Jan 2022 Book Review: Indistractable by Nir Eyal

How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life

Indistractable Book Review With Azodo

I truly believe that 2022 is going to be an amazing year for you! So, get ready to be amazing!

This book review is the first of the monthly book reviews I have planned for this year. The idea is to share insights from a book I have read so you can pick up practical ideas/lessons/etc right away or to even help you decide if you should read the book or not.

To kickstart the series and the year, I have chosen Nir Eyal’s latest book, Indistractable. Hope you learn something useful… Don’t forget to suggest books you want me to review in the coming months.

Let’s get started…

About the Book

Title: Indistractable

Subtitle: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life

Author: Nir Eyal with Julie Li

Number of Pages: 318

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Date of Publication: 2019

Genre: Guide, Self-help

What is the Book About?

For product managers, product designers, and anyone else who is involved in choice architecture, there is a book that is more or less a Bible. The book explores the hidden psychology of human behaviour and how Tech companies (especially social media, and game designers) use it to manipulate us and keep us hooked on their products. The title of the book is “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products” by Nir Eyal. Directly or indirectly, the author seems to have been involved in companies building products that are addictive with potentially negative consequences when it comes to controlling our attention. Hooked offered such a clear understanding of how habits (good or bad) can be formed.

This means that well-meaning companies can tap into this understanding to build products that help us live better and happier. But it also means that the same understanding can be used to build products that distract us and are harmful to us psychologically and otherwise.

As philosopher, Paul Virilio noted “When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck”

Indistractable is Nir Eyal’s attempt to help us regain control of our attention and time in this age of tech overuse and shortening attention span.

Format of the Book

The book is divided into 7 parts. Each part contains short, easily readable chapters.

• Part 1: Master Internal Triggers
• Part 2: Make Time for Traction
• Part 3: Hack Back External Triggers
• Part 4: Prevent Distraction with Pacts
• Part 5: How to Make Your Workplace Indistractable
• Part 6: How to Raise Indistractable Children
• Part 7: How to Have Indistractable Relationships

Indistractable contains lots of practical lessons, ideas, and tips on how we can become indistractable. According to the author, “In the future, there will be two kinds of people in the world: those who let their attention and lives be controlled and coerced by others, and those who proudly call themselves ‘indistractable’”

Below, I will share my top ideas from the book to help you become indistractable.

There are two types of action, according to the author:

• Traction: actions that move us towards what we want
• Distraction: actions that move us away from what we want

Similarly, there are two types of triggers:

• Internal: these are triggers (nudges, prompts) that are within us which causes us to do certain this at certain times. Examples of internal triggers include boredom and anxiety
• External: these are triggers from our environment such as WhatsApp notification, a co-worker who wants to talk about the weekend football matches

Top Ideas from the Book

• Our desire to relieve discomfort is what drives all our behaviour; everything else is just a proximate cause. Think about that for a moment. This means that blaming your smartphone for your distraction is not exactly correct. Look deeper to find what is truly distracting you. For example, you might be watching endless YouTube videos on “How to be Productive” simply because you are running away from the pain of actually doing the work that you ought to be doing at that moment. So, distraction is simply your attempt to escape reality!
• Look for the discomfort that precedes the distraction to find the true source of your distraction. Think back to the few moments preceding the moment you pulled out your smartphone to “just see what’s happening on Twitter” You might be surprised that it’s not exactly the addictive nature of Twitter that is distracting you but the anxiety from your unfinished report that must be submitted by 4 pm today
• To handle internal triggers, (i) figure out the true trigger; see the point above (ii) write down the trigger (e.g. anxiety), the time of the day, what you were doing, and how you felt when you noticed the trigger (iii) explore the sensations; allowing yourself to acknowledge the urger instead of suppressing it (iv) beware of moments of transition from one activity to the other such as the time between two meetings or the time from when the traffic light turned red and when it turns green. Watch what you do at those moments
• Implement the “10-minute rule” which means that you can give yourself permission to give in to the temptation but after you must have waited for 10 minutes
• Never see your willpower as a finite resource. Instead, view willpower as emotions such as joy and love. Just like you don’t run out of joy, you can’t run out of willpower
• Your calendar has to reflect your values. Plan your calendar to reflect the three areas that are central to your life: You, Relationships, and Work. Usually, we tend to neglect planning our relationships into our routine
• The Fogg Behaviour Model (named after Dr. BJ Fogg, author of “Tiny Habits”) states that for a behaviour (B) to occur, these three things must be present at the same time; Motivation (M), Ability (A) and a trigger (T). Therefore, B = MAT. If you want to stop a certain bad behaviour, you may want to increase the efforts it takes to carry it out. Conversely, if you want to carry out a good habit, you might want to lower the efforts it takes to carry it out. For example, if you want to drink more water, you may want to reduce the efforts it takes to go buy water whenever you are thirsty by always having a bottle by your side
• To receive fewer emails, write fewer emails
• Schedule time to check group chats. It’s unproductive to always be on group chats
• Reduce meetings by insisting on no agenda, no meeting
• Uninstall apps you don’t use. For those you use, arrange them neatly in folders
• Check your smartphone settings and disable as many notifications as necessary.
• Learn to use the “Do Not Disturb” option on your smartphone
• Online articles are another big distraction. Many times, we justify our behaviour as doing research. Save articles to read later at the time you scheduled for that
• Get an accountability partner to help you stay focused
• Pledge money or other things that are valuable to you to help you stay focused on your goal. For example, to finish the first draft of your book by a certain date, you may transfer, say $10,000, to a partner with the instruction to give the money to any charity of their choice if you fail to meet your goal
• Change your identity. Saying “I don’t drink alcohol” is better and more effective than saying “I don’t want to drink alcohol” One is about identity; the other is about choice at the moment
• By bringing up your children in a more healthy and rounded manner, you can help make them less prone to distractions
• Reclaim time to be with your life partner

How I’m Applying the Lessons from the Book

Since reading the book, I have implemented and implemented a few tricks to help me become more indistractable such as:

• I now use the “Digital Wellbeing” app on my Android phone to disable my access to certain apps when I need to focus
• I have started to plan my calendar better
• I now use the Pomodoro system more to focus
• Twitter can be a source of distraction for me, so I am scheduling more of my tweets now
• I also have a bedtime set on my phone

Down Side?

Part 6 (How to Raise Indistractable Children) and Part 7 (How to Have Indistractable Relationships) was a bit stretched.

Also, the author could have condensed some of the chapters to make a shorter but more impactful read.

Personal Rating

On usefulness and readability, I give the book a 4/5 rating. I highly recommend it.

I hope this was useful to you. Feel free to suggest a book you want me to review in the coming months.

Have the best of 2022!

#BookWithAzodo