It is your own fault if you get hooked on technology - Financial Times

Nir Eyal would like anyone interested in reading this article to know it comes with a caveat. This is not a feature to devour on a whim. He would hate to distract anyone from whatever else they planned to do right now, unless that was reading the FT, of course.

The former Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer is a master at sucking people into doing something they might not have intended. His first book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, became a Silicon Valley bestseller for smartphone app makers looking for a dose of Facebook’s addictive magic.

But that was five years ago. Now Mr Eyal, 39, is trying to do something about the problem he helped to create with a new book, Indistractable, which has an almost polar opposite strap line: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. “I want to help people from an insider’s perspective and I think that’s very valuable,” he says with no hint of irony. After his MBA at Stanford, Mr Eyal founded a company to sell advertising into Facebook gaming apps, before turning to writing.

Where Mr Eyal differs from the growing clan of tech industry turncoats — such as former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris, who co-founded the Center for Humane Technology to try to persuade tech groups to think about people as well as profits when building their products, or ex-Facebook president Sean Parker, who has expressed regret about creating the social media group — is he remains wedded to the joys of technology. He just refuses to let technology distract him from the meat of daily life: work, family, self-care. What is more, he doesn’t think technology itself is the problem when it comes to distraction.

“We want to blame the technology. This is called motivated reasoning. But when we tell people technology is hijacking your brain, that it’s addicting you, that’s teaching people learnt helplessness. It’s teaching people to not even try [to do something about it].”

Like most impassioned converts, Mr Eyal reached his epiphany after a journey. His started one afternoon five years ago when he was playing with his daughter, doing activities from a book. One was to imagine your perfect superpower; he can remember the question but not his daughter’s answer because he was too busy fiddling with his phone.

Getting easily distracted was nothing new. “It happened on many occasions. When I’d sit down at my desk to write. ‘Let me just read this book, or check email real quick, or check Google.’ And I wouldn’t be able to do the work that I’d said I was going to do.”

He tried ditching the technology: getting a flip phone and a word processor with no internet connection. But nothing worked. He would find new ways to distract himself such as cleaning out his desk or taking out the rubbish. His work suffered. Cue his revelation that he was the one to blame, not technology, which is just as well for anyone trying to function in the modern world. He likens adults eager for distraction to babies seeking their dummies: both are hunting a different sensation.

“The most interesting part of this five-year process writing Indistractable was the shift in my mind from blaming technology, particularly in the workplace because so many people say, ‘Oh, I’m constantly tethered to my phone, tethered to Slack and other tools’, when, in fact, the conclusion I came to is that distraction in the workplace is a symptom of cultural dysfunction. Overuse of the tools is the symptom not the root cause of the problem.”

The trick, he reckons, is using your time with intent, as opposed to letting anything else distract you. Too many notifications? Turn them off, something two-thirds of people still aren’t doing. Tempted by Twitter? Block it with something like the SelfControl app, which limits access to certain websites. Work from home but can’t sit still? Sign up for FocusMate.com and pay to have someone else monitor you working.

In an open-plan office he swears something as simple as printing out a sign that says, “I need to focus right now but please come back soon” will work wonders, important because research shows our brains take 20 minutes to switch between tasks.

At home, his wife wears a “concentration crown” complete with built-in LED lights to show she is otherwise engaged.

The other culprit is office culture and the inability to talk about the problem of technological distraction: those late-night emails, the group chat that never stops, like an all-day conference call. He points out Slack’s mantra is, ‘Work hard and go home’, adding if the company synonymous with internal group chat can switch off, then so can any company.

Mr Eyal sometimes wears a T-shirt emblazoned with INDISTRACTABLE although today his tech-chic suit-jacket-and-jeans combo seems to embody his best-of-both-worlds iPhone philosophy: owning the latest model — he whips his out to show me — doesn’t equate to hours lost scrolling because he has hacked his apps right back, plus scrolling is fine provided you scroll on your schedule.

The key is timeboxing, a personal productivity tool to organise your calendar for anything from browsing Facebook or exercising to writing a report or doing the dishes.

Mr Eyal is evangelical about the approach — derided as infantilising by FT columnist Tim Harford — crediting it with saving his marriage among other things because he and his wife now divvy up chores that were falling to her.

“If something is on your to-do list, that’s output. You can’t plan output without input and your input is your time, so it’s important to make sure you have that time on your schedule. I agree it is more work but look, we live in the 21st century. We don’t have to hunt our own food. We don’t have to chop our own wood. I’m asking you to keep a calendar.”

Timeboxing doesn’t mean he never feels the urge to check Twitter or email when he should be doing something else, but he insists he has learnt to ride the urge by waiting it out: imposing a ten-minute rule is helpful.

“You can’t control what you feel. You can control how you react to how you feel.” This isn’t the first time Mr Eyal has changed his behaviour, he points out.

He is very trim — he used to be clinically obese, but now even loves exercising, not least because he uses the time to catch up on newspaper articles pre-saved into an app that dictates them out loud while he pounds the turf.

That’s why he hopes no one will have been tempted to read this far into this interview — unless it was something they had pre-planned to do. “I hope readers read this article on their schedule and not anyone else’s,” he adds, in an email sent the following morning. And yes, he time-boxed the slot.

Nir Eyal’s four-step guide to becoming indistractable

Master internal triggers. Work out why we are letting ourselves be distracted and fix that by waiting ten minutes, finding more willpower, or even a new job if we need a big change.

Make time for traction. The opposite of distraction, think of traction as actions that draw us towards what we want in life — or need to get done.

Hack back external triggers. Turn off the pings, dings and rings that prompt us to check email, dive into group chats, or open a news alert. Avoid co-workers who might interrupt us if we are busy.

Prevent distraction with pacts. Fight technology with technology. Use internet or website blocking apps such as SelfControl or Freedom. Block Facebook’s news feed.

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