Indistractable

by Nir Eyal;

  Shevat also revealed how Slack employees use a precommitment pact, the kind we discussed in part four, to help them stay offline outside office hours. Slack has a Do Not Disturb feature built into the service that users can turn on whenever they want to focus on what they really want to do, like doing focused work or being with family or friends. Shevat told me that if an employee tries to send a message when they shouldn’t, “you will get hit by the Do Not Disturb feature. If it’s after hours, it turns on automatically so you don’t get direct messages until you get back to work.”

  Most important, the culture at Slack ensures employees have a place to discuss their concerns. As Leslie Perlow discovered at BCG, regular meetings were critical in airing employee concerns. Companies that make time to discuss their issues are more likely to foster psychological safety and hear the looming problems employees would otherwise keep to themselves.

  As we learned in part one, dealing with distraction starts by understanding what’s going on inside us. If internal triggers are crying out for relief, employees will find ways to address them one way or another—whether healthily or not. Ensuring employees have a forum to voice problems to company leadership helps Slack team members relieve the psychological strain Stansfeld and Candy found in toxic work environments.

  But how does a company as big as Slack make sure everyone has a place to feel heard? This is where the company’s own technology comes in handy. The group-chat tool facilitates the regular discussions needed to foster psychological safety while coming to consensus quickly. How do they do it? Though it may seem inconceivable, Shevat credits emoji.

  At Slack, there’s a channel for everything, he says. “We have a channel for people who want to get lunch together, a channel for sharing pet photos, even a Star Wars channel.” These separate channels not only save others from the sort of off-topic conversations that clog up email and make in-person meetings unbearable—they also give people a safe place to send feedback.

  Among the many Slack channels, the ones company leadership takes most seriously are the feedback channels. They are not just for sharing opinions on the latest product release; they are also for sharing thoughts about how to improve as a company. There is a dedicated channel called #slack-culture and another called #exec-ama where executives invite employees to “ask me anything.” Shevat says, “People will post all sorts of suggestions and are encouraged to do so.” There’s even a special channel for airing your “beef” with the company’s own product, called #beef-tweets. “Sometimes comments can get very prickly,” Shevat says, but the important thing is that they’re aired and heard.

  Here’s where emoji can come to the rescue. “Management lets people know they’ve read their feedback with an eyes emoji. Other times, if something is handled or fixed, someone will respond with a check mark,” Shevat explains. Slack has found a way to let its employees know they’re being heard and action is being taken.

  Of course, not every conversation at every company should take place in a group chat. Slack also conducts regular all-hands meetings where employees can ask senior management questions directly. No matter the format, giving employees a way to send feedback and also know it’s been heard by someone who can help lets employees know they have a voice. Whether employees’ feedback is heard during small group meetings, like those facilitated by Perlow at BCG, or over group-chat channels at Slack isn’t the point; what matters is that there is an outlet that management cares about, uses, and responds to. It is critical to the well-being of a company and its employees.

  There’s always a risk when pointing to specific companies as exemplars. Jim Collins’s best sellers Good to Great and Built to Last included profiles of some companies that didn’t end up lasting very long and others that turned out to be not so great.

  Certainly, working at Slack and BCG isn’t perfect. Some employees I spoke with told me they’d had bad experiences with heavy-handed managers. As one former employee said of Slack, “They really did try to be a psychologically safe company. It’s just that not everyone was equally skilled at maneuvering some of those nuances.” Creating the kind of company where people feel comfortable raising concerns without the fear of getting fired takes work and vigilance.

  For now, the strategies of BCG and Slack seem to be successful. Both organizations are beloved by their employees and customers; on Glassdoor.com, BCG has been named among the ten “Best Places to Work” for eight of the past nine years, while Slack has an average anonymous review of 4.8 out of 5 stars, with 95 percent of employees saying they’d recommend the company to a friend, and 99 percent approval of the CEO.

  It is worth noting that, regardless of future profit margins or returns to shareholders, these companies, at the time of writing, show concern and commitment to helping their employees thrive by giving them the freedom to be indistractable.

  REMEMBER THIS

  •Indistractable organizations, like Slack and BCG, foster psychological safety, provide a place for open discussions about concerns, and, most important, have leaders who exemplify the importance of doing focused work.

  Part 6

  How to Raise Indistractable Children

  (And Why We All Need Psychological Nutrients)

  Chapter 29

  Avoid Convenient Excuses

  Society’s fear of what a potential distraction like the smartphone is doing to our kids has reached a fever pitch. Articles with headlines like “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” and “The Risk of Teen Depression and Suicide Is Linked to Smartphone Use, Study Says” have, ironically enough, gone viral online.

  Psychologist Jean Twenge, the author of the former article, writes, “It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.”

  Convinced by the ominous headlines and fed up with their kids’ tech distractions, some parents have resorted to extreme measures. A search on YouTube reveals thousands of videos of parents storming into their kids’ rooms, unplugging the computers or gaming consoles, and smashing the devices to bits in order to teach their kids a lesson. At least, that’s their hope.

