Nir Eyal

Many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old while companies irrationally overvalue the new.”

In the future, there will be two kinds of people in the world: those who let their attention and lives be controlled and coerced by others and those who proudly call themselves “indistractable.

By opening this book, you’ve taken the first step toward owning your time and your future.

With the techniques in this book, you’ll learn exactly what to do from this day forth to control your attention and choose your life.

Removing online technology didn’t work. I’d just replaced one distraction with another.

I discovered that living the life we want requires not only doing the right things; it also requires we stop doing the wrong things that take us off track. We all know eating cake is worse for our waistlines than having a healthy salad. We agree that aimlessly scrolling our social media feeds is not as enriching as spending time with real friends in real life. We understand that if we want to be more productive at work, we need to stop wasting time and actually do the work. We already know what to do. What we don’t know is how to stop getting distracted.

This book is about what I learned as I developed the most important skill for the twenty-first century. It’s about how I became indistractable, and how you can too.

The first step is to recognize that distraction starts from within. In part one, you’ll learn practical ways to identify and manage the psychological discomfort that leads us off track.

Part two will look at the importance of making time for the things you really want to do. You’ll learn why you can’t call something a “distraction”
unless you know what it is distracting you from. You’ll learn to plan your time with intention, even if you choose to spend it scrolling through celebrity headlines or reading a steamy romance novel. After all, the time you plan to waste is not wasted time.

Part three follows with a no-holds-barred examination of the unwanted external triggers that hamper our productivity and diminish our well-being.