In this talk at 2018 Habit Summit, author Nir Eyal describes a new model for managing distraction.
TRANSCRIPT:
Nir Eyal – Author of Hooked
You know many people think that we are going through a distraction crisis. But I think that there’s a lot more at stake than our broken noses and our bruised egos.
A few years ago, I wrote this book about how technology changes our habits. And I wrote this book for two reasons.
The first reason I wrote the book was for people like you — people who are building the kind of products and services that can help people live better lives by helping them build healthy habits.
But there’s another reason I wrote this book. You see around this time I found that technology was changing my behavior in ways that I didn’t always like.
I remember one time I was sitting with my daughter. We were having some quality father-daughter time and we were using this book of activities for daddies and daughters. And one activity in the book was to ask each other this question: ‘What superpower would you want?’
And I wish I could tell you in that moment what my daughter said. But I can’t. Because right then and there I was distracted by my device.
But if you asked me today what superpower I would want, I would want the power to be ‘Indistractable’.
Being indistractable is the skill of this century. When we think about the workplace as automation increases, the kind of jobs which will continue to be valuable are the ones that require human focus and creativity.
When it comes to our social lives, when we think about the importance of having close friendships and how we can only build those relationships, if we meet both face to face with body and mind.
You know, psychologists tell us that loneliness is as detrimental to our health and well-being as obesity and smoking.
And then regarding our kids what kind of example are we setting, if the impression they have of us is of the top of our heads as we’re scrolling on our devices?
So what I’d like to share with you this morning is what I’ve learned over the past five years, since writing my first book around this question of:
How do we manage distraction? How do we become indistractable?
And to start I want to share with you a story from a friend of mine.
This is Dr. Chance. She’s a Harvard-trained psychologist and she studies many of the things that we look at in terms of how products and services change people’s behaviors.
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A few years ago, she started using a particular product that started as a healthy habit and became an unhealthy obsession. The device that she formed this obsession over was a pedometer, specifically the Striiv pedometer.
At first it helped her do a few more steps every day. It helped her live a little bit more healthfully. But then it became an unhealthy obsession when at midnight one day she received this notification from the Striiv pedometer that told her of a challenge.
It said: ‘If you walk 20 stairs right now, we’ll give you 20 points!’
And so she thought well I could do that!
She walked down her to the stairs to her basement and back up. And as soon as she got to the top of the stairs, the app rang out again and said – ‘Guess what? If you do 40 more stairs we’ll give you triple points!’ So she did that too.
And for the next two hours, Dr.Chance walked 2,000 stairs. And to put that in perspective that’s 300 stairs less than climbing to the top of the Empire State Building.
She woke up the next morning; she had a terrible neck ache and she knew that something had to change.
What was this strange force that captured Dr. Chance’s mind that night?
What happened is that she came under the influence of Akrasia. Akrasia is this tendency that we have to do things against our better judgment. Now the word was first coined over 2,500 years ago by the Greek philosopher Socrates and Plato who noticed this tendency that all of us have to do things against our better judgment.
And the fact that people have been struggling with distraction for that long should give us some solace. This is not a new problem.
But if we are to understand the problem of distraction, we have to understand the psychology of Akrasia.
So we can think of it this way. Distraction is on one side of the spectrum – these things that we do against our judgment. These things that we don’t really want to do.
The opposite of distraction is ‘traction’. And you notice both words end in the word ‘action’, reminding us that both ‘distraction’ and ‘traction’ are things that we do, not things that happen to us.
And that’s not typically how we think about distraction. Many people will say, ‘You know, I was concentrating but then the phone rang and I got distracted!’
But what we’re doing is conflating the external trigger – the notification, the ring, the ding that distracted us with what we did in response to that interruption.
Now external triggers we see around us every day, but what is just as much a source of distraction are these internal triggers. These uncomfortable sensations that originate within us, that prompt us to either traction or distraction.
If we are going to manage distraction, we have to start by understanding these internal triggers.
You see the body gets us to act by making us feel these uncomfortable sensations that we seek to escape. It’s called homeostasis.
If you feel cold, you put on a jacket.
If you feel uncomfortably hot, you take it off.
If you feel hunger pangs, you eat.
And when you’re stuffed, you stop!
Those are physiological sensations.
But the same rule applies to psychological states, when we feel emotions that we’re looking to escape.
So when we’re feeling lonely, we might check Facebook
When we’re uncertain we Google
When we’re bored we might check the news or stock price or sports scores or Reddit or whatever.
