Fight Distraction and Find Focus -- Here's How

The average person is constantly bombarded by distractions. Developing a plan can help you find your grove, keeping distractions at bay.

Jul 05, 2024

Do you know how many times you check your phone every day?

According to one survey, the average person checks their phone 144 times. That means, on average, you’re checking your phone every seven minutes (assuming, of course, you’re asleep for at least eight hours every day).

For perspective, that’s almost nine times every hour. If you find it hard to get work done this could be why. A study conducted by the University of California Irvine shows how problematic distractions are. According to their research, it takes you about 23 minutes to recover from a distraction.

Put another way: it’s literally impossible to focus.

Whether it’s your phone, cigarette breaks, or constantly rummaging through the kitchen to find a snack, you’re surrounded by distractions. You constantly move from one distraction to another, reducing the amount of focused time you are able to spend getting meaningful work done.

The ability to buck this trend is a covetable skill that could become your superpower in the future. Employers want workers who can provide value and work efficiently. If you can master indistractability, you will be indispensable.

In his book Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, Nir Eyal dives into the triggers that drive us to distraction and how creating a plan to minimize the impact of those distractions can make us more productive.

With more and more AI-powered tools coming online, the ability to protect your focus so that you can get high-value work done is more important than ever before. Those who fail to do so will find it impossible to master new skills, let alone accomplish anything of significance.

This essay is a review of Indistractable. It will highlight some key themes from the book and what you, the reader, can do to make yourself indistractable.

Distraction is an internal reaction to psychological discomfort and poor time management. To be indistractable you have to create a plan.

Before you can make yourself indistractable, it’s important to first define what distraction is.

According to Eyal, distraction is:

“The drive to relieve discomfort is the root cause of all our behaviour.”

Distractions come from cues in your environment that trigger internal signals deep within your psyche. Constantly checking Instagram, for example, might emanate from a primal feeling to be liked by your peers. If you think that you’re not good enough you’ll seek out validation that you are.

A distraction represents temporary relief from whatever psychological baggage you’re holding onto. In the book, Eyal highlights four factors that drive our need for distraction:

Boredom
Negativity bias
Rumination
Hedonic adaptation

Anyone who works a desk job at a computer all day can relate to these. Maybe you feel unsatisfied with the work you do and are completely disengaged from it. All the desktop apps and mobile phone notifications you get on a daily basis are cues offering you a sense of relief from a boring, unfulfilling job. Without even realizing it, pseudowork has become a source of relief and workers are addicted to receiving notifications that pseudo work provides.

The good news is cues can go both ways. While someone might be looking for a distraction, another person might be looking for traction. The former pushes you away from achieving your goals while the latter helps you move closer to them.

The key is knowing the difference between traction and distraction and developing a plan to do something about it.

Eyal argues that the best way to combat distraction is to become a better steward of your time. That means being proactive about how you manage it and establishing boundaries to defend it when distraction creeps in.

In the book, he offers three strategies for intentionally using your time:

Time boxing
Eliminating white space in your calendar
Implementing values-based scheduling

By changing your relationship with time you set the groundwork for becoming indistractable. You progressively delay distraction or eliminate it entirely until it’s no longer something you crave.

When you create a plan and implement it, you simultaneously build confidence in yourself. That newfound confidence helps you shift your identity from someone who aspires to be productive to someone who actually is.

Through the process of becoming indistractable you’ll change your identity. This identity shift will allow you to establish new habits that increase your personal productivity and thus satisfaction with work.

Any time you want to change your habits you have to fundamentally change yourself. In the process, you’ll become a whole new person.

Here’s an example of what I mean by that. Earlier this year I qualified for the Boston Marathon. This is a goal I had been working on for the last two and a half years. I didn’t become a Boston Qualifier because of diet and exercise (although that helped). I became a Boston Qualifier because I finally believed I already was one. I donned a new identity and practiced behaviors and habits that someone with that identity would be expected to manifest.

When you adopt a new identity you begin practicing new habits. Those habits represent who you’re striving to be, not who you are at that moment. To combat distraction you have to change your identity and with that the values associated with your new identity.

As Eyal writes:

“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.”

The first step to changing your identity and creating new habits is to bring awareness to sources of distraction. Eyal highlights several in the book:

Interruptions at work
Email
Group chats
Meetings
Your phone
Desktop notifications
Articles you want to read
Social media and news feeds

Many of these distractions have become so integrated with our lives you might not even consider them distractions in the first place. Cal Newport argues in his book Deep Work that these distractions are sources of shallow work that don’t provide much value. Instead, they inhibit productivity and the ability to get meaningful work done.

To combat distraction, Eyal recommends creating rituals to change the cues in your environment and being more intentional with how you use your time. Essentially, he’s calling for you to create a deliberate plan for indistractibility and committing to sticking to it.

The first part of the plan is time management. If you don’t know how to manage your time others will manage it for you. Eyal argues for better time management, writing:

“Our most precious asset — our time — is unguarded, just waiting for someone to steal it. If we don’t plan our day, someone else will.”

Once you’ve developed a plan for how you’ll use your time, you have to create an environment that’s less distracting and more conducive to productivity. This sentiment is echoed in James Clear’s book Atomic Habits.

The easiest way to make a change stick is to reduce friction. Locking up your smartphone or working from an internetless space are two examples of changes you can make in your environment that minimize opportunities for distraction.

After you’ve created distraction-free space you need to create boundaries around your triggers. You’re human after all. Recognize what your triggers are and create rituals and rules to respond to them.

One of my distraction triggers is constantly checking LinkedIn. I don’t use any other social media platforms and because LinkedIn is a professional site, I find spending time on it justifiable. Everytime I do, however, I lose 30–45 minutes of productive work time.

I’ve established boundaries around how I use social media using music. My playlists include transitions which signal to me it’s time to start working. The audio cues put a boundary around my time, protecting it from incessant scrolling on LinkedIn.

Finally, when you’re ready to start tackling work, you need to adopt a new mindset around it. Eyal suggests “reimagin[ing] the task by finding fun in it.” The more you gamify something and it becomes enjoyable to do, the more you’ll want to do it.

This was the case for me with running. I don’t particularly like running but when I gamify it I go into a whole other world. As I accomplish incremental milestones I find myself naturally wanting to work harder. Running becomes a game and it’s something I look forward to doing. Over time all of those little accomplishments have compounded into the one big accomplishment I was chasing — qualifying for the Boston Marathon.

Together, these four components create a plan that Eyal argues can make you indistractable. The point of doing all of this isn’t to become more productive for productivity’s sake. It’s to empower and incentivize yourself to do more — to constantly strive to become a better version of you.

Final takeaway.

Personal productivity has always been a feature of the modern knowledge workforce but it shifted over the last decade and a half to focus on self-growth. Over time we’ve come to define our self worth in light of how much we can accomplish.

Looking ahead, this is going to be harder to do, jeopardizing our perception of our own worth and value as a result. With new AI and automation tools coming online, the way we define productivity and accomplishment is going to radically change. And with so many workers spending the bulk of their time doing pseudo work, the absence of meaningful work will justify putting your job on the chopping block.

This is why cultivating indistractibility is so important. Establishing boundaries around your attention and your time will give you a competitive advantage in the workforce of tomorrow. It will give you the time and space you need to cultivate a craft and eventually master it.

Attention is already becoming the most valuable commodity in our increasingly digital economy. How well you protect and leverage it will determine your success in the years to come.

Indistractable is a quick read with valuable nuggets of wisdom on human psychology and how it maps to our modern technological age. You can pick up a copy online or borrow it from your local library.

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