Nir Eyal, a previous Stanford marketing lecturer, is the best-selling author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. His debut book, with its felicitous bright yellow cover, is now a sacred text of major and upcoming tech companies, whose business models depend upon captivating consumers by designing engaging and habit-forming products. Unfortunately, these same user-friendly products that Eyal hoped to inspire came with a dark side. They are innately distracting. Ironically, Eyal realized this in his own life, after yet another magical moment with his daughter was spoiled by preoccupation with his phone. Realizing his habitually distracted behavior was negatively affecting his life and relationships, Eyal was spurred on to write Indistractable – How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. In this book, Eyal guides us in becoming people with follow-through—people who are indistractable. Eyal explores why we are so easily distracted, what we can do to mitigate the power of distraction over our lives, and how we can ultimately persevere with our goals, learn to thrive, and pass on our indistractable skills to our children.

It is a long-held misconception that human behavior is either driven by pain or pleasure. In reality, we are much more motivated to relieve discomfort than we are to seek pleasure. As Epicurus put it, “by pleasure, we mean the absence of pain in the body and trouble in the soul.” And this rings true with distractions. Many blame social media or television for derailing achievement of goals, but ultimately, all distractions are unhealthy escapes from discomforting realities. If we genuinely want to become indistractable, we must learn how to handle our discomfort and pain in a better way.

The first step should be recognizing that dissatisfaction is the human evolutionary state. We are incredibly wired to be discontent, a surprising and unorthodox advantage for our species. Discontentment has helped catalyze humans towards advancement, without which we would have lacked motivation. Today, we can still channel the power of our unease to make our circumstances better. To accomplish this we must become more familiar with our internal triggers and emotions that prompt us toward distraction. 

When writing, the author often struggles with the urge to look something up online under the guise of “research,” but deep down, he recognizes this distraction is a diversion from difficult work. In a similar way, when you feel the urge to distraction, try your best to identify what feelings precede the urge. Are you feeling anxious? Restless? Incompetent? What are the sensations that accompany these feelings? Do your fingers tingle? Do you get butterflies in your stomach? Explore these feelings in their fullness and write these observations down. 

The premise here is that the better your self-awareness becomes in noticing and exploring these internal triggers, the better you will be at managing them down the line. A technique called the “10-minute rule” can be helpful with this. When you feel the need to distract yourself, ride the wave of the urge for 10 minutes before allowing yourself to give in. This gives you the time to sit and evaluate the sensations you feel, and many times, after “surfing the urge,” you will notice you no longer crave the distraction.

Another technique to lessen the urge of distraction is to reimagine your laborious or tedious tasks as fun. Sounds strange, but according to Ian Bogost, the author of Play Anything, fun does not need to equal pleasure. It simply needs to free us from discomfort. By taking your task more seriously, and by paying absurd attention to it, you can unearth the unique challenges and variability in it. As humans crave novelty, this transforms any activity from monotonous into one that can hold your focus.

Lastly, to truly tackle our discomfort at the root, we need a mindset change. Many of us, the author included, have come home after a hard day’s work believing ourselves fully spent, but it turns out that willpower is only as finite as we believe. If we view it more as an emotion that comes and goes, rather than a fuel tank that gradually empties, we can persist with our goals despite a temporary lack of motivation. Similarly, our self-image is equally important. Having a poor view of oneself and a lack of self-compassion in the face of failure ultimately leads to escape with distractions even more. Allow yourself the same kindness you would give a friend

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We all have values that guide us through life. These values are typically the attributes of the person we want to be, and commonly fall under one of three life domains: you, relationships, and work. If you value being a loving spouse, for example, this corresponds with the relationship domain, whereas valuing being a productive team member falls under the work domain. Most of us unintentionally neglect values in one area or another when we fail to schedule our time to align with them. The most effective way to avoid this is by “timeboxing.” Timeboxing is creating a schedule of your time by deciding what you are going to do and most importantly when you are going to do it, with a goal of having no blank space in your template. This means you will need to decide how much time you want to dedicate to each domain in your life to be consistent with your values. It is also important to schedule 15 minutes each week for honest reflection and revision of your calendar as you see fit.

The first domain to attend to when timeboxing is the domain of you. You are at the core of the three domains, so taking care of your health and wellness is vital for the other domains to flourish. Make sure to create space for prioritizing the basic needs of sleep, hygiene, and a good diet.