There are lots of companies and products and services out there that will help us rid ourselves of those negative internal states, those uncomfortable emotions.
So if we’re going to manage distraction we have to start there by realizing that the source of much of this discomfort comes from these uncomfortable psychological states.
You see there’s more to Dr. Chance’s story that I didn’t tell you.
What Dr. Chance told me is that in this period of time when she became obsessed with her pedometer, she was going through a really rough patch. Her marriage was falling apart and she was under a lot of stress and pressure to find a full-time teaching career.
So what she told me and what she’s allowed me to share with you today is that Dr. Chance was using her pedometer as an escape from an uncomfortable reality.
And the fact is if you’re dealing with something as difficult as the pain of going through a divorce, then your smartphone or Facebook, or whatever, your pedometer isn’t the real source of the problem.
In my case I’ll admit to you that when I was with my daughter and after so many hours of toddler time and the thousandth game of Uno, I needed a break. But I probably could have handled it in a much healthier way.
You know, some problems, some things that cause us this internal discomfort are problems that we can fix. And we of course should when we can.
But not every problem can be easily fixed. For example, the pain of going through a divorce, a difficult work environment, these things take time to work themselves out.
But what we can do is to learn to cope. Also with the low-grade pain that many of us experience throughout the day, things like boredom and loneliness and fatigue, etc.
So how do we cope? How do we learn to cope with internal triggers in a healthier way?
Well, we have to start by realizing that most distraction starts from within. And the first step psychologists tell us is to note the sensation. That by simply naming what it is that we’re feeling, we start to gain control over that sensation.
Then the next thing we need to do is to begin to crowd out that sensation with curiosity.
You know what many people do, most of us, myself included, is to tell ourselves, ‘Don’t feel that right now. Push it down, don’t feel that negative sensation.’ That’s in fact psychologists instruct us to do the exact opposite.
That by instead getting curious about that sensation and doing what psychologists call ‘Surfing the Urge’. Taking our curiosity almost as the surfboard to ride that wave for a few minutes, until that sensation passes.
One technique I really like is called the Ten Minute Rule, where I tell myself I can give in to any urge any temptation as long as I wait just ten minutes and get curious about that sensation until it passes.
And I’ll tell you more techniques later on the presentation of what you can do during those ten minutes.
So the first thing we’ve got to do is to manage those internal triggers. But there’s a lot we can do to help make traction more likely.
But of course there’s this difficult question we have to answer at this point which is:
What exactly is the difference between traction and distraction?
How do we know the difference between these things we want to do and these things we don’t want to do?
I mean after all if you would ask Dr. Chance in that moment at 2:00 a.m. – ‘Do you want to be climbing these stairs up and down all night?’ She would tell you, ‘Yeah, get out of my way!’
You see, distraction tricks us. It tells us that we want to do the thing we’re doing even though in retrospect we’ll regret it. We don’t want to do that thing.
So how do we tell the difference between traction and distraction? The only way is to plan ahead. You see you can’t call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from.
You know many times when I have worked with folks to try and help them manage distraction, they tell me, ‘Oh my god! There’s so much distraction out there. I can’t get anything done!’
And then I ask them you know, ‘Would you mind if I looked at your calendar? Could I see what you plan to do today that you’ve got distracted from doing?’
And oftentimes they show me their calendar and there’s nothing on it. Just big white spaces of time. See the fact is if you don’t schedule your day, someone else will.
So we can use a technique that psychologists call ‘Implementation intentions’ – which is a fancy way of saying planning out what we will do, when we will do it. To make sure that we become more likely to do the things we really want to do.
So take into an extreme it might look something like this. And now catch your breath. The first time I saw this planning every minute of your day, I thought this was a terrible idea and something that would be impossible to do.
But the goal here isn’t necessarily to always stay perfectly on track. The goal here is to not let distraction take you off course, by convincing you you want to do something that you don’t really want to do.
So by planning ahead, by having a template every week for what we would ideally like to do with our time, we become much more likely to stay on track. To do those acts of traction as opposed to getting distracted.
So we’ve got to make time for traction in our day and so we can do several things.
For example, planning the time, not the output. You know a lot of people, myself included I used to plan I’m going to do this task and that task. But the fact is that studies have shown that people are awful at estimating how long something takes to do, right!
We think we can do things in much less time than they actually take. Because there’s all these exogenous factors that take more time. We have to get input from other people, we’re not really good at judging how long it takes to make a presentation, or write a memo.
