Stop blaming technology
– distraction starts within. Manage your inner triggers to enjoy greater focus
and a fuller life
Need to know
‘Just a second. I just need to respond to this one thing,’ I said to my daughter, as I attended to my iPhone.
Only much later could I count the mistakes in that
statement. No, it wouldn’t take ‘just a second’; no, I didn’t ‘need’ to respond
to the email – I’m an author and researcher, and thus rarely receive messages
that have a drop-everything-and-answer urgency to them. And no, it wouldn’t be
‘one thing’. My brain would be too tempted, I’d feast on it all.
After I finished, I looked up and my daughter was
gone. The worst part: before I became distracted, we had been playing a lovely
game, telling each other what superpower we most wished for. It could have
brought us closer together, but I’d just blown the spirit and substance of it
big-time.
If you’re a parent in the 21st century, I bet
you’ve experienced your own version of this. But it’s not just parents, it’s all
of us in our interactions with each other. Distraction has become the norm.
We’re blessed with pocket-sized supercomputers that connect us to anyone and
everyone, and a buffet of information. But there’s a dark side: those same
gadgets distract us, often at the moments that matter most.
Of course, smartphones didn’t invent distraction –
they’re just the latest culprit. Before that, we blamed television. And before
that, it was the telephone, or comic books, or the radio. Go back more than
2,000 years, and Socrates was even criticising the written word, for causing
‘forgetfulness in the learners’ souls’.
Still, our present feels different, with the
sources of distraction seeming greater in number and more ubiquitous. One study in 2014
showed that when two people are talking, the mere presence of a smartphone
resting on a table is enough to change the character of their conversation.
That’s a tame example. To see the seriousness of the problem, look at the
sobering statistics on
‘distracted driving’ in the United States.
After I abandoned my daughter and our game for an
utterly inconsequential email, I realised I needed to deal with my distraction
problem. First, I tried a popular approach: I blamed technology and made a
serious attempt at a ‘digital detox’. I bought a flip phone, subscribed to a
print newspaper, and even purchased a 1990s-era word processor without an
internet connection. I convinced myself that, once I banished all the
technology from my life, I’d become the disciplined writer and focused father
I’d always strived to be.
Talk about a rude awakening. Sitting at my ancient
word processor, my eyes began to peer over to my now-tantalising bookshelf.
‘Hmmm,’ I said to myself, ‘I really should take a glance at this book’. I’d
justify the distraction as necessary for ‘research’. And if it wasn’t reading,
then I’d find something else – the laundry that needed to be
folded right now, my desk that needed to be tidied-up this
minute. The technology wasn’t distracting me. I was
distracting me.
That’s when I started a five-year journey to
understand distraction, its
causes and its cures. I discovered a great deal that I found surprising and
counterintuitive, and I developed methods to deal with my distraction that
actually worked – and didn’t involve me trying to turn back time and operate a
flip phone. I realised that distraction often begins from within, not without,
and found that the fix came from identifying and managing the psychological
discomfort that leads us off track.
As often as not, distraction is your brain ducking
challenging feelings such as boredom, loneliness, insecurity, fatigue and
uncertainty. These are the internal triggers – the root causes –
that prompt you to find the comfort of distraction and open a browser tab, Twitter
or email, instead of focusing on the matter at hand. Once you identify these
internal triggers, you can decide to respond in a more advantageous manner. You
won’t always be able to control how you feel – but you can learn to control how
you react to the way you feel. A trigger that once sent you to Twitter can
perhaps lead instead to 10 deep breaths.
Distraction, in other words, is a symptom of a
problem – not the problem itself. Those deeper and systemic reasons – such as
an inability to cope with fear, anxiety or stress – deserve our concern,
because it’s only when we start to address them that we can make real progress.
When we begin to understand what we’re trying to avoid by clicking over to
Twitter or checking the news for the 10th time today, we can begin to address
the issue itself, and not medicate it through more distraction. We also begin
to appreciate how habitual the act of avoiding discomfort via distraction can
be, and how much it’s become a part of how we work and live.
The good news is that there’s something paradoxical
about discomfort: it’s actually the best tool we have for evolving and
developing as a species. Feeling bad isn’t actually bad; it’s what helped us
survive. Writing in 2001, the American psychologist Roy Baumeister and his
colleagues observed: ‘If
satisfaction and pleasure were permanent, there might be little incentive to
continue seeking further benefits or advances.’ If we didn’t feel bad, in other
words, we’d never achieve good.
Once you understand the depth of distraction, you
can start to manage it and improve. After years of experiments, I found myself
less distracted – a quality that improved nearly every aspect of my life. It
turns out that being able to focus on the subjects and people in my life who
matter improved everything from my health to my happiness to my productivity.
