by Nir Eyal;
You can hack back YouTube by removing distracting video thumbnails and ads.
Overcoming the countless external triggers on social media, from news feeds to suggested videos, represents a significant step in our quest to become indistractable. Regardless of the exact tool we choose, the key is to regain control over our experiences rather than allowing the social networks to control our time and attention.
REMEMBER THIS
•Feeds, like the ones we scroll through on social media, are designed to keep you engaged. Feeds are full of external triggers that can drive us to distraction.
•Take control of feeds by hacking back. Use free browser extensions like News Feed Eradicator for Facebook, Newsfeed Burner, Open Multiple Websites, and DF Tube to remove distracting external triggers. (Links to all these services and more are available at NirAndFar.com/Indistractable.)
Part 4
Prevent Distraction with Pacts
Chapter 22
The Power of Precommitments
Jonathan Franzen, the writer Time magazine called the “Great American Novelist,” struggles with distraction just like you and me. The difference, however, between Franzen and most people, is that he takes drastic steps to keep himself focused. According to a 2010 Time profile:
He uses a heavy, obsolete Dell laptop from which he has scoured any trace of hearts and solitaire, down to the level of the operating system. Because Franzen believes you can’t write serious fiction on a computer that’s connected to the internet, he not only removed the Dell’s wireless card but also permanently blocked its Ethernet port. “What you have to do,” he explains, “is you plug in an Ethernet cable with superglue and then you saw off the little head of it.”
Franzen’s methods may seem extreme, but desperate times call for desperate measures. And Franzen is not alone in his methods. Famed director Quentin Tarantino never uses a computer to write his screenplays, preferring to work by hand in a notebook. Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jhumpa Lahiri writes her books with pen and paper and then types them on a computer without internet.
What these creative professionals understand is that focus not only requires keeping distraction out; it also necessitates keeping ourselves in. After we’ve learned to master internal triggers, make time for traction, and hack back external triggers, the last step to becoming indistractable involves preventing ourselves from sliding into distraction. To do so, we must learn a powerful technique called a “precommitment,” which involves removing a future choice in order to overcome our impulsivity.
Although researchers are still studying why it is so effective, precommitment is, in fact, an age-old tactic. Perhaps the most iconic precommitment in history appears in the ancient telling of the Odyssey. In the story, Ulysses must sail his ship and crew past the land of the Sirens, who sing a bewitching song known to draw sailors to their shores. When sailors approach, they wreck their ships on the Sirens’ rocky coast and perish.
Knowing the danger ahead, Ulysses hatches a clever plan to avoid this fate. He orders his men to fill their ears with beeswax so they cannot hear the Sirens’ call. Everyone follows Ulysses’s orders, with the exception of Ulysses, who wants to hear the beautiful song for himself.
But Ulysses knows that he will be tempted to either steer his ship toward the rocks or jump into the sea to reach the Sirens. To safeguard himself and his men, he instructs his crew to tie him to the mast of the ship and instructs them not to set him free nor change course until the ship is in the clear, no matter what he says or does. The crew follows Ulysses’s commands, and as the ship passes the Sirens’ shores, he is driven temporarily insane by their song. In an angry rage, he calls for his men to let him go, but since they cannot hear the Sirens nor their captain, they navigate past the danger safely.
In Homer’s Odyssey, Ulysses resists the Sirens’ song by making a precommitment and successfully avoiding the distraction.
A “Ulysses pact” is defined as “a freely made decision that is designed and intended to bind oneself in the future,” and is a type of precommitment we still use today. For example, we precommit to advanced health-care directives to let our doctors and family members know our intentions should we lose our ability to make sound judgments. We precommit to our financial security by depositing money in retirement accounts with steep penalties for early withdrawal to ensure we don’t spend funds we’ll need later in life. We covet the fidelity that is promised in a lifelong relationship bound by the contract of marriage.
Such precommitments are powerful because they cement our intentions when we’re clearheaded and make us less likely to act against our best interests later. Just as we make precommitments in other areas of our lives, we can utilize them in our counteroffensive against distraction.
The most effective time to introduce a precommitment is after we’ve addressed the first three aspects of the Indistractable Model.
If we haven’t fundamentally dealt with the internal triggers driving us toward distraction, as we learned in part one, we’ll be set up for failure. Similarly, if we haven’t set aside time for traction, as we learned in part two, our precommitments will be useless. And finally, if we don’t first remove the external triggers that aren’t serving us before we make a precommitment, it’s likely not going to work. Precommitments are the last line of defense preventing us from sliding into distraction. In the next few chapters we’ll explore the three kinds of precommitments we can use to keep ourselves on track.
REMEMBER THIS
•Being indistractable does not only require keeping distraction out. It also necessitates reining ourselves in.
•Precommitments can reduce the likelihood of distraction. They help us stick with decisions we’ve made in advance.
•Precommitments should only be used after the other three indistractable strategies have already been applied. Don’t skip the first three steps.
