. It’s time to talk about dysfunctional work cultures.

Here’s the problem in a nutshell: if your company is ineffectively organized and run, your attempts to become indistractable will be hampered at every turn. One of the most common symptoms of workplace dysfunctionality is the way work increasingly eats into employees’ “free time.”

To raise indistractable kids, we need to understand the root causes of why they get distracted.

What’s up with kids these days? They spend all their time glued to a screen rather than enjoying the great outdoors with their friends like we used to, right?

Wrong. Let’s look at it from a different, and less idealized, point of view and ask ourselves why they’re so dependent on digital devices.

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What is Indistractable about?

Indistractable (2019) addresses one of modern life’s most common problems – distraction, often blamed on contemporary technology. Nir Eyal, however, claims that while smartphones and apps might get in the way of more meaningful work, they are not the root cause of the issue. So what is? In these blinks, Eyal provides an actionable four-part framework that breaks down how distraction really works and what you can do to overcome it.

Who should read Indistractable?

Anyone who has ever given-in to procrastination and distraction at one time or another
Self-starters set on cultivating better habits
Parents worried about their kids’ relationship with tech

About the Author

Nir Eyal is a writer, consultant and lecturer whose work focuses on the psychology behind habit-forming technology. He is the author of the best-selling book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products (2014). Eyal is also an active angel investor and has taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Categories with Indistractable

Technology & the Future Mindfulness & Happiness

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