Nir Eyal thinks we’re spending too much time trying to make work easy.
He’s a behavioral design expert who taught at Stanford and has written two best-selling books.
But he thinks most of the productivity panaceas, like forming habits or trying to get into flow, that we all turn to in order to get our work done aren’t always as useful as we might hope:
“When most people talk about habits, what they’re saying is, ‘I want something that’s difficult to become effortless. I want the benefits but I don’t want it to be hard,” Nir said to me in an interview a few weeks ago. “Well, I have news for you: some things are just hard. There’s no way of getting around it.”
The problem is, when we expect work to be effortless and it ends up being difficult, we often blame ourselves. So the very tools we’re using to make work easier, can instead make it easier for us to give up.
Nir recommends a different approach. He thinks the number one barrier to getting our work done is distraction. It’s all around us: from our social media feeds, to our app notifications, to pseudo work distractions like our email inbox or our todo lists.
Most people think distraction is caused by technology, or that being distracted means there’s something wrong with them.
But Nir thinks that moments of distraction are actually our own human reaction to the discomfort we feel when we sit down to do our work. “They’re not character flaws, they’re emotional regulation problems,” he says
Nir thinks that we should develop tools to deal with internal discomfort instead of burying ourselves in distraction. And that once we’re indistractable, we’ll be ready to do our best work.
In this interview we talk about Nir’s unorthodox definition of distraction, go through his four-step process to becoming indistractible, and explore how he uses this process in his own life.
Let’s dive in!
Hi, I’m Nir Eyal. I'm a behavioral designer which means I use consumer psychology and behavioral design to help companies build the kind of products that build good habits in our lives.
I’ve written two books, Hooked and Indistractable. Hooked was about how to build habit-forming products. Indistractable is about how to break bad habits.
I taught for many years at Stanford at the Graduate School of Business, and then later at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. And today, I mostly teach and write about how to build good habits and break bad ones.
Before we can eliminate distraction we have to understand what it is.
To define distraction, we’ll define it by what it is not.
Most people say that the opposite of distraction is focus. But I don’t think that’s true. I think that the opposite of distraction is not focus, it is traction.