Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life

Book Preface

Introduction
From Hooked to Indistractable
There’s a certain yellow book you’ll find on the shelves of most major tech companies. I’ve seen it at Facebook, Google, PayPal, and Slack. It’s given out at tech conferences and company training events. A friend working at Microsoft told me the CEO, Satya Nadella, held up a copy and recommended it to all the company’s employees.

The book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, was a Wall Street Journal best seller and, at the time of this writing, still ranks as the number one book in the “Products” category on Amazon. It’s a cookbook, of sorts. The book contains a recipe for human behavior—your behavior. These tech companies know that in order to make money, they need to keep us coming back—their business models depend on it.

I know this because I’ve spent the past decade researching the hidden psychology that some of the most successful companies in the world use to make their products so captivating. For years, I taught future executives at both the Stanford Graduate School of Business and at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design.

In writing Hooked, my hope was that start-ups and socially concerned companies would use this knowledge to design new ways of helping people build better habits. Why should the tech giants keep these secrets to themselves? Shouldn’t we use the same psychology that makes video games and social media so engaging to design products to help people live better lives?

Since Hooked was published, thousands of companies have used the book to empower their users to build helpful and healthy habits. Fitbod is a fitness app that helps people build better exercise routines. Byte Foods seeks to change people’s eating habits with internet-connected pantries that offer locally made fresh meals. Kahoot! builds software to make classroom learning more engaging and fun.1

We want our products to be user friendly, easy to navigate, and yes, habit-forming. Companies making their products more engaging isn’t necessarily a problem—it’s progress.

But there’s also a dark side. As philosopher Paul Virilio wrote, “When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck.” In the case of user friendly products and services, what makes some products engaging and easy to use can also make them distracting.

For many people, these distractions can get out of hand, leaving us with a feeling that our decisions are not our own. The fact is, in this day and age, if you are not equipped to manage distraction, your brain will be manipulated by time-wasting diversions.
In the next few pages, I’ll reveal my own struggle with distraction, and how I, ironically, got hooked. But I’ll also share how I overcame my struggle and explain why we are much more powerful than any of the tech giants. As an industry insider, I know their Achilles’ heel—and soon you will too.

The good news is that we have the unique ability to adapt to such threats. We can take steps right now to retrain and regain our brains. To be blunt, what other choice do we have? We don’t have time to wait for regulators to do something, and if you hold your breath waiting for corporations to make their products less distracting, well, you’re going to suffocate.

In the future, there will be two kinds of people in the world: those who let their attention and lives be controlled and coerced by others and those who proudly call themselves “indistractable.” By opening this book, you’ve taken the first step toward owning your time and your future. But you’re just getting started. For years you’ve been conditioned to expect instant gratification. Think of getting to the last page ofIndistractable as a personal challenge to liberate your mind.

The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. Planning ahead ensures you will follow through. With the techniques in this book, you’ll learn
exactly what to do from this day forth to control your attention and choose your life.

Contents
Introduction: From Hooked to Indistractable
Chapter 1: What’s Your Superpower?
Chapter 2: Being Indistractable
PART 1: MASTER INTERNAL TRIGGERS
Chapter 3: What Motivates Us, Really?
Chapter 4: Time Management Is Pain Management
Chapter 5: Deal with Distraction from Within
Chapter 6: Reimagine the Internal Trigger
Chapter 7: Reimagine the Task
Chapter 8: Reimagine Your Temperament
PART 2: MAKE TIME FOR TRACTION
Chapter 9: Turn Your Values into Time
Chapter 10: Control the Inputs, Not the Outcomes
Chapter 11: Schedule Important Relationships
Chapter 12: Sync with Stakeholders at Work
PART 3: HACK BACK EXTERNAL TRIGGERS
Chapter 13: Ask the Critical Question
Chapter 14: Hack Back Work Interruptions
Chapter 15: Hack Back Email
Chapter 16: Hack Back Group Chat
Chapter 17: Hack Back Meetings
Chapter 18: Hack Back Your Smartphone
Chapter 19: Hack Back Your Desktop
Chapter 20: Hack Back Online Articles
Chapter 21: Hack Back Feeds
PART 4: PREVENT DISTRACTION WITH PACTS
Chapter 22: The Power of Precommitments
Chapter 23: Prevent Distraction with Effort Pacts
Chapter 24: Prevent Distraction with Price Pacts
Chapter 25: Prevent Distraction with Identity Pacts
PART 5: HOW TO MAKE YOUR WORKPLACE INDISTRACTABLE
Chapter 26: Distraction Is a Sign of Dysfunction
Chapter 27: Fixing Distraction Is a Test of Company Culture
Chapter 28: The Indistractable Workplace
PART 6: HOW TO RAISE INDISTRACTABLE CHILDREN (AND WHY WE ALL NEED PSYCHOLOGICAL NUTRIENTS)
Chapter 29: Avoid Convenient Excuses
Chapter 30: Understand Their Internal Triggers
Chapter 31: Make Time for Traction Together
Chapter 32: Help Them with External Triggers
Chapter 33: Teach Them to Make Their Own Pacts
PART 7: HOW TO HAVE INDISTRACTABLE RELATIONSHIPS
Chapter 34: Spread Social Antibodies Among Friends
Chapter 35: Be an Indistractable Lover
Chapter Takeaways
Schedule Template
Distraction Tracker
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Notes
Indistractable Book Club Discussion Guide
About the Authors