That can seem obvious, but I couldn’t have fully appreciated the joys of living
an indistractable life if I hadn’t gotten there on my own after a five-year
journey. Being indistractable can lead you to not just change your life for the
better, but also experience life fully.
What to do
Identifying the triggers that made you feel bad in
the first place requires self-exploration. When you notice yourself feeling
distracted, pause and ask yourself what you’re feeling. Are you worried? Are
you afraid? Then go one step deeper. What caused the sensation? How does it feel
in your body?
In exploring my own internal triggers, I began to
appreciate that my anxiety about a project, which might lead me to find a
tempting Wikipedia rabbit hole, was actually adaptive: the fact that I was
anxious was good because it meant I was trying to become better. It was
sometimes even as easy as saying to myself: ‘You’re getting distracted right
now because you’re worried this won’t be up to snuff. That’s okay. It means
you’re trying to do your best work, and that’s something to feel good about.’
It seems like a simple mental trick, but even that thought can have a profound
influence in keeping you on track.
There’s an interesting paradox about internal
triggers: they can be big, imposing, powerful issues, and yet the fixes can
sometimes be easy and quick. Here’s an example: let’s say that an internal
trigger when you’re about to get started on a looming project is boredom. You
just can’t bring yourself to get excited about doing your taxes. And because
you get bored, you get distracted. But if you know you’re going to get bored,
you can find ways to avoid the distraction that will soothe the boredom. For
instance, if you set a time limit to work on the otherwise mind-numbing task
that is so short, you won’t have a chance to get bored. Anyone can work on
their taxes for just 10 minutes. This is called the 10-minute rule, and
it’s an effective way to avoid distractions of all sorts. The point is to
anticipate the internal trigger and then intercept it with a new routine rather
than allowing yourself to slink away into doing something you didn’t intend to
do.
In the case of my interaction with my daughter, the
internal trigger might have been anxiety about work or fear of missing out (on an email). But I
can address both of those proactively, so that they don’t interfere with precious
daddy-daughter time. In the case of my work anxiety, I could make sure that
someone on my team is monitoring incoming messages. I could put up an ‘out of
office’ email that encourages people to call me if there’s really an emergency.
Or in reality, I could get comfortable with the discomfort that I might indeed
be missing out on something, but that’s all right too. Any one of those is a
better and more constructive response to the internal trigger than being
distracted.
Whatever approach you take to address your inner
triggers, it’s encouraging to note that merely recognising uncomfortable
feelings and identifying them could be beneficial. For instance, in a
smoking-cessation study, researchers
found that participants who learned to acknowledge and explore their cravings
managed to quit smoking at double the rates of those in the American Lung
Association’s best-performing cessation programme. Just identifying and
investigating a craving had a tremendous impact.
Reframe
Once you’ve identified the triggers, you can
reframe the task at hand. Sure, you might be ‘forced to do your taxes’. But
another way of thinking about that is that you ‘get to review last year’s
business successes’. It sounds laughable, but it works. When I hit rough
patches mid-book writing, I would say: ‘I get to share this with my audience,’
as opposed to: ‘I really have to work on the book today.’
Here’s one strategy: I found the fun in whatever I
was doing. Yes, I know, this is where you roll your eyes, but hear me out. I
learned to stay focused on the tedious work of writing books by looking for and
finding the mystery embedded in my work. I wasn’t ‘writing’, I was ‘exploring’.
I wasn’t Ernest Hemingway; I was Scooby-Doo. Research indicates that even the
simple act of thinking of something that you don’t enjoy as fun can have a
powerful and real effect on your brain’s interpretation of it. ‘Fun,’ writes
the game designer Ian Bogost in his book Play Anything (2016),
‘turns out to be fun even if it doesn’t involve much (or any) enjoyment.’
To take a different example – let’s say you want to
exercise consistently, but dislike lifting weights or jogging. Again, you could
find ways to view the whole experience as a positive one. Envision every drop
of sweat as a sign that your body is getting stronger. Learn to see the burn as
tiny muscle fibres getting better at doing their job. Perceived difficulty is
often a matter of perspective, and you can choose to re-imagine almost any
discomfort as a blessing.
The benefits of reframing also extend to how you
think about your own tendencies. Before I focused on distraction, I used to
chastise myself for being a ‘distracted person’. ‘Stop getting distracted Nir!’
my brain would shout … at itself. A dive into the research showed that this was
making my problem worse, not better. Instead, I began to do what the
contemporary wellbeing literature recommends:
I showed compassion to myself and my struggles. I began to speak to myself the
way I might to a friend: ‘Nir, you’re distracted right now, and that’s OK.
What’s causing it? Let’s figure it out.’ These simple thoughts helped me
reframe my temperament, which is a critical step in addressing
distraction.
Identify your priorities
Self-exploration and reframing are all in the head.
You also need to attack the substance of your work life, noticing not just
where your mind goes, but where your time goes as well. It will help you stay
focused if you make sufficient time for ‘traction’ – the actions that draw you
toward what you want in life. That can involve leaving time for relationships,
fun or diversions too – but, crucially, it all has to keep a place on your
calendar.
Here’s one method: turn your values into time. Do
you want to make your family a priority? Figure out how much time you actually
want to spend with them and reserve that time on your schedule. Want to focus
on your health? Again, decide how many hours you want to devote, and block off
specific chunks of time in your schedule. In translating your values into time,
you take something fuzzy and undefined (eg, ‘health’) and turn it into
something definite and countable (ie, ‘hours’).
When I did this, it gave me room to give in to
things that I enjoyed, without letting them become distractions from what most
mattered. So if I wanted, for example, to scroll social media, I would give
myself an hour on my calendar to do it. It meant that I could browse Twitter or
Facebook guilt-free – as opposed to using those things as a way of avoiding
other work.
‘Hack back’ against external triggers
You’ll notice, I didn’t lead with this. The
preliminary work of figuring out the internal triggers and turning your values
into time is what allows you to then figure out what to do about those pesky
notifications; to create environments that are conducive to focus and that help
you defeat distraction. That means getting a handle on your email, and replying
only during set times. It means using real-time communications channels such as
Slack deliberately and sparingly. And it means giving your smartphone a spring
clean, removing apps that no longer serve you, and disabling notifications you
don’t need. This process also involves culling your media diet and deciding
which feeds you want to ignore and avoid altogether. In sum, it means regaining
a measure of control over your work environment and your information inputs –
giving yourself the maximum time and room for focused work.
Plan ahead
Forethought is the antidote to impulsivity: you can
use a ‘precommitment’ to a particular course of action to exert a powerful
influence on your future behaviour. If you precommit, you make a choice in
advance, and pledge to stick to it – and then you don’t need to depend so much
on the whims of self-control or willpower in the moment. Consider a simple
example: once you buy a plane ticket for a friend’s wedding, it’s rare that you
back out. Another example: once you put money away in a retirement account that
has a penalty for early withdrawal, you’re less likely to take money out. Research
in health psychology has similarly shown the benefits of these kinds of
pacts – such as committing to visit the gym with a friend or ordering groceries
in advance to reduce in-the-moment temptation. Crucially, precommitment devices
can also help you defeat distraction. I used a precommitment device to finish
my book. It took the form of a price pact: I told a friend of mine I’d give him
$10,000 if I didn’t meet my deadline. I kept my money and finished my book. You
can use pacts with yourself strategically, creating barriers that allow you to
overcome your bad habits and bring out your best work. However, remember to use
precommitments only as the last step. Before you do, be sure to master your internal
triggers, make time for traction, and hack back external triggers, then use
precommitments as the final firewall between you and distraction.
Key points
- Master
your internal triggers. A lot of writing about distraction
focuses on the surface issues: how to turn off notifications on your
phone, how to reduce the apps you use. That is all well and good, but the
process of becoming indistractable runs much deeper. I discovered that if
I started with the tactics – such as eliminating technology – then I’d
just find other ways to distract myself. So I focused on what I call
‘mastering internal triggers’ – what discomfort was I avoiding by turning
to social media or my phone? Then I was able to work on those distractions
and build my work habits around
them.
- Make
time for traction. You have to make a schedule that’s not driven by
ticking off your daily to-do list, but instead helps you achieve the
things you value most. That could be spending time with family, friends,
work, hobbies – anything. But the point is to organise your time around
these domains – specifically, around the things you say you
want to focus on. I’ve found it helpful to be explicit about those values,
and then to turn those values into a time.
- Hack
back external triggers. Ironically, it’s in our work
environments that we’re often the most distracted from doing our work. This
is doubly true today, with more of us working at home where we’re mixing
the personal with the professional. Take a good look at the notifications
that you have activated, both on your phone and on your computer. Think
about how many different interruptions you have during the day. Are all of
these necessary? I highly doubt it, and I know from my experience that
reducing the notifications is a small step that can have a big effect and
often takes just a few minutes. You won’t miss these external triggers,
and the paradox of eliminating a phone screen update when you get a new
Tweet or turning off news alerts is that, in most cases, you won’t notice
what you’re missing. Your brain, however, will thank you for giving it one
less distraction from whatever you’re focused on.
- Prevent
distractions with pacts. Make an agreement with yourself or
others about how you plan to spend your time. This is a useful strategy
for getting over that final hurdle, and it often involves accountability
to systems outside of yourself. Make a bet with a friend to spend your
time the way you say you will. Use third-party apps to block websites that
you know pull you away. In the same way that making automatic
contributions to your retirement accounts sets you up for success, you can
tackle behaviour change by using pacts to take momentary willpower out of
the equation.
