I recently reread the wonderful book, Indistractable by Nir Eyal. It is the best guide I've read for reclaiming our time and attention, and gain traction in our lives.

Nir deep dives on the distractions in our everyday lives, their root causes and how we should deal with them and gain traction on the most important work of our lives. The book has some great research on psychology and human behavior. I recommend it highly to anyone wanting to claim their time and life.

Below is a summary and my main takeaways from the book

Master Internal Triggers

What Motivates us really?

There is always a proximate cause and a root cause involved in the way we behave. The distractions in our lives are the result of the same forces at play – they are proximate causes that we think are to blame (they help us deflect responsibility on to something or someone else.), while the root causes stay hidden.

We tend to blame things like television, junk food, social media, cigarettes and video games etc. – but these are all proximate causes of our distraction. Solely blaming a smartphone for causing distraction is just as flawed as blaming social media sites or always on demand media. Unless we deal with the root causes of our distraction, we’ll continue to find ways to distract ourselves. Distraction, it turns out, isn’t about the distraction itself; rather, it’s about how we respond to it.

But most people don’t want to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that distraction is always an unhealthy escape from reality. How we deal with uncomfortable internal triggers determines whether we pursue healthful acts of traction or self-defeating distractions.

Having a distraction is the escape route we take to avoid the underlying internal trigger or discomfort. This escape often comes from checking social media, spending more time in the office, watching television, or in some cases, drinking or taking hard drugs.

Without dealing with the discomfort driving the desire for escape, we’ll continue to resort to one distraction or another.

But by pinpointing the root cause, rather than blaming the proximate, we’ll be better able to address the real issue next time. When used together, the strategies and techniques Nir shares work both immediately and in the long term to help you deal with the real source of distraction.

Remember :
Understand the root cause of distraction. Distraction is about more than your devices. Separate proximate causes from the root cause.

All motivation is a desire to escape discomfort. If a behavior was previously effective at providing relief, we’re likely to continue using it as a tool to escape discomfort.

Anything that stops discomfort is potentially addictive, but that doesn’t make it irresistible. If you know the drivers of your behavior, you can take steps to manage them.

Deal with Distractions from Within

Like all human behavior, distraction is just another way our brains attempt to deal with pain. If we accept this fact, it makes sense that the only way to handle distraction is by learning to handle discomfort.

Nir shares some research by Dr Jonathan Bricker , who has spent his career helping people manage the kind of discomfort that leads not only to distraction, but also to disease. Bricker has developed and tested innovative ways to help people change behaviors that affect health, such as smoking. Bricker’s approach involves harnessing the power of imagination to help his patients see things differently. His work shows how learning certain techniques as part of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) can disarm the discomfort that so often leads to harmful distractions.

Bricker decided to focus his efforts on stopping smoking and developed an app to deliver ACT over the internet. Though he uses ACT specifically to help people quit smoking, the principles of the programme have been shown to effectively reduce many types of urges. At the heart of the therapy is learning to notice and accept one’s cravings and to handle them in a healthy way. Instead of suppressing urges, ACT prescribes a method for stepping back, noticing, observing and finally letting the desire disappear naturally. But why not simply fight our urges? Why not ‘just say no’?

It turns out mental abstinence can backfire. Certain desires can be modulated, if not completely mitigated, by how we think about our urges.

Remember :
Without techniques for disarming temptation, mental abstinence can backfire. Resisting an urge can trigger rumination and make the desire grow stronger.

We can manage distractions that originate from within by changing how we think about them. We can reimagine the trigger, the task and our temperament.

Reimagine the Internal Triggers

By reimagining an uncomfortable internal trigger, we can disarm it.

While we can’t control the feelings and thoughts that pop into our heads, we can control what we do with them. Nir suggests we shouldn’t keep telling ourselves to stop thinking about an urge; instead, we must learn better ways to cope. The same applies to other distractions like checking our phones too much, eating junk food, smoking or excessive shopping. Rather than trying to fight the urge, we need new methods to handle intrusive thoughts.

The following four steps help us do just that:

Step 1. Look for the emotion preceding distraction.

Nir shares an example when he is doing his writing work, he often has the urge to google something. It’s easy to justify this bad habit as ‘doing research’ but deep down Nir says he knows it’s often just a diversion from difficult work.

Dr Bricker advises focusing on the internal trigger that precedes the unwanted behavior, like ‘feeling anxious, having a craving, feeling restless, or thinking you are incompetent’.

Step 2. Write down the internal trigger.

Dr Bricker advises writing down the trigger, whether or not you subsequently give in to the distraction, using ‘a journal, a piece of paper, a chart, or an app’. He recommends noting the time of day, what you were doing and how you felt when you noticed the internal trigger that led to the distracting behavior ‘as soon as you are aware of the behavior’, because it’s easier at that point to remember how you felt. Nir also suggests using a Distraction tracker which he has included with this book.

