Do you ever find yourself…
Do you ever find yourself trying to concentrate
and you can’t seem to focus?
Why are we so distracted these days?
And is technology the root cause of the problem,
or is there something deeper going on?
Background
My name is Nir Eyal, and I’ve spent the last five years
researching and writing about the deeper psychology of distraction.
When I found myself struggling with distraction,
I decided to do what many people advise
and got rid of the distracting technology.
I got myself a flip-phone without any apps.
All it did was phone calls and text messages.
Then I got a word processor from the 1990s
without any sort of internet connection.
Unfortunately I found I still got distracted.
I’d start reading a book from my bookshelf.
I’d tidy up my desk. I’d take out the trash even –
just to avoid the thing that I didn’t want to do.
I had only focused on the external triggers –
the pings and dings that were leading me towards distraction.
What I hadn’t focused on,
and what turns out to be a much more common source of distraction,
are the internal triggers –
the uncomfortable emotional states that we seek to escape.
When we’re lonely, we check Facebook.
When we’re uncertain, we google.
When we’re bored, we check the news, stocks prices, sports scores –
anything to not feel these uncomfortable sensations
that we’re not ready to experience.
Here are a few techniques I discovered in my research
that could help us stay on track.
Plan your day
First what you want to do is to make sure you plan your day.
Two-thirds of people don’t keep any sort of calendar,
any kind of schedule in their day.
Well the fact of the matter is if you don’t plan your day,
somebody is going to plan it for you.
Many of us believe in this myth of the to-do list.
I used to think that just by writing things down they’d get done.
But of course I’d go from day to day to day
recycling the bottom half of my to-to list
because I wasn’t making time to do those tasks.
So the best place to start is not with the output
of what you want to get done every day,
but with the input of how much time you have to devote to every task.
Consequences of distraction
So distraction has many consequences.
One of them is that we find that when someone is interrupted during a task,
it can take up to 20 minutes for them to refocus on what they were doing.
Many times we don’t even realize how much worse our output is when we…
So check email in one solid block.
If you enjoy using social media that’s great,
but make time for it in your day so it’s not something you’re only using
every time you feel bored or lonely.
Surfing the urge
Researchers have found that surfing the urge
is an effective way to master our internal triggers.
In a smoking cessation study,
researchers found that when they taught smokers how to notice
the sensation and be mindful of what they were experiencing,
they became much more likely to stop smoking.
By surfing the urge and noticing what it is that we’re experiencing
and allowing that sensation to crest and then subside –
kind of like how a surfer might surf a wave –
we allow that emotion, that uncomfortable internal trigger,
to crest and then pass.
liminal moments
The next thing that we want to do is be careful of liminal moments.
Liminal moments are these periods of time when we are transitioning
from one task to the other.
So for example if you start checking your email
on the way back from a meeting and you’re finally at your desk
and you keep checking your email
instead of getting to the task at hand
well now that liminal moment has turned into a distraction.
So be careful of those times
when you’re transitioning from one task to the next.
conclusion
A study of alcoholics found that the number one determinant
of whether someone would stay sober after a rehabilitation program
was not their level of physical dependency,
it wasn’t what was happening in their body,
in fact it was what was happening in their minds.
The people who were most likely to stay sober
were those who believed they had the power to stop.
So when we think that technology is hijacking our brains
or it’s addicting everyone, we are making it more likely that
we won’t be able to put technology distractions in their place.
So don’t believe this lie that there’s nothing we can do.
Clearly there’s so much we can do
to help make sure that we get the best out of these products
without letting them get the best of us.
