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.

Women's Work by Megan K. Stack

WOMEN’S WORK by National Book Award finalist Megan K. Stack explores a “Reckoning with Work and Home” by relating events from Stack’s time living in Beijing and India.  During those periods she and her husband became parents. They employed housekeepers and childcare workers – “migrants who’d left their own children behind to work in the city, and ended up in my house.” This extremely personal and well-written text describes Stack’s feelings about work (she had been a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times) and motherhood, noting “Job, book, baby: I’d forced myself to choose the one I loved least. It was a terrible choice because I loved each of them.” WOMEN’S WORK also confronts the ideas of feminism and privilege as Stack strives to explore the lives, homes, and families of the women who worked for/with her and says, “Xiao Li, Mary, and Pooja will forever give me strength and push me forward to what needs to be done.” 

Stack recounts in detail her own experiences with post-partum depression, concluding at one point, “If a woman is in an intolerable situation, the answer is not to drug her so that she can tolerate it.  The answer should be – should be – to change the intolerable situation.” And, she honestly reflects on the role of men, particularly fathers and husbands (expat or not), who often fail to appreciate the ambivalence - even guilt - over the unsatisfactory compromises involved with employing domestic workers. In addition, she writes about Asia: “[China and India] represent our collective future; they are the stuff of the world’s dreams and nightmares. They are also places that have made statistical headway towards erasing women.” There is SO much to explore here and our students could certainly use this book as a Junior Theme research text or perhaps read portions for Senior Writers Seminar. I definitely recommend WOMEN’S WORK which received a starred review from Kirkus.

Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky

MAKE TIME by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky is subtitled “How to Focus on What Matters Every Day” and I think this would make an excellent read for our cohort on resiliency and work/life balance. The authors share their thoughts in a very conversational tone and relate the suggestions to their own experiences like scheduling a regular time with friends or going for a run after work.  Knapp spent a decade at Google and Google Ventures where he created the design sprint process and Zeratsky (or JZ), who has written for numerous financial and technology publications, worked as a designer for fifteen years at YouTube and Google Ventures. MAKE TIME is divided into sections which deal with their formula—highlight, laser, reflect, energize. They offer numerous helpful and practical suggestions such as the idea of shifting habits (e.g., turning off notifications or deleting messaging apps from your phone) and controlling where you focus attention. 

Another example involves “to do” lists where each author describes his own method. JZ maintains a "might do" list, then selects highlights (something relatively urgent that will provide satisfaction and joy) and adds those to the calendar.  Jake, instead, establishes a burner list with “one and only one project, activity or objective” on the FRONT burner; everything else goes to the back burner.  The authors' suggestions are accompanied by simple visuals and cartoon-like drawings to help reinforce each process.  If you are interested in time redesign, MAKE TIME is a humorous and insightful read; it received a starred review from Booklist.