I ask him if it’s fair to put the onus on us, as consumers, to break our toxic relationship with our smartphones given how they are deliberately designed to suck us in. I do think there’s a bifurcation occurring between people who can control their attention and people who let their attention be controlled. Wait until we have augmented and virtual reality and goodness knows what else. I do think that learning to become indistractable, to control your attention and choose your life, is the skill of the century, because if we think the world is distracting now, then wait a few years. The ease of access to content, the transfer of information means that “if it’s a distraction you seek, it’s easier than ever to find”.Īs such, Eyal recognizes humans are at a critical juncture in their relationship with technology.

The problem, he says, is not technology, it’s our desire to escape what we don’t enjoy in real life, be it a difficult task we’re putting off, or a relationship that’s breaking down.Īs he remarks in the book, although distractions have been around as long as humans, today’s distractions “feel different”. reaching for our phones, with careful planning. Our actions are prompted by triggers, both internal (cold or hunger or sadness) and external (the ping of a smartphone notification or a chatty colleague passing by).īut, argues Eyal, we can take steps to “retrain and regain our brains”, and we can avoid impulsiveness, i.e. The premise is that every action either moves us away from our goals (distraction) or towards them (traction). Indistractable is both handbook and toolkit for overcoming distraction and leading a more fulfilling life. The reason it didn’t work, Eyal tells me, is because technology is not going away–we need it for our livelihoods–and because those books failed to confront the psychology of why we get distracted. I would start looking at books on my shelf or doing laundry.” In short, he replaced one distraction for another. “I even bought a 1990s word processor off eBay that didn’t have an internet connection and I used that for a while.

Nir eyal