So instead of planning the output, the one thing we can control is our time. And so we want to plan for the time, not necessarily the output.
Then what we want to do is to get rid of low value work. A study in Harvard Business Review found that about 41% of what you do every day as a knowledge worker is spent on work you didn’t need to do – low value tasks.
The good news is that we live in an age where we can outsource many of these tasks. So for example, one technology I use all the time is called X.ai that books my meetings for me. So I don’t have to play this email ping-pong game trying to plan meetings with folks because the artificial intelligence does it for me. And there’s lots of tools like this.
Speaking of messaging we have got to find a way to tame the messaging monster. You know studies have found that about 25% of the emails you receive from your colleagues are emails you didn’t have to receive and about 25% of the email we send are emails we didn’t have to send.
So in order to make time for traction, we’ve got to find ways to manage these messages.
Now part of the reason that all these messages are so disruptive to our day-to-day lives is that they send us all these pings, and dings, and rings, a notification in the form of external triggers which can lead to distraction.
So how do we manage these external triggers?
You know in some professions, managing external triggers is literally a matter of life and death.
If I were to ask you to think of what are the top three causes of death in the United States. What are the 3 major causes of death? I’ll give you the first two.
Number one is heart disease; number two is cancer. What’s number three? Car accidents or Alzheimer’s or stroke? Not even close.
If it was a disease the number three cause of death in the United States would be prescription mistakes. Healthcare providers dosing out the wrong amount or the wrong types of drugs to their patients. 400,000 people are harmed every single year through prescription mistakes.
Now most hospitals in America just think this is a fact of life, there’s nothing they can do about it.
But then a brave group of nurses at UCSF decided to figure out what was going on. And they found the source of this problem was in fact external triggers leading to distraction.
Their study found that when someone was dosing out medication they were interrupted on average 10 times per every dosing session. And that led to a ton of these prescription mistakes.
And here’s a solution they found. They found a solution that not only cost just pennies but also reduced prescription mistakes by 88%. You want to see what the solution is? Vests, plastic vests that the nurses wear to tell their colleagues, ‘Do not interrupt me. Right now I’m busy dosing out medication!’
88% reduction in prescription mistakes. Unbelievable!
So what lesson can we take from these nurses?
What can we learn from this and apply to our own workplaces? How about something like this?
What if we started using a little sign on our desk especially for those of you who work in open office plans? What if we put a little bit, a little sign that said: ‘For right now I’m busy doing focus work!’ In fact I’m going to give you a link to a little slide that you can print and cut out for yourself to try out and see if this works for you.
I also found that this is effective in the home as well. You know my wife and I both work from home and we often found that we would interrupt each other when we really need to be doing focused work!
And we would find as many of you, who have kids know, that just as when you sit down to do some focus work that’s the time when your kid wants to interrupt and get your attention.
So here’s what Julie did. She bought this – what we call the concentration crown. Six dollars on Amazon. It’ll even light up and it tells everyone around her that she’s busy doing concentrated work! And it’s cut down on all those interruptions from me and from my daughter.
There’s a lot we can do online as well for our digital devices. For example, one of my favorite features in the new iOS is this: ‘Do not disturb while driving mode!’ One button and anyone who calls or text gets a notification that says ‘I’m sorry. I can’t talk right now! I’m driving!’
Of course they don’t need to know if you’re driving right. The same results come from using it.
Now we can also do this on our desktops as well: clearing all that digital clutter, all those external triggers that lead us towards distraction. We can do it on our mobile devices, clearing all those notifications that can distract us so that we have a more pristine environment on our phone.
Now we’ve got to start hacking back these external triggers by asking ourselves a fundamental question. That question is:
‘Is this external trigger serving me? Or am I serving it?’
There’s nothing wrong with external triggers. If the external trigger prompts us to traction, it’s great! But when it prompts us towards distraction we’ve got to do something about it, starting with changing these notification settings.
You know, two-thirds of people who own a smartphone, never adjust their notification settings. It takes all of 10 minutes to make sure that we turn off the triggers that don’t serve us.
And then finally we’ve got to stop using distracting devices in meetings, whether that’s in a social engagement with our friends or in a business context. These distracting devices tend to have a secondhand smoke effect. So that when you see a work colleague checking their email that serves as an external trigger, prompting you to check it as well.
So if we are going to meet in the real world, we’ve got to be present both in body and mind.
Finally, one more technique and this is almost like a safety net technique that I want to share with you. That you use after you’ve dealt with the internal triggers, after you’ve made time for traction, after you’ve hacked back those external triggers.