Next, turn to the relationship domain. It is important to make time in your schedule for cultivating relationships with family and friends, as the people you love deserve more than your left over time. It has also been recently evidenced that a lack of close friendships may be harmful to your health. The 75-year Harvard Study of Adult Development has continually monitored the wellbeing and social habits of 724 men, and concluded that quality relationships keep us happier and healthier. If you value being a present parent, an intimate spouse, and a faithful friend, intentionally schedule time to plan activities, dates, and regular get-togethers. Staying consistent with your relationships helps cultivate and nourish both you and them.

Lastly, we must address the work domain. Most of us have little choice in how much time we devote to this area, but that is why it is important to make sure your time at work is in keeping with your values. Using a detailed timeboxed schedule at work can help keep you productive. Collaborating on this with your manager or managers can also help you to keep chaos at bay by aligning expectations and appropriately prioritizing important tasks.

Although a timebox schedule will not solve all problems, we will certainly fail at our tasks if we don’t make time for them. We cannot control the outcomes of our schedules, but we can control the inputs.

When Wendy, a freelance marketing consultant, sat down to begin work at 9 a.m. with a brilliant proposal idea, her attention was quickly diverted by the ping of her phone. Ignoring the intrusion at first, Wendy could not resist the second ping. Believing it might be something of importance, she grabbed her phone only to see a trivial social media tweet. Before putting her phone down again, she noticed a text from her mom. She sent a quick heart emoji reply, but then noticed a red notification on her LinkedIn app. A recruiter had seen her profile. Considering replying, Wendy realized it was now 9:20 a.m., and worst of all, she had forgotten her proposal idea. Wendy had let distraction derail her, and many of us are guilty of the exact same thing. 

In our tech-driven world, external triggers to distraction are unsurprisingly rife. Tech companies deliberately design our devices to manipulate our behavior and keep us coming back for more, with never-ending stimulus-response loops. Without realizing it, when we respond to an external trigger like a push notification, we are conditioning ourselves to react instantly in the future. The result is we are constantly interrupted from our tasks at hand and left feeling stressed and frustrated. The problem here is that not all external triggers are harmful. Some can be advantageous in keeping us on track. How do we separate the good from the bad? The author recommends asking a critical question: Is this trigger serving me, or am I serving it? In answering this question, we can hack back or take back control of the triggers that are unhelpful.

As evidenced by Wendy’s story, our smartphones, for example, are indispensable but also potentially majorly distracting. The author advises four steps to hack them back. First, remove all unnecessary apps. If you don’t use it, or it doesn’t align with your values, uninstall it. Second, remove distracting apps like Facebook or YouTube, and instead schedule time to view them on your computer. Third, declutter your home-screen and utilize the search function to locate apps instead. Fourth, adjust or disable intrusive app notifications and utilize Do Not Disturb mode. There are many other hacks or adjustments we can make on our devices, such as ones to manage email, desktop, social media feeds, and group chats to help minimize distractions. Some practical ideas include sending fewer emails to receive less in return, tagging them with a reply due date, and scheduling time to respond. Install browser extensions that block ads and news feeds to give you the benefits of social media without the distractions, and place a Do Not Disturb sign above your workstation to avoid interruptions from others. With these practices and more, we can regain power over technology instead of letting it control us.

A final step in becoming indistractable involves a powerful and old-age technique called “precommitment.” In Homer’s Odyssey, Ulysses demonstrates an iconic example of precommitment when sailing past the land of the Sirens. Wanting to hear their enchanting song but avoid a watery fate, Ulysses instructed his crew to tie him to the mast of his ship and to fill their own ears with beeswax. Doing as he commanded, the ship passed by the Sirens unscathed even as Ulysses was driven temporarily mad by their song. Precommitments such as the Ulysses pact are so powerful because they make us less likely to act against our best interests despite any future wavering. They are our last line of defense against distractions after dealing with our internal and external triggers and timeboxing.

There are three types of precommitments the author finds especially useful. The first, an effort pact, is a precommitment that helps prevent distraction by making the undesirable action more difficult to do. Having to exert effort forces us to reason whether the distraction is even worth it. The author, for example, uses a site blocker app called SelfControl that stops his access to distracting sites during work time. This type of pact is particularly effective when it involves other people. Today, it is easy to scroll through frivolous content on your private computer or phone without arousing the suspicion of your co-workers. It can be extremely helpful, therefore, to make a pact with a partner to work together in holding each other accountable.

