Have you ever noticed that your attention and ability to focus seems to have a mind
of its own? Maybe you’re frustrated with how little you get done on some days. If you
can relate, this video is for you.
Dr. Jubbal, MedSchoolInsiders.com.
Most of us, myself included, strive to continuously improve our productivity and effectiveness,
and we know that in order to accomplish our goals, we need to stop wasting time and do
the actual work. But the hard part isn’t knowing what to do - it’s resisting distractions.
Living our ideal life, then, isn’t just about doing all the right things, but also
not doing the things you’ll regret, like checking your Instagram for the 37th time
today.
Nir Eyal is an expert on habit-forming technology, best known for his book Hooked, which teaches
companies how to build apps that you simply can’t resist. Now he’s using his expertise
to help the little guys with his new book, Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention
and Choose Your Life. This is how to reclaim a hold on your attention, ability to do deep
work, and become indistractable in a new age of the attention economy.
While many of us vilify technology as being the cause for our distractions, Nir emphasizes
that distraction is nothing new. Rather than blaming technology for our inability to stay
on track, we must take responsibility and understand the root causes if we have any
hope of reclaiming our attention.
Master Internal Triggers Let’s begin with internal triggers, which
are cues arising from within, like feeling hunger or cold. External triggers, on the
other hand, are those arising from the environment, like a notification on your phone.
Nir argues that the root cause of all our behavior is simply the drive to relieve discomfort
— even the drive caused by desire is there to free ourselves from the pain of wanting.
You can think of a root cause as the underlying reason, and the proximate cause as what is
immediately responsible for a problem. In other words, it what allows you to deflect
responsibility onto something or someone else.
This distinction is important, as addressing the proximate but not the root cause doesn’t
actually fix the problem. Distractions are often the result of proximate causes like
our cell phones that we think are the culprit, but the root cause remains hidden.
Or as Nir puts it, “solely blaming a smartphone for causing distraction is just as flawed
as blaming a pedometer for making someone climb too many stairs.”
Therefore, to most effectively deal with distraction, we need to learn to deal with discomfort.
There are 4 steps to mastering your internal triggers.
Step 1 - look for the discomfort that precedes the distraction, and focus on the internal
trigger. What emotions and thoughts come up prior to engaging with the distraction?
Step 2 - write down the internal trigger. Note the time of day, what you were doing,
and how you felt when you noticed the internal trigger.
Step 3 - explore your sensations with curiosity, not with contempt. Think of this as an extension
of the mindfulness practices we’ve discussed on the channel.
Step 4 - be extra cautious during liminal moments. Liminal moments are the transition
instances from one task to another throughout the day. For example, let’s say you open
a tab in a browser, but it’s taking long to load, and then you open up another while
waiting. These are critical moments that can determine whether you stay on task or get
off track and go down a 2 hour YouTube binge.
I love Nir’s take on fun. Fun doesn’t require enjoyment. Rather, by reimagining
difficult work as fun and rewarding in its own way, you’ll find yourself empowered
to do more. Have you ever noticed that you derived deep satisfaction, even maybe some
fun, after working through a challenging assignment or problem? That’s the beauty in enjoying
the process and noticing the nuances and the hidden beauty beyond the surface level monotony.
One should also be careful to not to overlook the importance of identity and temperament.
If you label yourself as having poor self-control, guess what, you’ll act in ways that are
more aligned with lacking self-control. When you inevitably fall short on your goals, don’t
beat yourself up, but rather approach the failing with self-compassion. Paradoxically,
self-compassion makes you less likely to deviate in the future compared to being strict with
yourself because you break the vicious cycle of stress that so often accompanies failure.
Remember, obstacles and setbacks are part of the growth process, not a hindrance to
it.
Make Time for Traction If distraction pulls you away from your goals,
traction is what brings you closer to them. And unless you plan ahead, it’s difficult
to know the difference between traction and distraction.
As Seneca 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.”
While we may idolize the perks of freedom, we actually perform better under constraints.
Limitations give us a structure, while a blank schedule and a lengthy to-do-list torments
us with too many choices.
Nir is a strong advocate of timeboxing, where you closely schedule out your day in advance.
Ideally, you should eliminate all white space from your calendar so you know how you want
to spend your time each day. That way, if you’re not doing what you’re supposed
to be doing, then you’re off track.
Although your aim is to follow the time boxed schedule as closely as possible, understand
you’ll never achieve perfection. Rather, each week, reflect on where your schedule
didn’t work out in the prior week so you can make it easier to follow the subsequent
week. Over time, your schedule, and ability to stick to it, will improve.
When first approaching timeboxing, start with your personal time, meaning at the most basic
level, what are the things you need to do? Sleep, hygiene, meals, and the like. After
that, focus on how spending your time would reflect your values. For some people, that
translates to carving a few hours every night for friends or family. For others grinding
through medical school, it may be important to schedule different types of study sessions
around a daily exercise routine.
Remember, you will never be perfect at this, but don’t beat yourself up when you miss
the mark. Think of yourself as a scientist, experimenting and tweaking your schedule and
refining it week after week. Remind yourself that showing up is the most important part.
Not showing up guarantees failure. You can’t always control what you get out of a work
session, but you can always control whether or not you’ll show up and how much time
you put into a task.
