NIR EYAL, author of INDISTRACTABLE breaks down steps to eliminate everything that takes you away from the life you want to live, and move you toward TRACTION, with the goal of taking full control of your life.
Based on the book Indistractable and the work of Nir Eyal.
We cannot call something a distraction unless we know what it is distracting us from.
Let me say that again. You can’t call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from.
If you don’t plan your day, somebody is going to plan it for you. The social media companies, the news, your boss, your kids, somebody is going to take up that time in your day unless you decide in advance how you want to spend your time.
We need to talk about the leading cause of distraction. The leading cause of distraction is not what is happening outside of us. Because what I discovered in my five years of research is that most distraction begins from within. We call these “internal triggers”.
What are internal triggers? Internal triggers are uncomfortable emotional sensations that we seek to escape from.
You see, in fact, all human behavior, all human behavior, everything you do, you do for only one reason: the desire to escape discomfort.
So calling yourself indistractable doesn’t mean you never get distracted. That’s impossible. The difference between an indistractable person and a distractable person is that an indistractable person understands why they got distracted, and has the tools to do something about it.
There’s a wonderful Paulo Coelho quote. He said, “A mistake repeated more than once is a decision.” If we keep getting distracted by the same stupid things day after day, week after week, month after month, we are choosing to be distractable.
An indistractable person looks at why they got distracted with this methodology I’ve developed and understands the source of the problem to make sure that they don’t keep getting distracted by doing something today to prevent getting distracted tomorrow.
To understand distraction, we really need to understand what that word even means. When people say they got distracted, what does that actually mean? I didn’t understand the real definition of the term “distraction” until I started along this line of research. The best way to understand what distraction is, is to understand what distraction is not. If you ask most people what is the opposite of distraction, they’ll tell you it’s focus, of course, right? Hmm, not exactly. You see, if you look at the origin of the word distraction, the opposite of distraction is not focus, the opposite of distraction is traction, that both words come from the same Latin root “trahere”, which means “to pull”. So traction, by definition, is any action that pulls you towards what you said you were going to do, things that you do with intent, things that help you live out your values and become the kind of person you want to become.
Now, the opposite of traction is distraction. Distraction, by definition, is any action that pulls you away from what you plan to do, anything that is not consistent with your values, anything that pulls you away from becoming the kind of person you want to become.
So this isn’t just wordplay. This is incredibly important, because I would argue, any action can be either traction or distraction. Let me give you a great example. For years, every time I would get into work, I would sit down at my desk and I would say, “Okay, I’m going to get started on that big project, I’ve got to focus, I have to concentrate, I’m not going to get distracted. I’m not going to procrastinate.” I’m going to get started on that big project that I’ve been putting off. Here I go, I’m going to do it right now. But first, let me check some email, let me scroll this Slack channel. let me do all these other tasks that feel work related.” But really, I didn’t realize that I was allowing distraction to trick me into prioritizing the easy and urgent stuff to trick me into prioritizing the easy and urgent stuff as opposed to doing the important work that I knew I had to do.
So even tasks that feel like they’re work related, if it’s not what you plan to do with your time, they are, in fact, distractions. And in fact, they’re the most pernicious form of distractions, because if we play a video game at our desk, well, we clearly know we’re off task. But when we think we’re working on one project, when we think we’re doing one task that seems to be the right thing to do because it’s work related, but really, we’re putting off doing more important work. That is a much more sinister form of distraction. Conversely, just as anything can be a distraction, anything can be traction. So don’t listen to these chicken-little tech critics that tell you the sky is falling and that technology is addicting us and hijacking our brains. It’s rubbish.
There’s nothing wrong with playing a video game or watching a movie on Netflix or enjoying social media, if it’s what you PLAN to do with your time. You see, the difference between traction and distraction is one word. And that one word is “forethought”. The time you PLAN to waste is not wasted time.
So if you want to take a walk, take a nap, scroll social media, pray, meditate, whatever it is you want to do with your time is totally fine as long as you do it with intent, as long as you have planned ahead as to how you want to spend your time. You can otherwise turn a distraction into traction by planning ahead, by using forethought.
So now that we understand the difference between traction and distraction, we need to ask what drives us towards traction or distraction.
We have two kinds of triggers. The first kind of trigger is called an “external trigger”, and it’s what people tend to blame, the usual suspects like the pings, the dings, the rings, anything in your outside environment that can lead you towards traction or distraction. We can get back to those in just a minute. But first, I want to focus on what’s even more important than the external triggers.
We need to talk about the leading cause of distraction. The leading cause of distraction is not what is happening outside of us, because what I discovered in my five years of research is that most distraction begins from within. We call these “internal triggers”. What are internal triggers? Internal triggers are uncomfortable emotional sensations that we seek to escape from. You see, in fact, all human behavior, all human behavior, everything you do, you do for only one reason: the desire to escape discomfort. In fact, even the desire to feel pleasure is, itself, psychologically destabilizing. This is called the “homeostatic response”.
If you think about it, if you go outside and it’s cold, well, the brain tells you, “Oh, this is uncomfortable, you should put on a coat.” When you walk back inside, the brain says, “Oh, it’s too hot in here, take it off.” If you feel hunger pangs, you eat. If you’re full because you ate too much, you stop eating. And so physiologically, everything we do is about a desire to escape discomfort. This is called the “homeostatic response”. It’s pretty common sense.
