Mastering indistraction
One of my favourite podcasts is The Knowledge Project, which is hosted by the same people who host my favourite site, fs.blog. I listened to an episode where they hosted Nir Eyal, author of a book called Indistractible. I thought the podcast was intriguing and offered a lot of advice for how we think about distraction and how we master it. So I wanted to write out what I heard to solidify it. Ironically, I own this book, but haven’t prioritized reading it yet.
When you think of the opposite of distraction, what do you think of? My instinct would have been focus. But Eyal says that is incorrect. The actual opposite of distraction is right there in the word itself. Traction. Traction is any action that pulls you towards something you said you were going to do.
Eyal suggests that anything can be a distraction, and anything can be traction. He gives an example of when he would sit down to work on his book. Taking out his phone and playing candy crush is an obvious distraction. He didn’t do that. Instead, he would answer emails. He rationalized it by saying he would have to do it at some point anyway, but emails were distracting him from the thing he set out to do, work on his book.
On the flip side, anything can be traction. Even things like going on social media or playing video games or taking time to relax is traction, if you have planned to take time to do those things. The crux is, they are done on your schedule.
Addiction
We like to call everything an addiction. I’m addicted to my phone, to social media, to eating, etc. But is it really addiction? Eyal defines an addiction as a persistent compulsive dependency on a behaviour or substance that harms the user. So with that as the lens, most of us are not addicted to our phones. We are distracted by our phones. What is the distinction? Well, if we are addicted to our phones, we have someone to blame in a way. Those evil tech companies who design their apps to be as addictive as possible have brainwashed me! But Eyal argues that there are tons of solutions to hack back at apps, and many of them are offered by the app themselves. Apple screen-time, pausing notifications, etc. So what we should really be calling the behaviour that holds us back from becoming who we want to be, and doing what we want to do, is a distraction.
The problem with calling these behaviours distractions is it puts personal responsibility on us. Eyal says that it’s not your fault that these distractions exist. You didn’t invent Facebook, or Twitter, “But lots of things in life are not your fault. But they are still your responsibility.”
Eyal goes on to talk about how he hacked back his tech use. He even went as far as to buy a flip phone and do a tech detox. But he said even with drastic measures like that, he would sit down to write his book and suddenly be distracted by the need to organize his desk, or take out the trash. His point was, it wasn’t the tech and the evil tech companies that were distracting him. Even if he removed those things, he found ways to distract himself. This point led to one of his most poignant quotes on the podcast, which I will write out below:
What I discovered was… the leading cause of distraction is not what we call external triggers. It’s not the stuff outside of us. But rather distraction begins from within, what we call the internal triggers. That is the leading cause of distraction. Boredom, uncertainty, fatigue, anxiety…Time management requires pain management…You’ll always be distracted by something, right? If it’s too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, it doesn’t matter. Something is going to distract you unless you understand what feeling you are trying to escape. Procrastination, distraction. It’s not a character flaw. It’s not some kind of moral failing. It is the inability to deal with emotional discomfort.
So when we are feeling anxiety, or bored, how do we master those internal triggers and not allow them to distract us? Eyal gives several tools in the podcast that we can use. He says his book offers up more as well if you want to dig in even further.
He illustrates these tools as ways to respond to emotional triggers or urges. He says emotional urges are uncontrollable. Feeling anxious or bored is as involuntary as the urge to sneeze. We can’t control it. We can however control how we respond to that urge.
He also makes a good point about pain or discomfort itself. He talks about how pain doesn’t feel good, but that doesn’t mean its a bad thing. Pain is meant to force you into action. Discomfort is meant to spur on change. He talks about early homo sapiens. If they were all perfectly happy and content all the time and read all of the thousands of books that are out today telling us the five steps to happiness, they would have been useless from an evolutionary perspective. Pain and discomfort pushes us to action. It causes us to innovate, make technology
You want people to be perpetually perturbed. You want them to want more. That’s what gets us to hunt, to invent, to create…that discomfort, that wanting more, can be rocket fuel to propel us forward. And so that’s why it’s very important not to run away from that discomfort, but to harness it to lead you towards traction rather than distraction.
Four steps to becoming indistractible
- Master the internal triggers
- Make time for traction
- Manage external triggers
- Create PAC’s (pre-commitment devices)
Mastering the internal triggers
One technique he gives for mastering internal triggers is to write down the preceding emotion. When you find yourself distracted, he suggests taking out a pen and writing down the sensation that you think caused it. Was it boredom, anxiety, something else?
After you’ve done that, he encourages you to explore the sensation with curiosity, but not contempt. In other words, don’t shame yourself when you become distracted. Explore what was causing it, take a couple minutes to think if you can.
Then do what he calls surf the urge. He uses the word surf because he says emotions are like waves. They crest and fall, so if we can get passed the crest, we can usually resist the urge. His technique for surfing the urge is to allow yourself to give in, but only after ten minutes.
He says this is powerful because of how our brains work and claims that full abstinence usually doesn’t work, and often backfires. He gives the example of smokers. Those trying to quit smoking who abstain and abstain and finally give in to smoke, are basically training their brain to associate the relief from discomfort as only relating to when they give in to smoke. He says that though nicotine is addictive, it is more so the learned association of don’t smoke, don’t smoke, don’t smoke, ok fine, that becomes the powerful addiction due to how the brain is trained over time.
He says this is why digital detoxes don’t work. Because we are not learning to deal with the underlying discomfort.