A price pact is a second recommended precommitment. With these aptly named agreements, money is on the line. The author made a price pact of $10,000 with a friend to encourage him to complete the first draft of this book by a set date. Losing that money would have been a devastating blow, and consequently, the pact worked like a charm. When suitable, price pacts are highly effective.

The final type of precommitment, what the author calls an “identity pact,” is perhaps the most effective. When we make something a part of our identity, we facilitate making choices that align with that identity rather than choices that don’t. The author, for example, was a vegetarian for five years. Although he missed eating meat, defining himself as a vegetarian changed his mindset —eating meat became unpalatable because vegetarians simply don’t eat meat. In the same way, you can choose to make “indistractable” a part of your identity. To solidify your commitment to this new moniker, share it with others. Teach others to be indistractable, and create routine and rituals that reinforce your identity, like timeboxing.

The modern workplace is rampant with distractions. We are pulled into “urgent” meetings, distracted by requests from our bosses or co-workers, and called back into work after hours with messages, emails, or video conferences. It seems that an always-on, always-accessible work environment that seeps into all domains of our lives is the inescapable new norm. In reality, constant work distractions like tech overuse are the symptoms of a dysfunctional and painful work culture. Work environments like this can even lead to depression among overworked and under-appreciated employees.

The antidote to oppressive work environments is psychological safety. This term is defined as “a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.” Companies must foster safe environments that encourage open dialogue between employees and managers, about any issues. Ironically, a company that emulates an encouraging and open work culture is Slack — the group-chat app used by many dysfunctional organizations. At Slack, employees are encouraged to disconnect from using Slack after hours. They are also urged to share their thoughts, opinions, and even “beefs” with the company in one of the many channels devoted to feedback. Unsurprisingly, feeling that your voice is heard and cared about is important, and being able to share your concerns without fear of retribution is essential for employees to thrive. Managers can foster this environment by modeling curiosity themselves, making time to have open discussions, and framing work tasks or projects as learning opportunities that would benefit from everyone’s input. In showing concern for employees, managers allow them the freedom to be productive and indistractable at work.

In this digital age, adults are not the only ones having trouble with distraction. Kids are facing the same temptations, and many people believe technology is responsible. Ominous articles that cherry-pick data to link teen suicide and depression to smartphone use, unfortunately reinforce this idea, as do firsthand experiences with children who are addicted to videogames, i-pads, or smartphones. But blaming technology for our children’s behavior is once again far too easy. If we want to raise indistractable children, we need to dig deeper to uncover the root causes of our children’s distraction.

Ryan and Deci, two renowned researchers on human behavior, have proposed that humans need three psychological nutrients to thrive: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The typical state of an American child’s world today easily leads to malnourishment. Extremely restrictive school environments—with choices completely managed by adults, a heavy reliance on standardized tests to measure competency, and the loss of outdoor free-play and spontaneous socialization—have led kids to seek fulfilment and nourishment with technology. Online, kids have an immeasurable amount of freedom to create, experiment, and have autonomy over their “worlds.” They can gain a sense of accomplishment that is lacking in the classroom, and they are able to identify and connect with online communities to satisfy their need for relatedness.

In order to help children balance their time, parents and guardians need to create a safe space for free and vulnerable family discussion. We need to help our children feel understood by listening to them, but also relating our own struggles with distraction and teaching them about the costs of tech overuse. Next, working with our kids to timebox their schedules based on their values and priorities helps give them a clear plan to avoid distraction. These schedules should include plenty of time for play, online and offline, with both friends and parents. We also need to help our kids manage and remove distracting external triggers. For some younger children, this is as simple as a “no smartphones” policy. Giving a child a smartphone before they have the faculties to use it properly and appropriately, and before they understand when and how to manipulate the settings of the phone, is setting them up for failure. This is akin to throwing a child in the water before they know how to swim. Kids also need good sleep, so removing all screens from their bedrooms is a no-brainer. It is also important to make sure that you are not acting as a potential distraction. Respect your children’s timebox schedules. When they have scheduled focused time for homework or chores, leave them alone.

Lastly, we can teach our children to make pacts with themselves to help equip them to make and follow through with decisions. When children are involved in discussions about how much time they should spend on tech or on their homework, and then put in charge of monitoring their own behavior, they truly learn the skills they need to be indistractable.