According to Bricker, while people can easily identify the external trigger, ‘it takes some time and trials to begin noticing those all-important inside triggers’. He recommends discussing the urge as if you were an observer, telling yourself something like, ‘I’m feeling that tension in my chest right now. And there I go, trying to reach for my iPhone.’ The better we are at noticing the behavior, the better we’ll be at managing it over time. ‘The anxiety goes away, the thought gets weaker or [is] replaced by another thought.’

Step 3. Explore the negative sensation with curiosity instead of contempt.

Bricker then recommends getting curious about that sensation. For example, do your fingers twitch when you’re about to be distracted? Do you get a flurry of butterflies in your stomach when you think about work when you’re with your family? What does it feel like when the feelings crest and then subside? Bricker encourages staying with the feeling before acting on the impulse.

Step 4. Be extra cautious during liminal moments.

Liminal moments are transitions from one thing to the other throughout our day. Have you ever picked up your phone while waiting for a traffic light to change, then found yourself still looking at your phone while driving? Or opened a tab in your web browser, got annoyed by how long it’s taking to load and opened up another page while you waited? Or looked at a social media app while walking from one meeting to the next, only to keep scrolling when you got back to your desk? There’s nothing wrong with any of these actions per se. Rather, what’s dangerous is the fact that by doing them ‘for just a second’ we’re likely to do things we later regret, like getting off-track for half an hour or getting into a car accident.

A technique Nir suggested particularly helpful for dealing with this distraction trap is the ‘ten-minute rule’.

What is the this 'ten- minute rule'?

If you find yourself wanting to check my phone as a pacification device when you can’t think of anything better to do, just tell yourself it’s fine to give in, but not right now. You have to wait just ten minutes. This technique is effective at helping to deal with all sorts of potential distractions, like Googling something rather than writing, eating something unhealthy when you are bored, or watching another video on Youtube when you are ‘too tired to go to bed’.

This rule allows time to do what some behavioral psychologists call ‘surfing the urge’. When an urge takes hold, noticing the sensations and riding them like a wave – neither pushing them away nor acting on them – helps us cope until the feelings subside. Surfing the urge, along with other techniques to bring attention to the craving, has been shown to be effective. If we still want to perform the action after ten minutes of urge surfing, we’re free to do it, but that’s rarely still the case. The liminal moment has passed, and we’re able to do the thing we really wanted to do.

Make Time For Traction

Turn Your Values into Time

Traction draws you towards what you want in life, while distraction pulls you away. Earlier, we learned ways to cope with the internal triggers that can drive us to distraction and how to reduce the sources of discomfort: if we don’t control our impulse to escape uncomfortable feelings, we’ll always look for quick fixes to soothe our pain. The next step is to find ways to make traction more likely, starting with how we spend our time. Think of all the ways people steal your time.

Seneca, the Roman Stoic philosopher, wrote, ‘People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time, they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.’

When it comes to planning our schedule, where do we begin? The standard approach is to make a to-do list. We write down all the things we want to do and hope we’ll find the time throughout the day to do them. Unfortunately, this method has some serious flaws. Anyone who has tried keeping such a list knows many tasks tend to get pushed from one day to the next, and the next. Instead of starting with what we’re going to do, we should begin with why we’re going to do it. And to do that, we must begin with our values.

According to Russ Harris, author of The Happiness Trap, values are ‘how we want to be, what we want to stand for, and how we want to relate to the world around us’. They are attributes of the person we want to be. For example, they may include being an honest person, being a loving parent or being a valued part of a team. We never achieve our values any more than finishing a painting would let us achieve being creative. Values are not end goals; they are guidelines for our actions.

Though some values carry over into all facets of life, most are specific to one area. For example, being a contributing member of a team is something people generally do at work. Being a loving spouse or parent occurs within the context of a family. Being the kind of person who seeks wisdom or physical fitness is something we do for ourselves.

The trouble is, we don’t make time for our values. We unintentionally spend too much time in one area of our life at the expense of others. We get busy at work at the expense of living out our values with our family or friends. If we run ourselves ragged caring for our kids, we neglect our bodies, minds and friendships, keeping us from being the person we desire to be. If we chronically neglect our values, we become someone we’re not proud of – our life feels out of balance and diminished. Ironically, this ugly feeling makes us more likely to seek distractions to escape our dissatisfaction without actually solving the problem.

Remember :

You can’t call something a distraction unless you know what it is distracting you from. Planning ahead is the only way to know the difference between traction and distraction.

Does your calendar reflect your values? To be the person you want to be, you have to make time to live your values.

Timebox your day. The three life domains of you, relationships and work provide a framework for planning how to spend your time.

Reflect and refine. Revise your schedule regularly, but you must commit to it once it’s set.

I feel the crux of the book are in these 2 chapters I shared i.e. Master Internal Triggers and Make Time for Traction. But the book has several other chapters full of actionable insights and are worth exploring too. I’d recommend you check them out too. It will change the way you think about your time, technology and productivity. And I’m sure it will have lifelong benefits.