Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life

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The best part of this entire book was his advice on setting guidelines on tech usage with your kids, partner, and your friends. All the tips are practical and very useful. There are also reminders in the book and I have already recommended it to some of my friends. It's good to know that feeling bad isn't actually bad; it's exactly what survival of the fittest intended."

Too many fillers, and the whole premise is flawed, as Johann Hari explains in chapter eight of Stolen Focus (a great book). The author, who has worked for some technology companies, believes that it is ok for these companies to spend millions and an army of psychologists and casino experts to get as many people as possible hooked to their apps and that people are responsible to have the self-control for not getting addicted. Sort of what tobacco companies use to say. Recover!: An Empowering Program to Help You Stop Thinking Like an Addict and Reclaim Your Life (Book)International best-selling author, former Stanford lecturer, and behavioral design expert, Nir Eyal, wrote Silicon Valley's handbook for making technology habit-forming. Five years after publishing Hooked, Eyal reveals distraction's Achilles' heel in his groundbreaking new book. Addiction is almost never the source of our distractions, but for some people it is. Dr. Stanton Peele’s proven program is a practical, self-directed process that can empower readers to “develop the skills to live fully and prevent relapse; and much more.”

Precommitments keep you from feeling distracted by removing a future choice. However, they should only be used after the other three indistractable strategies have already been applied. Some ideas are repeated multiple times, which ironically will distract you from reading this book written to avoid distractions.We all get distracted – there’s no question about that. While you may think that your phone or other gadgets you own may be the cause of your distraction, it’s all rooted deeper inside you. In fact, your triggers wired within are the reason you look for distraction.

The trouble is that some people like to “think out loud” in group chat, explaining their arguments and ideas in one-line blurbs. This rarely works because it’s hard to follow along with someone’s thoughts in real time while others comment with emoji and other potential distractions. Indistractable PDF Book The book covers a lot from being more focused at work to parenting to relationships and I learned several new ideas. What I loved the most, though, is how practical this book is. There are solid recommendations on new approaches to try as well as lots of useful and creative app recommendations to help you stay focused. I'm already putting several things into practice and seeing good results. According to Michael Inzlicht, professor at University of Toronto, willpower is not finite. It's more like an emotion. "Just as we don't 'run out' of joy or anger, willpower ebbs and flows in response to what's happening to us and how we feel." Let go of this belief as it encourages you to believe you have a reason to quit because you have used up your willpower. Another day goes by and, once again, your most important personal and professional goals are put on hold. In Indistractable, Eyal reveals the hidden psychology driving us to distraction. He describes why solving the problem is not as simple as swearing off our devices – abstinence is impractical and often makes us want more.

Nir Eyal is the bestselling author of "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products" (a finalist for the 2014 Goodreads Choice Awards) and "Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life." (nominated for the 2019 Goodreads Choice Awards) I couldn’t blame my no-shows on traffic, nor could I blame it on membership dues, because membership was free for residents. Even taking a long walk would be better than doing nothing. Yet I somehow found reasons to skip my workouts. I decided to make a price pact with myself. After making time in my timeboxed schedule. Indistractable zeroes in on one of the biggest challenges of our time: managing our attention. Nir Eyal provides the most practical and realistic approach yet to balancing technology with well-being If you’re mowing the lawn, for example, instead of running away or rewarding yourself, look at the activity differently until you discover new challenges you didn’t see before (e.g., beating a record time).

I liked Nir's other book, "Hooked." It is one of my favorite and best product/business books ever (and also useful for non-product people). After "Hooked" taught the whole industry how to build addictive products, Nir is now basically selling the "cure." I remember my parents keeping ashtrays around the house in my childhood, despite being nonsmokers. At the time, people smoked indoors, around children, at the office—wherever they pleased. My mother did her best to discourage the smoking habit by providing an ashtray shaped like a bony skeleton hand, but that not-so-subtle reminder of the consequences of smoking was all she felt comfortable doing. It’s one thing to tell this to knowledge workers who ride electric scooters to work and stream productivity podcasts into their AirBuds. But tell it to the single working mother who can barely carve out enough “me time” to take a shower. Better yet, tell the tech designers it’s not their fault, that it’s ultimately their users’ responsibility to manage distractions, and that even if their products do distract, the “root cause” of it lies in users themselves. In The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley points out that the Lord’s Prayer has 50 words, and six of them are dedicated to imploring God not to lead us into temptation. When I was a child sitting in Sunday school in west Texas, I often wondered why God would engineer these temptations into our environment in the first place – much less lead us into them – if he was only going to enjoin us to avoid them later.I spend far too much time on Apple News (mostly saving stories to gmail folders or bookmarks in Chrome but I have a wide range of interests and they cover over 200 publications. I do not plan to stop using Apple News but am defiantly being more selective and delaying my reading to a later time. If you value your time, your focus, or your relationships, this book is essential reading. I’m putting these ideas into practice." Alexis Kirschbaum at Bloomsbury went above and beyond what any author could ask for in an editor and played a critical hand in improving this book. She and her colleagues, including Hermione Davis, Thi Dinh, Genevieve Nelsson, Andy Palmer, Genista Tate-Alexander, and Angelique Tran Van Sang, deserve my sincere gratitude. Have you ever caught yourself getting distracted at the smallest things? It could be a pop-up notification on your phone, and you ditch your focus on work completely at that insignificant stimulus? The problem with the little gadgets is that they’re supposed to make our life easier, and while they do so, they also cause a series of other problems, like distraction. In Indistractable, Eyal reveals the hidden psychology driving us to distraction. He describes why solving the problem is not as simple as swearing off our devices: Abstinence is impractical and often makes us want more.