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.