Chapter 23
Prevent Distraction with Effort Pacts
Inventors David Krippendorf and Ryan Tseng came up with a simple way to stop their unwanted habit of late-night snacking on indulgent foods. Their device, kSafe (formerly Kitchen Safe), is a plastic container equipped with a locking timer built into the lid.
Placing your tempting treats (like Oreo cookies, a personal favorite) in the container and setting the kSafe timer locks the container until the timer runs out. Of course, one could smash the container with a hammer or run out to buy some more cookies, but that extra effort makes those choices less likely. Krippendorf and Tseng’s concept was so compelling that it scored a deal on the reality show Shark Tank, and the product now has nearly four hundred five-star reviews on Amazon.
KSafe is an example of a precommitment. Specifically, it demonstrates the usefulness of an effort pact—a kind of precommitment that involves increasing the amount of effort required to perform an undesirable action. This type of precommitment can help us become indistractable.
An effort pact prevents distraction by making unwanted behaviors more difficult to do.
We are experiencing an explosion of new products and services vying to help us make effort pacts with our digital devices. Whenever I write on my laptop, for instance, I click on the SelfControl app, which blocks my access to a host of distracting websites like Facebook and Reddit, as well as my email account. I can set it to block these sites for as much time as I need, typically in forty-five-minute to one-hour increments. Another app called Freedom is a bit more sophisticated and blocks potential distractions not only on my computer but also on mobile devices.
Forest, perhaps my favorite distraction-proofing app, is one I find myself using nearly every day. Every time I want to make an effort pact with myself to avoid getting distracted on my phone, I open the Forest app and set my desired length of phone-free time. As soon as I hit a button marked Plant, a tiny seedling appears on the screen and a timer starts counting down. If I attempt to switch tasks on my phone before the timer runs out, my virtual tree dies. The thought of killing the li
ttle virtual tree adds just enough extra effort to discourage me from tapping out of the app—a visible reminder of the pact I’ve made with myself.
Apple and Google are also joining the crusade against digital distractions by adding effort pact capabilities to their operating systems. Apple’s iOS 12 allows users to schedule time constraints for certain apps through its Downtime function. If users attempt to access a listed app during specified hours, the phone prompts the user to take an additional step in order to confirm that they want to break their pact. Newer versions of Google’s Android come with Digital Wellbeing features that provide similar functionality.
Adding a bit of additional effort forces us to ask if a distraction is worth it. Whether with the help of a product like kSafe or an app like Forest, effort pacts are not limited to those we make with ourselves; another highly effective way to forge them involves making pacts with other people.
The Forest app is a simple way to make an effort pact on your phone.
In previous generations, social pressure helped us stay on task—before the invention of the personal computer, procrastinating at our desks was obvious to the entire office. Reading a copy of Sports Illustrated or Vogue or recapping the details of our long weekend while on the phone with a friend sent clear signals to our colleagues that we were slacking off.
In contrast, few people today can see what we’re scrolling through or clicking on while at the office. Hunched over our laptops, we find ourselves checking sports scores, news feeds, or celebrity gossip headlines throughout the workday. To a passerby, these acts look just the same as performing competitive research or following up on sales leads. Disguised by the privacy of our screens, the social pressure to stay on task disappears.
The problem becomes more acute when we work remotely. Since I tend to work from home, I find it all too easy to get off track when I know I should be writing. Perhaps bringing back a bit of social pressure when I’m having trouble staying focused could be helpful? I put the question to the test and asked my friend Taylor, a fellow author, to co-work with me. Most mornings, we sat at adjacent desks in my home office and agreed to work in timed sprints of forty-five minutes. Seeing him hard at work, particularly at times when I found myself losing steam, and knowing that he could see me, kept me doing the work I knew I needed to do. Scheduling time with a friend for focused work proved to be an effective way to commit to doing what mattered most.
But what if you can’t find a colleague with a compatible schedule? When Taylor went away to speak at a conference for a week, I needed to re-create the experience of making an effort pact with another person. Thankfully, I found Focusmate. With a vision to help people around the world stay focused, they facilitate effort pacts via a one-to-one video conferencing service.
While Taylor was away, I signed up at Focusmate.com and was paired with a Czech medical school student named Martin. Because I knew he would be waiting for me to co-work at our scheduled time, I didn’t want to let him down. While Martin was hard at work memorizing human anatomy, I stayed focused on my writing. To discourage people from skipping their meeting times, participants are encouraged to leave a review of their focus mate.5
Effort pacts make us less likely to abandon the task at hand. Whether we make them with friends and colleagues, or via tools like Forest, SelfControl, Focusmate, or kSafe, effort pacts are a simple yet highly effective way to keep us from getting distracted.
REMEMBER THIS
•An effort pact prevents distraction by making unwanted behaviors more difficult to do.
•In the age of the personal computer, social pressure to stay on task has largely disappeared. No one can see what you’re working on, so it’s easier to slack off. Working next to a colleague or friend for a set period of time can be a highly effective effort pact.