But what most people don’t realize is that the same phenomenon occurs with our psychological sensations. Think about it. Where do people go when they’re feeling lonely? Well, you check a social network like Facebook. And what about when you’re uncertain? Before you scan your brain to see if you know the answer, you’re Googling? And what about when you’re feeling bored? Oh my goodness, so many solutions to boredom, right? Check the news, check stock prices, sports scores, Pinterest, Reddit, all kinds of solutions to take care of this uncomfortable sensation of boredom, because we don’t like those internal triggers, they don’t feel good, and we look for escape from them.
So here’s the fact of the matter:
TIME management is PAIN management.
And if all human behavior is about a desire to escape discomfort, if you don’t understand what is that emotional itch, what is the uncomfortable sensation you are looking to escape, whether it’s with too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, it doesn’t matter; we have to first start by mastering these internal triggers, so that we can gain control over them, as opposed to them controlling us.
So now that we understand the difference between traction and distraction, and we understand that we are driven towards traction or distraction by internal and external triggers, we can actually plot out the four points of how we become indistractable. It starts, first and foremost, by mastering the internal triggers, by understanding the deeper reasons why we look for escape from those uncomfortable sensations. The next step is to make time for traction.
Over the past five years research in my book, I’ve talked to thousands of people, and many of them have complained to me about how distracting the world is, how they can’t get anything done because social media this, and did you hear what happened in the news that, and their boss wants this and their kids want that, and they tell me how distracted they are. But when I asked them, “Okay, but what did you get distracted from exactly? Let me see your calendar. What was it that you plan to do?” They haven’t a clue. Sometimes they’ll show me their calendar.
And I’m guilty of this as well. I used to do this several years ago before I wrote this book. My calendar was blank. I’d have maybe an appointment here and there, but for the most of my day, I didn’t have anything planned. What I did have was a super long to-do list with all kinds of tasks I wanted to check off. What I’ve since discovered is that running your day with a to-do list as opposed to a calendar, is just about the worst thing you could possibly do for your productivity. Instead of keeping it to do list, which we tend to tick off the easy stuff and the fun stuff as opposed to the important stuff, when we keep a calendar, not just a calendar, a time box calendar, we utilize this fundamental truth that we cannot call something a distraction unless we know what it is distracting us from.
Let me say that again. You can’t call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. And so if you don’t plan your day, somebody is going to plan it for you. The social media companies, the news, your boss, your kids, somebody is going to take up that time in your day unless you decide, in advance, how you want to spend your time. There’s a reason we call it spending time and paying attention. The same type of language that we use to describe spending money and paying with dollars and cents, because our time and attention has value. And so if you just give it away to whoever wants it, don’t complain when you haven’t gotten done what you wanted to do with your time, and frankly, with your life.
So, this comes down to turning our values into time. What does that mean? Fundamentally, we have to ask ourselves, what are our values? So what are values anyway?
Values are attributes of the person you want to become, meaning you have to ask yourself, how would the person I want to become spend their time?
Now we can ask ourselves within these three life domains of you, your relationships, and finally your work. How would the person I want to become spend their time starting with you? So whatever is important for you in terms of personal values, how much time would the person you want to become spend on reading, on yoga, on prayer, on meditation, whatever it is that’s important to you, heck, playing video games, if that’s important to you, that’s part of your values, and the way you want to take care of yourself, wonderful, but plan that time in your schedule.
Next, our relationships. We are going through a global loneliness crisis, because over the past several decades, and this didn’t start with social media, but since the 1990s, social scientists have told us that the time that people devote to planned activities with their friends has markedly decreased. And so we can bring that back. We can make sure that we spend time with our friends, loved ones, and family members by putting time for it in our schedule.
If part of your value system involves being a devoted spouse, or a loving parent, or an available sibling, do you have that time to connect with the important people in your life scheduled and held on your calendar? And then finally, when it comes to our values around our work.
You see, work is split up into two kinds of work. We have what we call “reactive work” and “reflective work”. Reactive work is how most people spend most of their time at work. It’s responding to emails, answering phone calls, messages, slack notifications, reacting to what other people want you to do with your time. Now, that time is clearly part of many people’s jobs, but what we neglect to do is to carve out and protect time for reflective work.
Listen, if you want a leg up on the competition, if you want to do your job better than anyone else can, let me give you a little secret. Make time to think. You know why? Because it’s such a rare skill; nobody’s doing it.
Nobody’s making time in their day to work without distraction, to allow you the time to reflect, to plan, to strategize. You have got to have that time held and secured on your calendar.
So the second step to becoming indistractable is to make time for traction by keeping a time box calendar and then doing what we call “doing a schedule sync with the important stakeholders in your life.” So this will not only change your work-life balance, it’ll also change your relationship with your life partner. For example, when you can sit down with your schedule once a week, takes maybe 10-15 minutes, and review that physical artifact of your schedule, this is how we make sure that we live up to our obligations to others and to ourselves. The third step to becoming indistractable is to hack back our external triggers. So external triggers, again, are these pings, dings, and rings, anything in our outside environment that can lead us off track towards distraction rather than traction. And so there’s all kinds of things that we can do. Many of these things are really common sense.
Two thirds of Americans never change their smartphone notification settings. What? Can we really complain that our smartphones are addicting us when we haven’t taken five minutes to turn those notifications that don’t serve us, off?
So the critical question is to ask ourselves, when it comes to all of these external triggers, all of these pings and dings, which external triggers serve me and which am I serving? And to critically evaluate in all the different exter