How to stop getting distracted: it's not your phone

Tuesday, working from home. The client presentation is due at six. You open the file, type the title of the first slide, and stop. "Just a second": LinkedIn, where a former colleague is announcing a promotion. Then Slack, then your inbox, then an article on how to be more productive. When you look up it's 4:40. The slide is still blank, and the knot in your stomach is still there. You've read three books on focus and installed an app that blocks websites. If you want to know how to stop getting distracted, this is where to start: your phone was never the problem.

Distraction starts on the inside

Nir Eyal knows a thing or two about the apps that keep us glued to our screens: years ago he wrote a book teaching companies how to build habit-forming products. That's exactly why his book Indistractable catches you off guard. His argument is that the main cause of distraction isn't notifications. It's what we feel a moment before we go looking for them.

Every time we get distracted, Eyal says, we're escaping some kind of discomfort. The boredom of a Zoom call that never ends. The anxiety of sending a quote the client might turn down. The feeling that you're not quite up to the report your boss asked for. Your phone is just the nearest emergency exit.

Hence the line the whole book rests on: time management is pain management. If you don't learn to sit with that feeling for a few minutes, you'll always find a way out. Delete Instagram and you'll catch yourself tidying your desk, answering emails that could have waited, checking the weather for the third time.

Eyal draws a line between traction and distraction: the actions that move you toward what you want, and the ones that pull you away from it. Answering a work message can be either. It depends on what you had decided to do in that moment.

Why your mind keeps looking for an exit

It isn't a personal flaw. According to Eyal, we're wired to be a little dissatisfied: a restless brain pushed our ancestors to search, improve and survive. Today the same machinery pushes us toward the screen.

The book cites a 2014 study published in Science that makes the point almost comically. Participants had to sit alone in a room for fifteen minutes with nothing to do but think. The only thing in the room was a device that delivered a mild electric shock. Beforehand, every one of them had said they would pay money to avoid being shocked. Yet, left alone with their thoughts, 67 percent of the men and 25 percent of the women shocked themselves, some of them more than once.

To avoid being bored, we'll put up with pain. Of course we open LinkedIn.

Why banning your phone doesn't work

The gut reaction is a ban: "No social media today." It usually lasts until the first coffee break. Eyal explains why with an experiment by the psychologist Daniel Wegner. A group of people was asked not to think about a white bear for five minutes, and they thought about it, on average, once a minute. Later, when they were allowed to think about it, the bear came back far more often than it did for people who had never been told to push it away.

The harder you fight a craving, the stronger it gets. A study of flight attendants who smoked makes the same point. They flew out of Israel, some on a three-hour flight to Europe, others on a ten-hour flight to New York. How badly they wanted a cigarette didn't depend on how long it had been since the last one, but on how long they had to wait for the next. Over the Atlantic, the ones who knew they couldn't smoke for hours barely felt the urge; at that same moment, their colleagues who had just landed in Europe felt it at full strength.

A craving, in other words, isn't a blind force. A lot depends on how you look at it.

How to stop getting distracted in four steps

To change the way you look at it, Eyal draws on the work of Jonathan Bricker, a psychologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle who helps people quit smoking. His method works just as well with your phone.

1. Look for the discomfort that comes before the distraction. Don't ask "Why did I open Instagram?" Ask "What was I feeling right before?" Anxiety, boredom, fatigue, fear of getting it wrong.
2. Write it down. The time, what you were doing, how you felt. Even when you end up giving in. Over time you'll catch it earlier.
3. Get curious about it. Where do you feel it: your chest, your hands, your stomach? How does it build, and how does it fade? Instead of fighting it, you watch it pass.
4. Watch out for in-between moments. Between two calls, on the train to the office, while a heavy file takes forever to open. Those are the minutes when you pick up your phone "for just a second" and look up half an hour later somewhere else entirely.

In a smoking study cited in the book, people who had learned to notice and explore their cravings quit at twice the rate of those in the American Lung Association's best-performing program.

Then there's a tool Eyal uses on himself: the ten-minute rule. When you feel the urge to grab your phone, you're allowed to, just not right now: in ten minutes. In the meantime you ride the urge like a wave, neither pushing it away nor giving in. Nine times out of ten, by the time the ten minutes are up, the urge has passed and you're back in your presentation. And if the discomfort comes from a task that feels too big, break it into thirty-minute blocks, the way Neil Fiore's Unschedule suggests.

You're not weak, you're human

The most freeing part of the book is this: discomfort isn't something to get rid of. It's the same engine that makes us grow. The goal isn't to stop feeling it, but to stop running every time it shows up.

For Eyal, being indistractable means something simple: striving to do what you said you would do. You don't need another app or another book. You need to notice the exact moment you're about to walk away.

Your experiment for today

Pick your next workday and try this.

1. Keep a sheet of paper next to your laptop, or a note on your phone.
2. Every time you pick up your phone for no clear reason, write down three things: the time, what you were doing, and what you were feeling just before.
3. At least once, try the ten-minute rule. Feel the urge, check the clock, wait. Then decide.

At the end of the day, read it back. You'll probably find it isn't your phone that distracts you, but the same discomfort, at the same time of day, in front of the same task. And a discomfort you know is a lot less scary.