•You can use tech to stay off tech. Apps like SelfControl, Forest, and Focusmate can help you make effort pacts.
5I liked the service so much that I decided to invest in Focusmate.
Chapter 24
Prevent Distraction with Price Pacts
A price pact is a type of precommitment that involves putting money on the line to encourage us to do what we say we will. Stick to your intended behavior, and you keep the cash; but get distracted, and you forfeit the funds. It sounds harsh, but the results are stunning.
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine illustrated the power of price pacts by examining three groups of smokers who were trying to quit their unhealthy habit. In the study, a control group was offered educational information and traditional methods, such as free nicotine patches, to encourage smoking cessation. After six months, 6 percent of people in the control group had stopped smoking. The next group, called the “reward group,” was offered $800 if they had stopped smoking after six months—17 percent of them were successful.
However, the third group of participants provided the most interesting results. In this group, called the “deposit group,” participants were required to make a precommitment deposit of $150 of their own money with a pledge to be smoke-free after six months. If, and only if, they reached their goal, they would receive the $150 deposit back. In addition to recouping their cash, successful deposit-group participants would also receive a $650 bonus prize (as opposed to the $800 offered to the “reward” participants) from their employer.
The results? Of those who accepted the deposit challenge, an astounding 52 percent succeeded in meeting their goal! One would imagine that a greater reward ought to lead to greater motivation to succeed, so why would winning the $800 reward be less effective than winning the $650 reward, plus $150 deposit? Perhaps participants in the deposit group were more motivated to quit smoking in the first place? To combat this potential bias, the study’s authors only used data from smokers willing to be in either test group.
Explaining the results, one of the study’s authors wrote that “people are typically more motivated to avoid losses than to seek gains.” Losing hurts more than winning feels good. This irrational tendency, known as “loss aversion,” is a cornerstone of behavioral economics.
I’ve learned how to harness the power of loss aversion in a positive way. A few years ago, I was frustrated at the number of excuses I was making for not exercising regularly. At the time, going to the gym couldn’t have been easier—the fully equipped facility was located in my apartment complex. I couldn’t blame my no-shows on traffic, nor could I blame it on membership dues, because membership was free for residents. Even taking a long walk would be better than doing nothing. Yet I somehow found reasons to skip my workouts.
I decided to make a price pact with myself. After making time in my timeboxed schedule, I taped a crisp hundred-dollar bill to the calendar on my wall, next to the date of my upcoming workout. Then I bought a ninety-nine-cent lighter and placed it nearby. Every day, I had a choice to make: I would either burn the calories by exercising or burn the hundred-dollar bill. Unless I was certifiably sick, those were the only two options I allowed myself.
Any time I found myself coming up with petty excuses, I had a crystal clear external trigger that reminded me of the precommitment I made to myself and to my health. I know what you’re thinking: “That’s too extreme! You can’t burn money like that!” That’s exactly my point. I’ve used this “burn or burn” technique for over three years and have gained twelve pounds of muscle, without ever burning the hundred dollars.
My “burn or burn” calendar is one of the first things I see in the morning. It reminds me that I need to either burn calories or burn the hundred-dollar bill.6
As exemplified by my “burn or burn” method, a price pact binds us to action by attaching a price to distraction. But a price pact need not be limited to smoking cessation, weight loss, or fitness goals; in fact, I found it helpful for achieving my professional ambitions as well. After spending nearly five years conducting the research for this book, I knew it was finally time to start putting words on the page, but I found it difficult to
get down to writing each day and instead found myself doing even more research, both online and offline. Even worse, I found myself a few clicks away from consuming media that was entirely irrelevant to my writing goals. Clearly, I was not making traction.
Eventually, I’d had enough of my false starts, half-finished chapters, and incomplete outlines. I decided to put some skin in the game and enter a price pact to hold myself accountable to my important goal of finishing this book.
I asked my friend Mark to be my accountability partner in my price pact; if I didn’t finish a first draft of this book by a set date, I had to pay him $10,000. The thought of it made me sick to my stomach—if I forfeited the money, gone would be the vacation budget I’d set aside for my fortieth birthday; gone would be my self-indulgent fund reserved for my new adjustable desk; most devastatingly, gone would be the completion of this book, a goal I so desperately wanted to achieve.
A price pact is effective because it moves the pain of losing to the present moment, as opposed to a far-off future. There’s also nothing special about the dollar amount so long as the sum hurts to lose. For me, the price pact worked like a charm, because knowing that I had so much on the line kicked me into high gear. I committed to a minimum of two hours of distraction-free writing time six days per week, added it to my timeboxed schedule, and got down to work each day. In the end, I was able to keep my money (and my vacation and adjustable desk), and you’re now reading the result of my work.
By this point, you may think price pacts are an impenetrable defense against distraction. Why not just make the cost of distraction so high that you always stay on track? The fact is, price pacts aren’t for everyone and for every situation. While price pacts can be highly effective, they come with some caveats. To experience the best results with price pacts, we need to be aware of and plan for their pitfalls: