My New year’s Revolution: Being “Indistractable”

Part of The Marketing Society UAE LinkedIn series - Rachel Dunn, Marcomms Leader and UAE Board Member

New year, new resolutions! At The Marketing Society, we prefer to think about them as ‘revolutions’. What revolutions can we start in in 2021 to accelerate our careers, business success and even wider societal impact? For me, my revolution this year is all about being ‘indistractable’.                                                               

In September 2020, I was unlucky enough to catch Covid-19. Thankfully, I didn’t have severe symptoms and by the second week in isolation (and with more time than usual on my hands), I was able to read some of the books I’d been accumulating over the previous months. Once such read was Indistractable by Nir Eyal. Behavioural designer and Stanford lecturer Eyal is also bestselling author of Hooked, Silicon Valley’s handbook for how to create habit-forming technology.

Eyal was inspired to write Indistractable after becoming frustrated with constantly being distracted and not getting the most of out of life. In the book, he talks about situations we can all relate to, from being distracted when he wanted to spend quality time with his daughter, to starting something and not finishing it, or simply just not doing what he said he would do. He also admittedly struggled with the idea of parenting in an age of distraction, and the book has some great advice for parents on how to raise indistractable kids.

The book immediately appealed to me. I consider myself a motivated, energetic and productive person. Like many other busy marketers, I have pronounced on many occasions “I’m great at multi-tasking”, wearing it like a badge of honour. But more recently, and as life has become even busier with more to juggle than ever before, I’m starting to think that multi-tasking is a red herring, and truly being productive (doing what you intend to do) means focusing on one task at a time – it means being indistractable.

What I love about the book is that it doesn’t just blame devices and technology for diverting our attention, going deeper by delving into the hidden psychology (the internal and external triggers) driving us to distraction. It describes why solving the problem is not just a case of abstaining from devices or resisting checking emails/WhatsApp/social media, because it is impractical and can often lead to us craving it more.

The model Eyal lays out is reassuringly simple: on the Y axis, there are internal and external triggers, on the X axis there is traction (which he points out comes from the Latin word “trahere, meaning to draw or pull”) and distraction – the opposite of traction which means “drawing away of the mind”. The indistractable model is the foundation for the book and provides the backdrop to a 4-step guide to becoming indistractable, thereby intentionally controlling our attention and choosing the things we want to do in life.

Credit: The Indistractable Model, Nir Eyal https://www.nirandfar.com/indistractable/ 

Here are the key takeaways:

Step 1- Master internal triggers: analyse your internal triggers and learn to deal with the discomfort of a situation rather than trying to escape it (there is a handy ‘distraction tracker’ in the book to help with this). Re-imagine the internal trigger and avoid labelling yourself as ‘easily distracted’ - self-talk matters.

Step 2 - Make time for traction: use to-do lists to capture tasks then timebox them - schedule time for everything important in your life, personal and professional.

Step 3 - Hack back external triggers: ask if the external trigger is serving you, or if you are serving it. Is it leading you towards traction or distraction? There are a number of brilliant hacks here, from sending less emails to get less emails to turning off notifications on your phone which I found a real game-changer.

Step 4 - Prevent distraction with pacts: explore using pacts to hold yourself accountable – whether effort pacts to make unwanted behaviour more difficult or an identity pact such as calling yourself ‘indistractable’.

For many of us, working in the marcomms industry means being multi-tasking, tech-obsessed, data-crunchers who consume huge amounts of content, are always expected to be on social media and often have multiple stakeholders to engage, influence and win over. Not to mention coaching our teams and supporting their mental health whilst juggling personal commitments, all the while navigating our way through a global pandemic.

If there’s one learning to take from this book, it’s that our time is precious. By truly understanding what triggers us to be distracted, we can adopt some simple habits or ‘hacks’ to reclaim our time to do what we say we will do (whilst avoiding doing the wrong things) and hopefully live a more purposeful life in 2021, whatever that looks like to each of us. We can truly be indistractable.

#growthmindset #themarketingsociety #marketing #indistractable #nireyal