So if you allow yourself to have ten minutes after you feel the urge, you can either go back to work for ten minutes, or examine that urge with curiosity. He says that after ten minutes, the wave of that urge will have subsided and 90% of the time, you can go back to work undistracted.
Making time for traction
The key idea behind this step is that you can’t call something a distraction unless you know what it is distracting you from.
Eyal starts this section out by bashing to do lists. He says they are terrible for a few reasons. First, when people wake up and look at their to do list, they don’t start on the most important thing, we typically start on the easiest thing. Second, to do lists have no constraint. We can add items to infinity, and never end up completing things on our list. Lastly, when we live day after day, week after week, year after year, not accomplishing things on our lists, we are training ourselves to believe that we are not people who do what we say we will do. In other words, we lack integrity, or we lie to ourselves. And as time goes on, that becomes acceptable to us.
Instead of to-do lists, Eyal recommends putting time on your calendar for things you want to do in a day which he calls time boxing. This can include work things, but also includes time for things like watching TV and video games.
Time boxing responds nicely to many of the criticisms of a to do list. First there is a constraint. We only have so much time in a day. So we can’t endlessly add things to it. The other big mindset change with time boxing is it is not about completing something or not, like a to do list. Instead the metric of success is simply, “Did I do what I said I was going to do, or not?” Eyal says it turns out that people who think this way end up finishing more than people with to do lists anyway.
Time boxing is turning values into time. So ask yourself, what do I value? Or how would the person I want to become spend their time? There are three domains to time boxing. How would the person I want to become spend time on themselves? Reading, prayer, relaxing? This is the personal domain. Next is the relational domain. How much time would the person I want to become spend on friendships, family, or community groups? And lastly is the work domain, which he splits into two further groups that he calls reactionary time and reflective time.
Reactive time is the time we spend responding to pings, answering emails and dealing with requests that inevitably pop up during the day. He says the problem with reactive time is if we aren’t careful, we end up spending our entire day reacting. But if you truly want a competitive edge, carve out time to think, to strategize, and reflect.
Further to the point of spending work time as productively as possible, he discusses a tool he calls schedule syncing. He starts out by disparaging the advice that in the face of so many priorities on our time, that we simply need to learn to say no. He says that saying no to your boss is just going to get you fired. Instead, he suggests having a short meeting at the beginning of the week with your boss where you present your calendar for the week. The conversation sounds something like this:
Here’s how much time I’m going to work on this project, on that project, this meeting, that meeting. Now you see this other piece of paper over here. OK, here’s where I wrote all the things that I didn’t know where to allocate in the week ahead. Can you help me prioritize if there is something on this list that needs to go in my calendar? OK, now you’ve handed them the tool. They will worship the ground you walk on… Most managers have no idea what their employees are doing and they’re dying to know how they’re spending their time, but they’re not going to ask them because they don’t want to micromanage them. So if you proactively do this and say, look, boss, I’m spending every minute working on this stuff and here’s how I’m spending my time, through that schedule process, you’re helping prioritize what’s important, what’s not important. And every time you do this, you will find something that’s not as important as you thought that your bosses actually take that off your calendar. Can you do this thing instead or that meeting is not that important or this one is. That schedule syncing process will absolutely change your work life.
Managing external triggers
This section is fairly tactical. They discuss some different tools that are available to help keep you focused and not distracted by external factors. He has an extension for example that disables the news feed on Facebook. If he is on Facebook, he checks pages directly, but doesn’t want the external pressure of the infinite “wall of garbage”. He also has free extensions that hide all the recommended videos on Youtube for example, and disables autoplay. The point is, we have a ton of control over mastering all of the external triggers that could set out to distract us, so use them.
PAC’s
Eyal discusses three types of pre commitment devices in this section. The whole point of a PAC is that deciding something ahead of time, makes it easier to commit to in the moment.
The three PAC’s are effort, price, and identity PAC’s.
Effort PAC’s
An effort PAC is a commitment you make that makes distractions harder to give in to. He talks about how he set up a timer on his wifi that shuts off his internet at 10pm. Of course he could work around it if he wanted to, but he says adding that layer of effort makes it easier to avoid distraction.
Price PAC’s
A price PAC is the idea of putting skin in the game. He gave the example of when he was at a point where he just needed to finish his book. He told his friend that if he didn’t get it done by January 1st, he would give him $10,000. So of course, he got his book done by then. Price PAC’s are a useful tool then for incentivizing yourself to complete certain tasks.
Identity PAC’s
Eyal says this is the most powerful of the PAC’s and says the research comes from the psychology of religion. He says if a group of people associate themselves with an identity, like Muslim or Christian or have some kind of noun they associate with themselves, they are more likely to do the things they say they will do. Eyal says this is why he named his book indistractbile. He says he wanted to associate himself as someone who is indistractible, or make it part of his “identity”. He says doing this helps us become the people we want to be.
Key takeways
I appreciated the clarity on the definition of distraction. The opposite of distraction is traction. If I am intentional about what I want to do with my time, and if I do what I said I will do with my time, then I am gaining traction.
I really liked the suggestion of time blocking. I’d like to try that out over the next few weeks and build in time based on how the person I want to be would schedule their time. That includes relaxing time because honestly, the person I want to be is not an overachieving stressed out maniac. My plan is to build in a short window of time every morning where I can plan out and schedule my day / week.
I also hope to identify some of the internal triggers that come up that cause me to be distracted during my days. This podcast was good timing as I have been finding distraction has been an issue for me over the last few weeks, so hopefully this process will be an inflection point for me.