Nir Eyal argues that over 90% of distraction comes from internal triggers, not external ones. He outlines a four-part method: master internal triggers, make time for traction, hack external triggers, and use accountability firewalls to become indistractable.
Chapters
If I could have any superpower, I would want the power to be indistractable. There is no part of your life that doesn't depend on your ability to focus your attention in order to do whatever it is you want to do, rather than having all kinds of outsize influences manipulate your time and attention. I wrote the book Indistractable because I struggle with distraction in my own life. When I'd sit down at my desk and I'd say, oh, yes, I'm really gonna focus on that one important project. Here I go. But let me just check some email for a minute or let me just scroll that Slack channel or check that newsfeed. And 20, 30, 45 minutes later, I still wasn't doing the thing I said I was going to do with my time. It would happen with my physical health, where I would say, oh, yes, I'm definitely gonna start eating right. I'm definitely gonna start exercising. But I wouldn't, and I didn't. I delved into the psychology of why we get distracted, why we go off track. And I found a lot of very surprising conc. Starting with that these things are not the source of the problem. Did you know that 2500 years ago, the Greek philosopher Plato talked about how distracting the world was? And if Plato was struggling with distraction 2,500 years before the Internet, this can't be the source of the problem. So what I want to teach you is how we can get to the deeper cause of distraction so that we can finally put it in its place. In this course, we're going to learn how to become indistractable in four states. The first step is going to be to master our internal triggers, because what I discovered in my five years of research is that over 90% of the things that get us distracted don't happen outside of us, but rather the leading cause of distraction begins from within. The next step is going to be to make time for traction, because it turns out that most people live a life full of distraction because they haven't defined for themselves what is traction in their day. The next step is to hack back our external triggers, all those pings, dings, and rings that seem to take us off track, not just on our phones, not just on our computers, but what about those ridiculous, wasteful meetings that we find ourselves in all the time? I'm going to teach you how to hack back all these various external triggers in every area of your life so you can finally make sure that these triggers are serving you rather than you serving them. We're going to use one of the most well studied techniques out there to learn how to make sure that we hold ourselves accountable by having a firewall, a last line of defense, so that when the other techniques might fail, we find ourselves drifting towards distraction. Something keeps us at bay. Becoming indistractable is the skill of the century. There is no area of your life that doesn't depend on your ability to concentrate your attention and focus your mind. Looking forward to you joining us.
