In this article, I’ll share with you my thoughts about Nir Eyal’s new book “Indistractable – How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.”
Indistractable is Eyal’s second book.
In his first book – Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products – Eyal provided his reader’s practical insights to create user habits that stick and actionable steps for building products people love.
Nir Eyal shares his so-called Hook Model with his readers. That’s a four-step process, which, when embedded into products, subtly encourages customer behavior. Through consecutive “hook cycles,” these products bring people back again and again without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging.
One could say, Indistractable is the antidote to what Eyal supported with his first book Hooked.
In Indistractable, he gives shares some guidelines and measures with his readers, that can be applied to overcome distractions. Distractions, mainly but not only caused by those habit-forming products he describes in Hooked.
It’s a great book. If you only stick to some of the measures, Eyal shares in his book, you will benefit from it already. You will be able to have more control over your attention. You will be able to focus more on the tasks, people, and essential things than before. Finally, you can choose what makes an impact on your life.
Nir Eyal writes about his so-called Indistractable Model.
The Indistractable Model
The Indistractable Model consists of four parts:
- Master INTERNAL TRIGGERS
- Make time for TRACTION
- Hack Back EXTERNAL TRIGGERS
- Prevent DISTRACTION with pacts
The part of the INTERNAL TRIGGERS is about how to deal with discomfort. Eyal also encourages you in this chapter to look for the root cause of the distraction rather than looking for an easy fix.
The TRACTION chapter is mainly about how important it is to have a clear plan of your day scheduled. Ideally, you have your timebox setup for your days set for weeks in advance.
If you do this, you know what you want to do when. It also helps you to see if you experienced a distraction or not. That’s an important step to become indistractable.
The most important question you have to ask yourself when it comes to EXTERNAL TRIGGERS is, “Is this trigger serving me, or am I serving it?”. This part of the book is mainly about defending your FOCUS and about how to hack back all the external triggers like your phone, meetings, notifications, and so on.
Pacts will help you to overcome DISTRACTIONs with precommitment. Eyal shares, why it’s better to plan ahead to be less likely distracted.
There is more
Nir Eyal also provides some good advice about “How to make your workplace indistractable”, “How to raise indistractable children,” and “How to have indistractable relationships”.
Even Google launched some content to take care of this recent, how it seems, hot topic on “How to manage and handle distractions.”
They call it, “Find a balance with technology that feels right for you.”
You can find more info about it here.
Google also has launched and supports the creation of experiments/tools, which you can use and which should help you find a better balance with technology.
On their webpage, you find a showcase of ideas and tools. Have a look at their Digital Wellbeing Experiments here.
I do recommend this book to you if you want to achieve more, want to have control over your attention back, and want to choose your life!
If you are interested in all the other books I read in 2019, then you can find them in this blog article.
You are curious why I share this experience with you, no problem. You can get a hint here.
If you want to know more about me or even get in contact with me, you can find more info on my contact page.