Home · Book Reports · 2025 · Indistractable

designates my notes. / designates important. / designates very important.

Thoughts

I really like the idea of timeboxing, but have never managed to stick with it. I use a spreadsheet and track tasks in 30 minute increments. It is best for regularly recurring tasks, but not one off tasks.

Understanding the triggers and emotions behind why you are looking to distract yourself is useful. Avoiding pain trumps acquiring pleasure.

Useful ideas about managing children’s time by giving them more agency.

A little repetitive towards the end.

Exceptional Quotes

• I discovered that living the life we want requires not only doing the right things; it also requires we stop doing the wrong things that take us off track.

• the time you plan to waste is not wasted time.

• Even when we think we’re seeking pleasure, we’re actually driven by the desire to free ourselves from the pain of wanting.

• Boredom, negativity bias, and rumination can each prompt us to distraction. But a fourth factor may be the cruelest of all. Hedonic adaptation, the tendency to quickly return to a baseline level of satisfaction, no matter what happens

• It’s good to know that feeling bad isn’t actually bad; it’s exactly what survival of the fittest intended.

• A technique I’ve found particularly helpful for dealing with this distraction trap is the ten-minute rule.” If I find myself wanting to check my phone as a pacification device when I can’t think of anything better to do, I tell myself it’s fine to give in, but not right now. I have to wait just ten minutes.

• The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”

• The Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote, People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time, they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.”

• You can’t call something a distraction unless you know what it’s distracting you from.

• Chapter 10 - Control the Inputs, Not the Outcomes

• The one thing we control is the time we put into a task.

• Our perception of who we are changes what we do.

Table of Contents

• 00: Introduction
• 01: What's Your Superpower
• 02: Being Indistractable

Part 1 - Master Internal Triggers

• 03: What Motivates Us, Really?
• 04: Time Management is Pain Management
• 05: Deal With Distraction From Within
• 06: Reimagine the Internal Trigger
• 07: Reimagine the Task
• 08: Reimagine Your Temperament

Part 2 - Make Time For Traction

• 09: Turn Your Values Into Time
• 10: Control the Inputs, Not the Outcomes
• 11: Schedule Important Relationships
• 12: Sync with Stakeholders at Work

Part 3 - Hack Back External Triggers

• 13: Ask the Critical Question
• 14: Hack Back Work Interruptions
• 15: Hack Back Email
• 16: Hack Back Group Chat
• 17: Hack Back Meetings
• 18: Hack Back Your Smartphone
• 19: Hack Back Your Desktop
• 20: Hack Back Online Articles
• 21: Hack Back Feeds

Part 4 - Prevent Distraction with Pacts

• 22: The Power of Precommitments
• 23: Prevent Distraction with Effort Pacts
• 24: Prevent Distraction with Price Pacts
• 25: Prevent Distraction with Identity Pacts

Part 5 - How to Make Your Workplace Indistractable

• 26: Distraction Is a Sign of Dysfunction
• 27: Fixing Distraction Is a Test of Company Culture
• 28: The Indistractable Workplace

Part 6 - How to Raise Indistractable Children (And Why We All Need Psychological Nutrients)

• 29: Avoid Convenient Excuses
• 30: Understand Their Internal Triggers
• 31: Make Time for Traction Together
• 32: Help Them with External Triggers
• 33: Teach Them to Make Their Own Pacts

Part 7 - How to Have Indistractable Relationships

• 34: Spread Social Antibodies Among Friends
• 35: Be an Indistractable Lover

· Introduction - From Hooked to Indistractable

· Chapter 1 - What’s Your Superpower

page 18:

• I wasn’t the only one putting distractions before people. An early reader of this book told me that when he asked his eight-year-old daughter what her superpower would be, she said she wanted to talk to animals. When asked why, the child said, “So that I have someone to talk to when you and mom are too busy working on your computers.”

page 19:

• I discovered that living the life we want requires not only doing the right things; it also requires we stop doing the wrong things that take us off track.

page 20:

• the time you plan to waste is not wasted time.

