The key ideas

Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life

Nir Eyal, 2019

You pick up your phone for a second, and then you can't remember why. Nir Eyal, who used to teach companies how to build habit-forming products, looks into why we get distracted and arrives at a surprising answer: most of the time the problem isn't the phone, it's the feeling we're running from. The book gives you four steps to take back your attention and do what you promise yourself and others.

Who it is for

For anyone who sits down to do something important and a minute later finds themselves on their phone. And for everyone who is tired of blaming gadgets and wants to understand what really pulls their attention away.

Being indistractable means striving to do what you say you will do.

The question a father missed the answer to

Nir Eyal was spending time with his young daughter. They had an activity book for dads and daughters, and one of the questions read: “If you could have any superpower, what would it be?” Eyal asked the question, and at that very second his phone buzzed in his pocket. A work email. While his daughter was telling him about her dream, he was looking at the screen. When he looked up, she had left the room.

The irony is that Eyal knew more about tech habits than most people. His previous book, Hooked, explained to companies how to build products people keep coming back to on their own. He tried cutting technology out of his life, but every time he found a new way to get distracted. So he asked himself a different question: what if the phone isn't the problem at all?

The answer took a whole book and came together as four steps. Step one: master internal triggers, the feelings that push us toward distraction. Step two: make time in your calendar for what matters. Step three: hack back the external cues, like notifications. Step four: make pacts with yourself that protect you from temptation in advance.

Ahead, you'll find out why a Yale lecturer was climbing stairs at two in the morning, what smoking flight attendants are really waiting for, and how mowing the lawn can become a game. And on the last page, you'll learn which superpower Eyal's daughter chose.

Email can be a distraction too

Picture this: Anna sits down in the morning to write an important report. First she decides to quickly clear her inbox, because that's work too. An hour later the report hasn't been started, and Anna feels the morning was well spent.

Eyal suggests looking not at what we're doing, but at where it's taking us. For any action that moves us toward what we really want, Eyal has a word: traction. An action that pulls us away from it, he calls distraction. That's why the same activity can be either one. A TV show on an evening you set aside for rest is traction. Email instead of the report is distraction, even though it looks like work.

The conclusion is simple: you can't call something a distraction unless you know what it's distracting you from. First you need a plan, and only then can you judge.

For Eyal, being indistractable doesn't mean never getting distracted. It means keeping the promises you make to yourself and to others. And two kinds of cues nudge us toward traction or distraction. External ones come from outside: a ringtone, a notification, a colleague at your desk. Internal ones come from within us.

Read in Livria

About the author

Nir Eyal is a writer and behavioral researcher, the author of Hooked, a book about how products shape our habits. He wrote Indistractable together with Julie Li.

All books by this author: Nir Eyal

Terms from the book

  • Wilson
  • Slack
  • Traction
  • Ryan
  • Odysseus
  • Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
  • Rumination
  • Boston Consulting Group
  • Seneca
  • Self-compassion
  • Ego depletion
  • Trigger
  • psychological safety
  • Negativity bias
  • Indistractable: The book's central idea: a person who strives to do what they promised themselves and others, not someone who never gets distracted.
  • Chance: Zoe Chance, a lecturer at the Yale School of Management who studies persuasion and influence. Eyal tells the story of her pedometer.
  • Pedometer: A device that counts your steps. Smart pedometers also award points and set goals.
  • Hedonic adaptation: The tendency to return quickly to our usual level of satisfaction after any joy or stroke of luck.
  • El Al: Israel's national airline.
  • Bogost: Ian Bogost, an American professor, researcher and video game designer, who wrote a book about finding play in everyday tasks.
  • Inzlicht: Michael Inzlicht, a Canadian psychologist at the University of Toronto who studies self-control and motivation.
  • Timeboxing: A way of planning in which every task gets its own block of time in your calendar, set in advance.
  • Concentration crown: A tactic from the book: a visible object a person puts on so the people close to them can see they shouldn't be interrupted right now.
  • Precommitment: A decision made in advance, so that when temptation comes there is no longer a choice to make.
  • Perlow: Leslie Perlow, a professor at Harvard Business School who studies how work and employees' time are organized.
  • Deci: Edward Deci, an American psychologist, co-creator of self-determination theory together with Richard Ryan.

All terms

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