Now we need to deal with the distraction itself by making it more difficult to get distracted.
And to illustrate the point I want to take you back 2,500 years to the story of Ulysses, in Homer’s Odyssey.
Now Ulysses is this hero that has to sail his ship home past all these trials and tribulations. And one of the trials that he has to pass through is to safely navigate his crew by the Island of the Sirens.
Now the sirens are these mythical creatures that sing this beautiful song that enchants anyone who hears it, making them crash their ships onto the shore of the Island of Sirens.
Now Ulysses knows this and he plans ahead. He makes sure that he doesn’t get distracted. And here’s what he does. He tells every one of his crew to stuff their ears with beeswax, so they can’t hear Siren’s song.
But he wants to hear the siren’s song but he doesn’t want to get distracted. So he tells them to bind him to the mast of the ship, and no matter what he says, and what he does, he tells his crew don’t let me go. And it works.
The ship sails right by safely and safely passes by the island of the sirens.
Now I’m hoping at this point you see the metaphor here, right. You’re Ulysses. There’s lots of distracting stuff out there. And of course that could be you as well crash there on the ships of the siren’s shore.
So how do we use this lesson? How can we apply this lesson to modern life?
Well there’s a lot we can do to take these Ulysses pacts. For example you may have seen this product on Shark Tank recently. This is called Kitchen safe. The kitchen safe is a little container. You put whatever it is you don’t want access to into the container.
There’s a little lock and timer built into the device. You set the timer for how long you don’t want access to whatever it is – the muffins and the doughnuts or your cell phone, whatever. And you’re making a little pact with yourself! So that during that period of time you can’t access whatever is in the kitchen safe.
We can also use technology to block distracting technology. These are three apps that I use every single day:
The Forest app: Whenever I want to do some focused work I open the Forest app. I dial in how much time I want to work and I get this little virtual tree. If I pick up the phone and I do anything with it that tree dies. It’s just a stupid little virtual tree… Who cares right. And yet it reminds me that I’ve taken a pact with myself to stay focused.
I’d do something similar on my desktop. I use an app called Self-control that blocks out distracting websites. By the way all of these are free tools that we can use.
And then finally my latest favorite app is this app called Time guard which allows me to access websites and apps that would otherwise be distracting when I want to access them. So you see here it says 6:30 to 8:30. That’s my time to check Reddit or YouTube or Facebook or whatever. And it’s no longer a distraction because that’s exactly what I want to be doing during that period of time. That’s my social media time. So it went from distraction to traction.
Okay so we can reduce distraction by taking these pacts, by using tech to block out tech for example wit by taking these pacts.
But there’s one downside and one warning I want to provide. And that warning is that sometimes when people fall off the wagon, when people fail, it’s very difficult for them to get back on, to get back on track. And we all inevitably fail on the path to becoming indistractable.
The solution is self-compassion. Studies have shown us that people who are more self-compassionate are more likely to reach their long-term goals. And the way to be self-compassion is to talk to ourselves as a third party might. Just like a good friend would talk to us. Maybe the way we would talk to Dr. Chance.
Let me tell you what ended up happening with Dr. Chance.
You see after she had this experience with her Striiv pedometer and she woke up the next morning with this terrible neck pain. She started making some changes in her life. She ended up getting a divorce but she says she’s in a much better place today.
She also finally found her full-time teaching job where she still teaches today at Yale. She started managing these, she started getting more traction in her day by making time for physical fitness as opposed to relying on those external triggers that weren’t serving her brought from the Striiv pedometer.
So the point here is that what we can do is to use these four techniques in concert. We can use them together. There is no magic bullet to fighting distraction.
However if we deal with the internal triggers, if we make time for traction, if we hack back the external triggers, and if we reduce distraction with pacts we can start to manage distraction.
And as for me in preparing for this talk, I sat down with my daughter and I said, ‘Look, I’m really sorry. But I remember I asked you this question and I didn’t hear what you said. Could you tell me what would be your superpower that you would most want?’
And here’s what she told me honest-to-goodness, this is what she said. She said that she would want the power to be kind.
I was so glad that I could be there to hear what she said. But then I also thought about a little later and I realized that being kind isn’t some made-up superpower. We can all find ways to be kind, can’t we?
Just as we can all find ways to manage distraction. We all have this power, we can do this.
You see psychologists tell us that the number one determinant of whether someone changes their behavior is their belief in their own power to do so.
So we all have the power to manage distraction. We can all become indistractable.
