How to fight distractions

Do you ever find yourself...

Do you ever find yourself trying to concentrate

and you can't seem to focus?

Why are we so distracted these days?

And is technology the root cause of the problem,

or is there something deeper going on?

My name is Nir Eyal, and I've spent the last five years

researching and writing about the deeper psychology of distraction.

When I found myself struggling with distraction,

I decided to do what many people advise

and got rid of the distracting technology.

I got myself a flip-phone without any apps.

All it did was phone calls and text messages.

Then I got a word processor from the 1990s

without any sort of internet connection.

Unfortunately I found I still got distracted.

I'd start reading a book from my bookshelf.

I'd tidy up my desk. I'd take out the trash even -

just to avoid the thing that I didn’t want to do.

I had only focused on the external triggers -

the pings and dings that were leading me towards distraction.

What I hadn't focused on,

and what turns out to be a much more common source of distraction,

are the internal triggers -

the uncomfortable emotional states that we seek to escape.

When we're lonely, we check Facebook.

When we're uncertain, we google.

When we're bored, we check the news, stocks prices, sports scores -

anything to not feel these uncomfortable sensations

that we're not ready to experience.

Here are a few techniques I discovered in my research

that could help us stay on track.

First what you want to do is to make sure you plan your day.

Two-thirds of people don't keep any sort of calendar,

any kind of schedule in their day.

Well the fact of the matter is if you don't plan your day,

somebody is going to plan it for you.

Many of us believe in this myth of the to-do list.

I used to think that just by writing things down they'd get done.

But of course I'd go from day to day to day

recycling the bottom half of my to-to list

because I wasn't making time to do those tasks.

So the best place to start is not with the output

of what you want to get done every day,

but with the input of how much time you have to devote to every task.

So distraction has many consequences.

One of them is that we find that when someone is interrupted during a task,

it can take up to 20 minutes for them to refocus on what they were doing.

Many times we don't even realise how much worse our output is when we...

So check email in one solid block.

If you enjoy using social media that's great,

but make time for it in your day so it's not something you're only using

every time you feel bored or lonely.

Researchers have found that surfing the urge

is an effective way to master our internal triggers.

In a smoking cessation study,

researchers found that when they taught smokers how to notice

the sensation and be mindful of what they were experiencing,

they became much more likely to stop smoking.

By surfing the urge and noticing what it is that we're experiencing

and allowing that sensation to crest and then subside -

kind of like how a surfer might surf a wave -

we allow that emotion, that uncomfortable internal trigger,

to crest and then pass.

The next thing that we want to do is be careful of liminal moments.

Liminal moments are these periods of time when we are transitioning

from one task to the other.

So for example if you start checking your email

on the way back from a meeting and you're finally at your desk

and you keep checking your email

instead of getting to the task at hand

well now that liminal moment has turned into a distraction.

So be careful of those times

when you're transitioning from one task to the next.

A study of alcoholics found that the number one determinant

of whether someone would stay sober after a rehabilitation programme

was not their level of physical dependency,

it wasn't what was happening in their body,

in fact it was what was happening in their minds.

The people who were most likely to stay sober

were those who believed they had the power to stop.

So when we think that technology is hijacking our brains

or it's addicting everyone, we are making it more likely that

we won't be able to put technology distractions in their place.

So don't believe this lie that there's nothing we can do.

Clearly there's so much we can do

to help make sure that we get the best out of these products

without letting them get the best of us.

Thanks for watching!

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