Indistractable Page 7

  To her surprise, when they sat down to discuss her schedule, April found that David was extremely supportive of her intention to stick to a more planned-out day. “He knew I was burning the candle at both ends,” she told me. “When I proposed a weekly schedule, he actually seemed relieved. He told me it was helpful to know when he could call or message me instead of guessing if I was with my family.”

  When she sat down with David, she realized many of the commitments clogging her calendar weren’t nearly as important to him as the time she spent closing deals. Thanks to their newfound alignment, David agreed she didn’t need to attend so many meetings or mentor so many people and reassured her that this would not adversely affect her career ambitions, as long as she put in the time for her most important task: increasing revenue.

  To help them stay in sync, April and David decided to meet for fifteen minutes every Monday morning at eleven o’clock. Reviewing her schedule for the week ahead would reassure them both that April was spending her time well and enable them to adjust accordingly, if necessary. At the end of the meeting, she realized she could gain greater control over her workday and also cut back on the time she spent tethered to her phone at night—time that came at the expense of her personal life. April loved the outcome: a detailed view of her entire week that respected her values, reduced distractions, and, ultimately, granted her more time to do what she really wanted.

  April’s story is not everyone’s story. The way April allocated her time won’t be the way you spend your time, but schedule syncing is essential, whether with a family member or an employer. Regularly aligning expectations around how you’ll spend your time is paramount, and must be done in regular, predictable increments. If your schedule can be synced weekly, then review it and get agreement for that period, but if your schedule changes daily, getting into the routine of a brief daily check-in with your manager will serve you both well. If you report to multiple bosses, a timeboxed calendar can serve as a way to get alignment around how you spend your time. There’s no mystery about what’s getting done when there’s transparency in your schedule.

  Remember, the Indistractable Model has four parts. Mastering internal triggers is the first step and making time for traction is the second, but there’s much more we can do, as you’ll soon learn. In part five, we’ll also dive into the role of workplace culture and why persistent distraction is often a sign of organizational dysfunction. For now, it’s important not to shortchange the simple yet highly effective technique of schedule syncing.

  Whether at work, at home, or on our own, planning ahead and timeboxing our schedules is an essential step to becoming indistractable. By defining how we spend our time and syncing with the stakeholders in our lives, we ensure that we do the things that matter and ignore the things that don’t. It frees us from the trivialities of our day and gives us back the time we can’t afford to waste.

  But once we’ve reclaimed that time, how do we get the most out of it? We’ll explore that question in the next section.

  REMEMBER THIS

  •Syncing your schedule with stakeholders at work is critical for making time for traction in your day. Without visibility into how you spend your time, colleagues and managers are more likely to distract you with superfluous tasks.

  •Sync as frequently as your schedule changes. If your schedule template changes from day to day, have a daily check-in. However, most people find a weekly alignment is sufficient.

  Part 3

  Hack Back External Triggers

  Chapter 13

  Ask the Critical Question

  Wendy, a freelance marketing consultant, knew exactly what she had to do for the next hour at work. Her calendar told her that she needed to be in her office chair at 9 am to write new client proposals, the most important task of her day. She fired up her laptop and opened the client’s file on her screen, eager to win new business. As she held her coffee mug with both hands and took a sip, a fantastic addition to the proposal entered her head. “This is going to be great!” she thought to herself.

  But before she had a chance to write down the idea—ping!—her phone buzzed with a notification. Wendy ignored the intrusion at first. She jotted down a few words, but then the phone buzzed again with a different notification. This time her focus faltered, and she became curious. What if a client needed her?

  She picked up her phone, only to find out that a trivial tweet by a celebrity rapper was reverberating through social media. After tapping out of the app, another notification caught her eye. Her mom had messaged her to say good morning. Wendy fired off a quick emoji heart to let Mom know she was fine. Oh, and what was that? A bright red notification bubble over the professional social networking app, LinkedIn. Perhaps there was a new business opportunity waiting for her? Nope. Just a recruiter who had seen her profile and liked what he saw.

  Wendy was tempted to reply, but she remembered the time. It was now 9:20 am, and she hadn’t made any progress on her proposal. Worst of all, she’d forgotten the big idea she had been so excited to add to it. “How did this happen?” she moaned to herself. Despite having important work to do, Wendy wasn’t getting it done. She was, once again, distracted.

  Does this sound familiar? Many of us have experienced just that kind of morning. The source of the distraction during these moments, however, isn’t an internal trigger. The ubiquity of external triggers, like notifications, pings, dings, alarms, and even other people, makes them hard to ignore.