· Chapter 2 - Being Indistractable

page 22:

• The ancient Greeks immortalized the story of a man who was perpetually distracted. We call something that is desirable but just out of reach “tantalizing” after his name. The story goes that Tantalus was banished to the underworld by his father, Zeus, as a punishment. There he found himself wading in a pool of water while a tree dangled ripe fruit above his head. The curse seems benign, but when Tantalus tried to pluck the fruit, the branch moved away from him, always just out of reach. When he bent down to drink the cool water, it receded so that he could never quench his thirst. Tantalus’s punishment was to yearn for things he desired but could never grasp.

page 26:

• Let’s think back to the tale of Tantalus. What was his curse exactly? Was it never-ending hunger and thirst? Not really. What would have happened to Tantalus if he had just stopped reaching? He was already in hell, after all, and dead people don’t need food and water, last time I checked.

• The curse is not that Tantalus spends all eternity reaching for things just out of reach, but rather his obliviousness to the greater folly of his actions. Tantalus’s curse was his blindness to the fact he didn’t need those things in the first place. That’s the real moral of the story.

Part 1 - Master Internal Triggers

· Chapter 3 - What Motivates Us, Really?

page 31:

• For hundreds of years, we’ve believed that motivation is driven by reward and punishment. As Jeremy Bentham, the English philosopher and founder of utilitarianism, put it, “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.” The reality, however, is that motivation has much less to do with pleasure than was once thought.

• Even when we think we’re seeking pleasure, we’re actually driven by the desire to free ourselves from the pain of wanting.

• Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher, said it best: “By pleasure, we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul.”

· Chapter 4 - Time Management is Pain Management

page 36:

• Eons of evolution gave you and me a brain in a near-constant state of discontentment. We’re wired this way for a simple reason. As a study published in the Review of General Psychology notes, “If satisfaction and pleasure were permanent, there might be little incentive to continue seeking further benefits or advances.” In other words, feeling contented wasn’t good for the species. Our ancestors worked harder and strove further because they evolved to be perpetually perturbed, and so we remain today.

• Negativity bias almost certainly gave us an evolutionary edge. Good things are nice, but bad things can kill you

page 37:

• This passive comparison of one’s current situation with some unachieved standard” can manifest in self- critical thoughts such as, “Why can’t I handle things better?” As one study notes, “By reflecting on what went wrong and how to rectify it, people may be able to discover sources of error or alternative strategies, ultimately leading to not repeating mistakes and possibly doing better in the future.”

• Boredom, negativity bias, and rumination can each prompt us to distraction. But a fourth factor may be the cruelest of all. Hedonic adaptation, the tendency to quickly return to a baseline level of satisfaction, no matter what happens

page 38:

• It’s good to know that feeling bad isn’t actually bad; it’s exactly what survival of the fittest intended.

· Chapter 5 - Deal With Distraction From Within

page 40:

• Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in 1863, “Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” One hundred twenty-four years later, the social psychologist Daniel Wegner put Dostoevsky’s claim to the test.

• In a study, participants who were told to avoid thinking of a white bear for five minutes did so on average once per minute, just as Dostoevsky predicted. But there was more to Wegner’s study. When the same group was told to try and conjure the white bear, they did so much more often than a group who hadn’t been asked to suppress the thought. “The results suggested that suppressing the thought for the first five minutes caused it to ‘rebound’ even more prominently into the participants’ minds later,” according to an article in Monitor on Psychology. Wegner later dubbed this tendency “ironic process theory” to explain why it’s so difficult to tame intruding thoughts.

• Two groups of flight attendants who smoked were sent on two separate flights from Israel. One group was sent on a three-hour flight to Europe, while the other group traveled to New York, a ten-hour flight. All the smokers were asked by the researchers to rate their level of cravings at set time intervals before, during, and after the flight. If cravings were driven solely by the effect of nicotine on the brain, one would expect that both groups would report strong urges after the same number of minutes had elapsed since their last cigarette; the more time passed, the more their brains would chemically crave nicotine. But that’s not what happened.

• When the flight attendants flying to New York were above the Atlantic Ocean, they reported weak cravings. Meanwhile, at the exact same moment, the cravings of their colleagues who had just landed in Europe were at their strongest. What was going on?

• The New York–bound flight attendants knew they could not smoke in the middle of a flight without being fired. Only later, when they approached their destination, did they report the greatest desire to smoke. It appeared the duration of the trip and the time since their last cigarette didn’t affect the level of the flight attendants’ cravings.

• What affected their desire was not how much time had passed after a smoke, but how much time was left before they could smoke again.