Learn more
That doesn’t mean the opposite is true, of course:
absence of evidence, as they say, is not evidence of absence. There’s no
question that overuse of tech can have negative consequences. My own view is
that technology is not inherently good or bad. It has to do with how much tech
you use, who is using it, what they are doing, and what they would be doing
instead of using it.
I admit that puts me in a different camp than many
of my peers who write and research in this space, because I am still a fan of
technology even as I write about its hazards. My book Indistractable (2019)
doesn’t recommend that people move to a cabin in the woods, quit social media,
or block the internet entirely from their lives. I found that such advice,
while well-meaning, didn’t fit with the reality of how most of us live today.
The issue, as I’ve pointed out before, isn’t
principally the technology itself or social media. It’s getting to the root
causes of what leads us to be distracted in the first place. When I worked on
the research for Indistractable, I discovered that I was just as
susceptible to being distracted by a news report or a dirty closet as I was by
a glowing screen. Does that mean I cut out the news, or let my closets go? No.
It meant having to figure out what I was avoiding (writing) and why I was
avoiding it (all the writerly anxieties) and then dealing with those. It also
meant building systems to manage my time, attention and internet use.
Thankfully, technology companies are waking up to
the need for a more balanced relationship
with the devices and services they’ve created. It’s why you’re seeing features
such as ‘Screen Time’ as defaults in Apple products; it’s also why you’re
seeing stronger and more highly tailored parental controls. The big tech
companies are responding to the market’s growing need for sensible technology,
and it’s a promising start. We need to encourage them to keep going – if they
get rewarded for trying to restrain and build controls, then they will keep
doing it.
Finally, and most importantly, we have to remember
that it’s up to us, not them. We have the strategies and tools to deal with
distraction now, and we don’t have to wait for Apple to release a software
update or for Google to change how its browser is built. We can take control of
our attention now, and we can remove and better manage the things that compete
for that attention.
Links & books
My book Indistractable:
How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life (2019) provides
research-backed techniques to overcome distraction. There are more than 30
pages of citations from academic journals and dozens of practical techniques,
as well as a section on raising indistractable kids and building an
indistractable workplace.
SelfControl: I use
this app and recommend it to everyone: it helps you block websites that
distract you.
Surfing the urge (MP3):
an audio-based exercise from the University of Washington that helps an
individual develop the practice of dealing with cravings or urges to behave in
a certain way.
Mixmax: among other
things, this app allows you to delay email delivery – which can help you
control your inbox.
SaneBox: this
software analyses your email habits to determine future email importance and
auto-filter/organise those emails so that the most important get the attention
that they deserve. It also comes with the SaneBlackHole feature that ensures
you never see emails from a particular address ever again.
News Feed Eradicator for
Facebook: a personal favourite, and it does what it says it will do
– makes your News Feed disappear, so you can use the best of Facebook without
getting pulled into the vortex.
Distraction Free for YouTube:
similar to the News Feed Eradicator – this scrubs ads and recommended videos,
so you watch what you came to watch on YouTube.
If you’re anything like me, you want to know the
hard thinking and science behind some of the techniques I’ve outlined above.
And you’re in luck: the past decade has seen an explosion in research on this
issue, which I would argue is a direct response to all of us becoming more
distracted, or at least feeling that way. Here are some of the journal papers,
books and blog posts that helped me understand the psychology of distraction:
There’s a difference between a break and a
distraction: in their book The Distracted Mind: Ancient
Brains in a High-Tech World (2016), Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist,
and Larry Rosen, a psychologist, explain that good breaks can reduce mental fatigue, boost brain
function, and keep us on-task for longer periods. They helped me understand the
distinction between a ‘break’ and a ‘distraction’ – one that allowed me to give
my brain a pause without sending it down a rabbit hole I didn’t intend to go
down.
The rewards of reward-based programmes: pacts
and incentive programmes were one of the most effective interventions for my
issue with distraction, and again, the research bears this out. In their
2015 study, researchers
at the University of Pennsylvania explored incentive programmes for smoking
cessation, and found that those that gave people financial rewards for quitting
smoking led to higher rates of sustained abstinence from smoking. It led me to
think about how I could reward myself for remaining indistractable, and how I
could create pacts that led to the behaviours I wanted.
Your smartphone isn’t the enemy: I
think it’s important to be honest about issues such as ‘technology addiction’
and distraction. In many cases, what you’ll read in the media are sensationalised
accounts designed to make you think that your smartphone is the root of all
evil in the world – particularly as it applies to raising children. I would
encourage people interested in these subjects to take a deep look at the
research; what you’ll find is surprising – technology isn’t rotting people’s
brains indiscriminately, as the psychologist Sarah Rose Cavanagh explains in
her blog post in
2017.
2 SEPTEMBER
2020