Hack Back External Triggers If you’re anything like me, you have issues
with external triggers. You’re not alone. Even in healthcare, external triggers can
be a cause of medical errors. At Kaiser South San Francisco, nurses wore brightly colored
vests to let others know that they were dispensing medications and not to interrupt them. With
this simple intervention, there was a 47% reduction in errors.
Email is a commonly misused tool, and there are several reasons it tends to go so wrong.
First, it’s a variable reward system. As we know from the most basic of psych studies,
the uncertainty of variable reward results in a much stronger draw. We often find ourselves
checking email impulsively multiple times a day, waiting for new messages.
Second, reciprocity, whereby humans are more likely to respond in kind to the actions of
another, pushes us to feel like we should respond to the messages we find in our inbox.
And third, necessity in our current student and work environments. If you wanted to get
away from email, good luck navigating college, medical school, or even your job.
Luckily, addressing the issues with email is relatively straightforward. To receive
fewer emails, we need to send fewer emails. Nir suggests that if it’s not an urgent
email, tell the sender that you have office hours every week on a certain day at a certain
time, where they can swing by to ask the question. This has two benefits. First, they are able
to come up with an answer for themselves. And second, difficult questions are best handled
in person or via a phone call anyway rather than email. While this is most appropriate
for those who are working corporate jobs, you can still apply a similar approach as
a student. For those questions that are less urgent and less conducive to email, don’t
be afraid to suggest speaking about it in person the next time you see them.
Delaying your email delivery is also a sneaky trick that is surprisingly effective. If you
respond quickly to someone’s email, you are reinforcing that email is a great way
to get a quick reply from you. Don’t be surprised if they respond again quickly soon
after. As Med School Insiders grew, I learned this the hard way and was soon overrun with
emails. By instead writing the email but scheduling it to send later in the week, which is possible
to do with most modern email clients, you’ll break the chain and slow the rate of communication.
Lastly, batching your emails is far more efficient than the constant checking throughout the
day. A big part of this is due to the time it takes our brain to switch between tasks.
I batch at the beginning and end of the work days, allowing myself to be more intentional
during the middle — doing what is on my task list, not serving someone else’s.
Now let’s talk about your biggest distraction — your smartphone.
First, remove apps you no longer need. I removed games from my phone back in college and I’ve
never looked back.
Second, replace functions where appropriate. If you use your phone to check the time, why
not replace the time function with a watch? You can also remove your social media apps
from your phone and use them from your computer at predetermined times in your timeboxed schedule.
Third, rearrange your apps. He suggests three categories - primary tools, for apps that
help you accomplish defined tasks that you do frequently. For example, getting a ride
or finding a location. Slot machines, for apps like email, Twitter, Instagram, and other
social media. And third, aspirations, which is for apps that encourage you to do things
you want to do more of, like meditation, journaling, yoga, reading, or podcasts.
Fourth, reclaim your attention, which translates to disabling most notifications. As sound
notifications are the most intrusive, you should be highly selective with sound — Nir
recommends sounds on for only text and phone calls. Visual notifications are the second
most intrusive, and for those he primarily relies on badges.
Prevent Distractions with Pacts Pacts are pre-commitment devices, whereby
you remove a future choice in order to reign back your impulsivity. There are a few different
types.
Effort pacts are a precommitment that increase the amount of effort required to do an undesirable
action. By making unwanted behaviors more difficult to perform, you’re adding friction
to becoming distracted. For example, I talk about focus apps on your computer like Freedom,
Focus, or SelfControl, which prevent you from being distracted away from work while on your
computer.
A price pact is where you put money on the line. This takes advantage of loss aversion,
whereby people are more motivated to avoid losses than they are to seek gains. Nir uses
a “burn or burn” calendar. Either he burns calories with exercising, or he burns the
$100 bill that he has taped to his exercise calendar if he misses a day.
Last, identity pacts are a function of your perception and beliefs about yourself. This
can prove tremendously powerful in behavior change. For example, when I went on a plant-based
diet in medical school, avoiding meat was surprisingly easy simply because my identity
around what I did and didn’t eat had changed. And the beautiful thing about identity change
is that the more we stick to our plans and our new formed identity, the more we enforce
it.
How to Have Indistractable Relationships Becoming indistractable isn’t a solo task
— distraction is contagious. When your friend pulls out her phone at dinner, it acts as
an external trigger, prompting you to become more likely to pull yours out as well. We
call this social contagion, whereby we copy the behavior of others around us.
Paul Graham, famous Silicon Valley entrepreneur writes about social antibodies, which are
social norms that act as defenses against new harmful behaviors. For example, in the
mid-20th century, smoking indoors, around kids, and just about any place was considered
more or less normal. But now in 2020, norms have drastically changed, and we’ve adopted
social antibodies to discourage and shun such behavior. If we develop new norms to make
it taboo to check one’s phone when in the company of others, it’ll be a strong force
in the fight against distraction.
Remember, being indistractable means striving to do what you say you will do. It does not
mean you’ll be perfect or never fail. We all do, and will continue, to struggle with
distraction. The game isn’t to beat distraction, but to constantly get better at managing it.
If you enjoyed this video, pick up the book, link in the description. I also had an awesome
conversation with Nir Eyal about Indistractable and other topics. Click here to check it out,
or watch my other book summaries here. Much love, and I’ll see you guys in that next
one.