  I can certainly understand parents’ feelings of frustration. One of the first things my daughter ever said was “iPad time, iPad time!” If we didn’t comply quickly, she’d increase the volume until we did, raising our blood pressure and testing our patience. As the years passed, my daughter’s relationship with screens evolved, and not always in a good way. She was drawn to spending too much time playing frivolous apps and watching videos.

  Now that she’s older, new problems associated with raising a kid in the digital age have cropped up. On more than one occasion, we’ve met up with friends and their kids for dinner, only to find ourselves sitting through awkward meals as the kids spend the entire time tap-tap-tapping away at their phones instead of engaging with one another.

  As tempting as it may be, destroying a kid’s digital device isn’t helpful. Surrounded by alarming headlines and negative anecdotes, it’s easy to understand why many parents think tech is the source of the trouble with kids these days. But is it? As we’ve seen is the case in the workplace and in our own lives, there are once again hidden root causes to kids’ distraction.

  My wife and I needed to help our daughter develop a healthy relationship with tech and other potential distractions, but first we needed to work out what was causing her behavior. As we’ve learned throughout this book, simple answers to complex questions are often wrong, and it is far too easy to blame behavior parents don’t like on something other than ourselves.

  For example, every parent obviously knows children become hyperactive when they eat sugar. We’ve all heard a parent claim the reason behind their kid’s bratty behavior at the birthday party was the ominous “sugar high.” I must admit I’ve used that excuse on more than one occasion myself. That is, until I learned that the concept of a “sugar high” is total scientific bunk. An exhaustive
meta-analysis of sixteen studies “found that sugar does not affect the behavior or cognitive performance of children.”

  Interestingly, though the so-called sugar high is a myth for kids, it does have a real effect on parents. A study found that mothers, when told that their sons were given sugar, rated their child’s behavior as more hyperactive—despite that child having been given a placebo. In fact, videotapes of the mothers’ interactions with their sons revealed that they were more likely to trail their children and criticize them when they believed they were “high” on sugar—again, despite the fact that their sons hadn’t eaten any.

  Another classic excuse in the parental tool kit of blame deflection is the “common knowledge” that teens are rebellious by nature. Everyone knows that teenagers act horribly toward their parents because their raging hormones and underdeveloped brains make them act that way. Wrong.

  Studies have found that teenagers in many societies, particularly preindustrialized ones, don’t act especially rebelliously and, conversely, spend “almost all their time with adults.” In an article titled “The Myth of the Teen Brain,” Robert Epstein writes, “Many historians note that through most of recorded human history, the teen years were a relatively peaceful time of transition to adulthood.” Apparently, our teenagers’ brains are fine—it is our brains that are underdeveloped.

  Innovations and new technologies are another frequent target of blame. In 1474 Venetian monk and scribe Filippo di Strata issued a polemic against another handheld information device, stating, “the printing press [is] a whore.” An 1883 medical journal attributed rising rates of suicide and homicide to the new “educational craze,” proclaiming “insanity is increasing . . . with education” and that education would “exhaust the children’s brains and nervous systems.” In 1936, kids were said to “have developed the habit of dividing attention between the humdrum preparation of their school assignments and the compelling excitement of the [radio] loudspeaker,” according to Gramophone, the music magazine.

  It seems hard to believe that these benign developments scared anyone, but technological leaps are often followed by moral panics. “Each successive historical age has ardently believed that an unprecedented ‘crisis’ in youth behavior is taking place,” Oxford historian Abigail Wills writes in an article for BBC’s online history magazine. “We are not unique; our fears do not differ significantly from those of our predecessors.”

  When it comes to the undesirable behavior of children today, convenient myths about devices are just as dubious as the blame parents deflect onto sugar highs, underdeveloped teen brains, and other technologies like the book and the radio.

  Many experts believe the discussion regarding whether tech is harmful is more nuanced than alarmists let on.

  In a rebuttal to the article that claimed children are on the brink of the worst mental health crisis in decades, Sarah Rose Cavanagh wrote in Psychology Today that “the data the author chooses to present are cherry-picked, by which I mean she reviews only those studies that support her idea and ignores studies that suggest that screen use is NOT associated with outcomes like depression and loneliness.”

  One of many studies not cherry-picked was conducted by Christopher Ferguson and published in Psychiatric Quarterly. It found only a negligible relationship between screen time and depression. Ferguson wrote in an article in Science Daily, “Although an ‘everything in moderation’ message when discussing screen time with parents may be most productive, our results do not support a strong focus on screen time as a preventative measure for youth problem behaviors.” As so often is the case, the devil is in the digital details.