· Chapter 6 - Reimagine the Internal Trigger

page 42:

• Step 1: Look for the discomfort that precedes the distraction, focusing in on the internal trigger

• Step 2: Write down that trigger

page 43:

• Step 3: Explore your sensations

• Step 4: Beware of liminal moments

page 44:

• A technique I’ve found particularly helpful for dealing with this distraction trap is the ten-minute rule.” If I find myself wanting to check my phone as a pacification device when I can’t think of anything better to do, I tell myself it’s fine to give in, but not right now. I have to wait just ten minutes.

• This rule allows time to do what some behavioral psychologists call “surfing the urge.”

· Chapter 7 - Reimagine the Task

page 46:

• Countless commercially produced distractions, like television or social media, use slot machine–like variable rewards to keep us engaged with a constant stream of newness. But Bogost points out that we can use the same techniques to make any task more pleasurable and compelling.

• We can use the same neural hardwiring that keeps us hooked to media to keep us engaged in an otherwise unpleasant task.

• Bogost gives the example of mowing his lawn. “It may seem ridiculous to call an activity like this ‘fun,’” he writes, yet he learned to love it. Here’s how: “First, pay close, foolish, even absurd attention to things.” For Bogost, he soaked up as much information as he could about the way grass grows and how to treat it. Then, he created an “imaginary playground” in which the limitations actually helped to produce meaningful experiences. He learned about the constraints he had to operate under, including his local weather conditions and what different kinds of equipment can and can’t do. Operating under constraints, Bogost says, is the key to creativity and fun. Finding the optimal path for the mower or beating a record time are other ways to create an imaginary playground.

• The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”

· Chapter 8 - Reimagine Your Temperament

page 50:

• Addicts’ beliefs regarding their powerlessness was just as significant in determining whether they would relapse after treatment as their level of physical dependence.

• Just let that sink in—mind-set mattered as much as physical dependence!

page 51:

• Self-compassion makes people more resilient to letdowns by breaking the vicious cycle of stress that often accompanies failure.

Part 2 - Make Time For Traction

· Chapter 9 - Turn Your Values Into Time

page 53:

• The Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote, People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time, they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.”

page 56:

• You can’t call something a distraction unless you know what it’s distracting you from.

• Timeboxing

· Chapter 10 - Control the Inputs, Not the Outcomes

page 62:

• The one thing we control is the time we put into a task.

• Whether I’m able to fall asleep at any given moment or whether a breakthrough idea for my next book comes to me when I sit down at my desk isn’t entirely up to me, but one thing is for certain: I won’t do what I want to do if I’m not in the right place at the right time, whether that’s in bed when I want to sleep or at my desk when I want to do good work. Not showing up guarantees failure.

· Chapter 11 - Schedule Important Relationships

page 67:

• For our gathering, four couples, my wife and me included, meet every two weeks to talk about one question over a picnic lunch. The question might range from a deep inquiry like, “What is one thing you are thankful your parents taught you?” to a more practical question like, “Should we push our kids to learn things they don’t want, like playing the piano?”

• Having a topic helps in two ways: first, it gets us past the small talk of sports and weather, giving us an opportunity to open up about stuff that really matters; second, it prevents the gender split that often happens when couples convene in groups—men in one corner, women in another. Having a question of the day gets us all talking together.

· Chapter 12 - Sync with Stakeholders at Work

Part 3 - Hack Back External Triggers

· Chapter 13 - Ask the Critical Question

page 77:

• The Fogg Behavior Model states that for a behavior (B) to occur, three things must be present at the same time: motivation (M), ability (A), and a trigger (T). More succinctly, B = MAT.

• Motivation is “the energy for action,” according to Edward Deci, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester. When we’re highly motivated, we have a strong desire, and the requisite energy, to take an action, and when we’re not motivated, we lack the energy to perform a task. Meanwhile, in Fogg’s formula, ability relates to facility of action. Quite simply, the harder something is to do, the less likely people are to do it. Conversely, the easier something is to do, the more likely we are to do it.

• When people have sufficient motivation and ability, they’re primed for certain behavior. However, without the critical third component, the behavior will not occur. A trigger to tell us what to do next is always required.

· Chapter 14 - Hack Back Work Interruptions

page 80:

• Hospitals are supposed to help heal the sick. How, then, do we explain the four hundred thousand Americans harmed in hospitals every year when patients are given the wrong medication?

• In addition to the devastating human toll, these preventable errors cost an estimated $3.5 billion in extra medical expenses. According to surgeon Martin Makary and research fellow Michael Daniel of Johns Hopkins University, If medical error was a disease, it would rank as the third leading cause of death in the U.S.”

· Chapter 15 - Hack Back Email

page 88:

• There’s mounting evidence that processing your email in batches is much more efficient and less stress inducing than checking it throughout the day. This is because our brains take time to switch between tasks, so it’s better to focus on answering emails all at once.

· Chapter 16 - Hack Back Group Chat

page 91:

• Jason Fried says group chat is “like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda.” This is especially notable because the company Fried founded, Basecamp, makes a popular group-chat app.

· Chapter 17 - Hack Back Meetings

page 95:

• First, every conference room should have a charging station for devices, but make sure it is just out of everyone’s reach. When attendees congregate before the meeting, they should be encouraged to silence their phone and plug in their devices so the meeting can proceed free of distractions.

• Our technology gives us a way of being physically present but mentally absent; the uncomfortable truth is that we like to have our phones, tablets, and laptops in meetings not for the sake of productivity but for psychological escape.

page 96:

• Make it harder to call a meeting. To call a meeting, the organizer must circulate an agenda and briefing document.

· Chapter 18 - Hack Back Your Smartphone

· Chapter 19 - Hack Back Your Desktop

· Chapter 20 - Hack Back Online Articles

page 109:

• Katherine Milkman at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School has shown how leveraging a behavior we want to do can help us do things we know we should do. In her study, Milkman gave participants an iPod loaded with an audiobook they could only listen to at the gym. Milkman chose books like The Hunger Games and Twilight that she knew had story lines likely to keep people wanting more. The results were amazing: “Participants who had access to the audiobooks only at the gym made 51 percent more gym visits than those in the control group.”

• Milkman’s technique is called “temptation bundling” and can be used whenever we want to use the rewards from one behavior to incentivize another. In my case, the articles I save to Pocket are my rewards for exercising.

· Chapter 21 - Hack Back Feeds

Part 4 - Prevent Distraction with Pacts

· Chapter 22 - The Power of Precommitments

page 116:

• Jonathan Franzen, the writer Time magazine called the “Great American Novelist,” struggles with distraction just like you and me. The difference, however, between Franzen and most people, is that he takes drastic steps to keep himself focused. According to a 2010 Time profile:

• He uses a heavy, obsolete Dell laptop from which he has scoured any trace of hearts and solitaire, down to the level of the operating system. Because Franzen believes you can’t write serious fiction on a computer that’s connected to the internet, he not only removed the Dell’s wireless card but also permanently blocked its Ethernet port. “What you have to do,” he explains, “is you plug in an Ethernet cable with superglue and then you saw off the little head of it.”

· Chapter 23 - Prevent Distraction with Effort Pacts

• Lock up your phone in a kSafe…

· Chapter 24 - Prevent Distraction with Price Pacts

page 124:

• A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine illustrated the power of price pacts by examining three groups of smokers who were trying to quit their unhealthy habit. In the study, a control group was offered educational information and traditional methods, such as free nicotine patches, to encourage smoking cessation. After six months, 6 percent of people in the control group had stopped smoking. The next group, called the “reward group,” was offered $820 if they had stopped smoking after six months—17 percent of them were successful.

• However, the third group of participants provided the most interesting results. In this group, called the deposit group,” participants were required to make a precommitment deposit of $150 of their own money with a pledge to be smoke-free after six months. If, and only if, they reached their goal, they would receive the $150 deposit back. In addition to recouping their cash, successful deposit-group participants would also receive a $650 bonus prize (as opposed to the $820 offered to the “reward” participants) from their employer. The results? Of those who accepted the deposit challenge, an astounding 52 percent succeeded in meeting their goal!

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· Chapter 25 - Prevent Distraction with Identity Pacts

page 130:

• Our perception of who we are changes what we do.

• By aligning our behaviors to our identity, we make choices based on who we believe we are.

page 131:

• results consistently show that teaching others provides more motivation for the teacher to change their own behavior than if the teacher learned from an expert.

page 132:

• Though conventional wisdom says our beliefs shape our behaviors, the opposite is also true.

