Indistractable by Nir Eyal

INDISTRACTABLE by Nir Eyal with Julie Li is subtitled “How to Control Your Attention and Choose your Life.” We all need this, right?  As I am typing, my phone is alerting me to a text and there are plenty of other distractions around, too. There is a certain irony in that Eyal is author of the internationally best-selling book titled Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, although he was primarily advocating for user friendly and easy to navigate products in that text. Having also lectured at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Eyal is obviously knowledge-able about the blending of technology, psychology, and business. In INDISTRACTABLE he advocates using four key strategies and addresses issues related to productivity, our habits/values and triggers, both internal and external. The structure of the book is very helpful – each of the roughly three dozen chapters has a boxed “remember this” section, plus, there is a summary list of chapter takeaways as well as templates for a scheduling tool and distraction tracker and notes. Eyal is a marketer at heart, too; he provides diagrams, acknowledges the many contributors who helped crowd-edit the book, and includes a book discussion guide. Portions of this text could be shared and discussed in advisory and would likely be of interest to Psych students (e.g., when exploring motivation or instant gratification), but Eyal’s writing is often geared to older tech users as evidenced by sections on stakeholders at work, email, and company culture, for example. Readers can also find additional resources, download materials, and get updates from NirAndFar.com/Indistractable.