  A closer read of the studies linking screen time with depression finds correlation only with extreme amounts of time spent online. Teenage girls who spent over five hours per day online tended to have more depressive or suicidal thoughts, but common sense would have us ask whether the kids who have a propensity to spend excessive amounts of time online might also have other problems in their lives. Perhaps five hours a day on any form of media is a symptom of a larger problem.

  In fact, the same study found that kids who spent two hours or less online per day did not have higher rates of depression and anxiety compared to controls. A study conducted by Andrew Przybylski at the Oxford Internet Institute found that mental well-being actually increased with moderate amounts of screen time. “Even at exceptional levels, we’re talking about a very small impact,” stated Przybylski. “It’s about a third as bad as missing breakfast or not getting eight hours sleep.” When kids act in ways we don’t like, parents desperately ask, “Why is my kid acting this way?” There’s certainty in a scapegoat, and we often cling to simple answers because they serve a story we want to believe—that kids do strange things because of something outside our control, which means that those behaviors are not really their (or our) fault.

  Of course, technology plays a role. Smartphone apps and video games are designed to be engaging, just as sugar is meant to be delicious. But like the parents who blame a “sugar high” for their kid’s bad behavior, blaming devices is a surface-level answer to a deep question. Easy answers mean we can avoid having to look into the dark and complex truth underlying why kids behave the way they do. But we can’t fix the problem unless we look at it clearly, free of media-hyped myths, to understand the root causes.

  Parents don’t need to believe tech is evil to help kids manage distraction.

  Learning to become indistractable is a skill that will serve our children no matter what life path they pursue or what forms distraction takes. If we are going to help our kids take responsibility for their choices, we need to stop making convenient excuses for them—and for ourselves. In this section, we’re going to understand the deeper psychology driving some kids to overuse their devices and learn smart ways to help them overcome distraction.

  REMEMBER THIS

  •Stop deflecting blame. When kids don’t act the way parents want, it’s natural to look for answers that help parents divert responsibility.

  •Techno-panics are nothing new. From the book, to the radio, to video games, the history of parenting is strewn with moral panic over things supposedly making kids act in strange ways.

  •Tech isn’t evil. Used in the right way and in the right amounts, kids’ tech use can be beneficial, while too much (or too little) can have slightly harmful effects.

  •Teach kids to be indistractable. Teaching children how to manage distraction will benefit them throughout their lives.

  Chapter 30

  Understand Their Internal Triggers

  Richard Ryan and his colleague Edward Deci are two of the most cited researchers in the world on the drivers of human behavior. Their “self-determination theory” is widely regarded as the backbone of psychological well-being, and countless studies have supported their conclusions since they began research in the 1970s.

  Just as the human body requires three macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates, and fat) to run properly, Ryan and Deci proposed the human psyche needs three things to flourish: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. When the body is starved, it elicits hunger pangs; when the psyche is undernourished, it produces anxiety, restlessness, and other symptoms that something is missing.

  When kids aren’t getting the psychological nutrients they need, self-determination theory explains why they might overdo unhealthy behaviors, such as spending too much time in front of screens. Ryan believes the cause has less to do with the devices and more to do with why certain kids are susceptible to distraction in the first place.

  Without sufficient amounts of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, kids turn to distractions for psychological nourishment.

  LESSON 1: KIDS NEED AUTONOMY—VOLITION AND FREEDOM OF CONTROL OVER THEIR CHOICES

  Maricela Correa-Chávez and Barbara Rogoff, professors at the University of California, Santa Cruz, conducted an experiment in which two children were brought into a room where an adult taught one of them how to build a toy while
the other one waited. The study was designed to observe what the nonparticipating child, the observer, would do while they waited. In America, most of the observer children did what you’d expect them to do: they shuffled in their seats, stared at the floor, and generally showed signs of disinterest. One impatient boy even pretended a toy was a bomb and threw his hands in the air to mimic an explosion, making loud disruptive noises to match the carnage. In contrast, the researchers found that Mayan children from Guatemala concentrated on what the other child was learning and sat still in their chairs as the adult taught the other child.

  Overall, the study found that American children could focus for only half as long as Mayan kids. Even more interesting was the finding that the Mayan children with less exposure to formal education “showed more sustained attention and learning than their counterparts from Mayan families with extensive involvement in Western schooling.” In other words, less schooling meant more focus. How could that be?

  Psychologist Suzanne Gaskins has studied Mayan villages for decades and told NPR that Mayan parents give their kids a tremendous amount of freedom. “Rather than having the mom set the goal—and then having to offer enticements and rewards to reach that goal—the child is setting the goal. Then the parents support that goal however they can,” Gaskins said. Mayan parents “feel very strongly that every child knows best what they want and that goals can be achieved only when a child wants it.”

  Most formal schooling in America and similar industrialized countries, on the other hand, is the antithesis of a place where kids have the autonomy to make their own choices. According to Rogoff, “It may be the case that children give up control of their attention when it’s always managed by an adult.” In other words, kids can become conditioned to lose control of their attention and become highly distractible as a result.