• William James quote “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook,”

Part 5 - How to Make Your Workplace Indistractable

· Chapter 26 - Distraction Is a Sign of Dysfunction

· Chapter 27 - Fixing Distraction Is a Test of Company Culture

· Chapter 28 - The Indistractable Workplace

page 147:

• Among the many Slack channels, the ones company leadership takes most seriously are the feedback channels. They are not just for sharing opinions on the latest product release; they are also for sharing thoughts about how to improve as a company. There is a dedicated channel called #slack-culture and another called #exec-ama where executives invite employees to “ask me anything.” Shevat says, “People will post all sorts of suggestions and are encouraged to do so.” There’s even a special channel for airing your “beef” with the company’s own product, called #beef-tweets. “Sometimes comments can get very prickly,” Shevat says, but the important thing is that they’re aired and heard.

Part 6 - How to Raise Indistractable Children (And Why We All Need Psychological Nutrients)

· Chapter 29 - Avoid Convenient Excuses

page 153:

• top deflecting blame. When kids don’t act the way parents want, it’s natural to look for answers that help parents divert responsibility.

• Techno-panics are nothing new. From the book, to the radio, to video games, the history of parenting is strewn with moral panic over things supposedly making kids act in strange ways.

• Tech isn’t evil. Used in the right way and in the right amounts, kids’ tech use can be beneficial, while too much (or too little) can have slightly harmful effects.

· Chapter 30 - Understand Their Internal Triggers

page 155:

• Maricela Correa-Chávez and Barbara Rogoff, professors at the University of California, Santa Cruz, conducted an experiment in which two children were brought into a room where an adult taught one of them how to build a toy while the other one waited. The study was designed to observe what the nonparticipating child, the observer, would do while they waited. In America, most of the observer children did what you’d expect them to do: they shuffled in their seats, stared at the floor, and generally showed signs of disinterest. One impatient boy even pretended a toy was a bomb and threw his hands in the air to mimic an explosion, making loud disruptive noises to match the carnage. In contrast, the researchers found that Mayan children from Guatemala concentrated on what the other child was learning and sat still in their chairs as the adult taught the other child.

• Overall, the study found that American children could focus for only half as long as Mayan kids. Even more interesting was the finding that the Mayan children with less exposure to formal education “showed more sustained attention and learning than their counterparts from Mayan families with extensive involvement in Western schooling.” In other words, less schooling meant more focus. How could that be?

• Psychologist Suzanne Gaskins has studied Mayan villages for decades and told NPR that Mayan parents give their kids a tremendous amount of freedom. “Rather than having the mom set the goal—and then having to offer enticements and rewards to reach that goal—the child is setting the goal. Then the parents support that goal however they can,” Gaskins said. Mayan parents “feel very strongly that every child knows best what they want and that goals can be achieved only when a child wants it.”

• Most formal schooling in America and similar industrialized countries, on the other hand, is the antithesis of a place where kids have the autonomy to make their own choices. According to Rogoff, “It may be the case that children give up control of their attention when it’s always managed by an adult.” In other words, kids can become conditioned to lose control of their attention and become highly distractible as a result.

• Robert Epstein, the researcher who wrote “The Myth of the Teen Brain” in Scientific American, has a similar conclusion: “Surveys I have conducted show that teens in the U.S. are subjected to more than ten times as many restrictions as are mainstream adults, twice as many restrictions as active-duty U.S. Marines, and even twice as many restrictions as incarcerated felons.”

page 158:

• When considering the state of modern childhood, Ryan believes many kids aren’t getting enough of the three essential psychological nutrients—autonomy, competence, and relatedness —in their offline lives. Not surprisingly, our kids go looking for substitutes online. “We call this the ‘need density hypothesis,’” says Ryan. “The more you’re not getting needs satisfied in life, reciprocally, the more you’re going to get them satisfied in virtual realities.” Ryan’s research leads him to believe that “overuse [of technology] is a symptom, one indicative of some emptiness in other areas of life, like school and home.”

· Chapter 31 - Make Time for Traction Together

· Chapter 32 - Help Them with External Triggers

· Chapter 33 - Teach Them to Make Their Own Pacts

Part 7 - How to Have Indistractable Relationships

· Chapter 34 - Spread Social Antibodies Among Friends

· Chapter 35 - Be an Indistractable Lover