Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention

I loved this book, and several times in reading it, I faced some uncomfortable truths about how I work. The distractions that I allow to pull my focus from the task at hand. I do not think that I will go to the control lengths that Nir shares, but there are some work situations in that I am going to go “full Nir” to enable me to have focus/flow time until I get done what I need to get done.

Some (I have so many highlights I just can put them all here) from my Kindle highlights;

“But there’s also a dark side. As philosopher Paul Virilio wrote, “When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck.” In the case of user-friendly products and services, what makes some products engaging and easy to use can also make them distracting.”

“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.”

“A 2014 study published in Science asked participants to sit in a room and think for fifteen minutes. The room was empty except for a device that allowed the participants to mildly but painfully electrocute themselves. “Why would anyone want to do that?” you might ask. When asked beforehand, every participant in the study said they would pay to avoid being shocked. However, when left alone in the room with the machine and nothing else to do, 67 percent of men and 25 percent of women shocked themselves, and many did so multiple times. The study’s authors conclude their paper by saying, “People prefer doing to thinking, even if what they are doing is so unpleasant that they would normally pay to avoid it. The untutored mind does not like to be alone with itself.”

“To use a popular aphorism, “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”

“Think of all the locks, security systems, and storage units we use to protect our property and how little we do to protect our time.”

“Another form of multichannel multitasking has been shown to be an effective way to help people get fit. 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.”

“As we learned in part one, many distractions originate from a need to escape psychological discomfort. So what is making the modern employee so uncomfortable? There is mounting evidence that some organizations make their employees feel a great deal of pain. In fact, a 2006 meta-analysis by Stephen Stansfeld and Bridget Candy at University College London found that a certain kind of work environment can actually cause clinical depression.”

Here is the LINK to the AMAZON Book