  It’s time for us to hack back. In tech speak, “to hack” means “to gain unauthorized access to data in a system or computer.” Similarly, our tech devices can gain unauthorized access to our brains by prompting us to distraction. Facebook’s first president, Sean Parker, admitted as much when he described how the social network was designed to manipulate our behavior. “It’s a social-validation feedback loop,” he said. “Exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”

  To start hacking back, we first need to understand how tech companies use external triggers to such great effect. What exactly is the “vulnerability in human psychology” Parker described that makes us susceptible to the external triggers that so often lead to distraction?

  In 2007, B. J. Fogg, founder of Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab, taught a class on “mass interpersonal persuasion.” Several of the students in attendance would later pursue careers applying his methods at companies like Facebook and Uber. Mike Krieger, a cofounder of Instagram, created a prototype of the app in Fogg’s class that he eventually sold for $1 billion.

  As a student at Stanford’s business school at the time, I attended a retreat at Fogg’s home, where he taught his methods of persuasion in more depth. Learning from him firsthand was a turning point in my understanding of human behavior. He taught me a new formula that changed the way I viewed the world.

  The Fogg Behavior Model states that for a behavior (B) to occur, three things must be present at the same time: motivation (M), ability (A), and a trigger (T). More succinctly, B = MAT.

  Motivation is “the energy for action,” according to Edward Deci, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester. When we’re highly motivated, we have a strong desire, and the requisite energy, to take an action, and when we’re not motivated, we lack the energy to perform a task. Meanwhile, in Fogg’s formula, ability relates to facility of action. Quite simply, the harder something is to do, the less likely people are to do it. Conversely, the easier something is to do, the more likely we are to do it.

  When people have sufficient motivation and ability, they’re primed for certain behavior. However, without the critical third component, the behavior will not occur. A trigger to tell us what to do next is always required. We discussed internal triggers in a previous section, but when it comes to the products we use every day and the interruptions that lead to distraction, external triggers—stimuli in our environment that prompt us to act�
�play a big role.

  Today, much of our struggle with distraction is a struggle with external triggers.

  “When BlackBerry launched push email in 2003, users rejoiced: They didn’t need to constantly check their inbox for fear they’d miss important messages. When email comes, BlackBerry promised, your phone will tell you,” David Pierce wrote in Wired magazine. Apple and Google soon followed and made notifications part of their phone operating systems. “Suddenly, there was a way for anyone to jump into your phone when they wanted your attention,” Pierce continued. “Push notifications proved to be a marketer’s dream: They’re functionally impossible to tell apart from a text or email without looking, so you have to look before you can dismiss.”

  Checking those notifications comes at a high price. External triggers can rip us away from our planned tasks. Researchers have found that when people are interrupted during a task, they tend to subsequently make up for lost time by working faster, but the cost is higher levels of stress and frustration.

  The more we respond to external triggers, the more we train our brain in a never-ending stimulus–response loop. We condition ourselves to respond instantly. Soon, it feels impossible to do what we’ve planned because we’re constantly reacting to external triggers instead of attending to what’s in front of us.

  Perhaps the answer is to simply ignore the external triggers. Maybe if we don’t act on the notifications, phone calls, and interruptions, we can go about our business and quickly silence the interruptions when they happen.

  Not so fast. A study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance found that receiving a cell phone notification but not replying to it was just as distracting as responding to a message or call. Similarly, the authors of a study conducted at the University of Texas at Austin proposed that “the mere presence of one’s smartphone may impose a ‘brain drain’ as limited-capacity attentional resources are recruited to inhibit automatic attention to one’s phone, and are thus unavailable for engaging with the task at hand.” By having your phone in your field of view, your brain must work hard to ignore it, but if your phone isn’t easily accessible or visually present, your brain is able to focus on the task at hand.

  Thankfully, not all external triggers are harmful to our attention. In many ways, we can leverage them to our advantage. For example, short text messages providing words of encouragement are effective at helping smokers quit. A metastudy of interventions from ten countries found that “the evidence provides unequivocal support for the efficacy of text messaging interventions to reduce smoking behavior.”

  The trouble is, despite the potential benefits external triggers can provide, receiving too many can wreak havoc on our productivity and happiness. How, then, can we separate the good external triggers from the bad? The secret lies in the answer to a critical question:

  Is this trigger serving me, or am I serving it?

  Remember that, as the Fogg Behavior Model describes, any behavior requires three things: motivation, ability, and a trigger. The good news is that removing unhelpful external triggers is a simple step toward controlling unwanted distractions.

  When I challenged Wendy, the marketing consultant struggling to stay focused, to ask herself the critical question, it empowered her to start putting unhelpful external triggers in their place. She could begin to decide for herself which triggers led to traction instead of allowing her attention to be controlled by other people.

  Viewed through the lens of this critical question, triggers can now be identified for what they rightly are: tools. If we use them properly, they can help us stay on track. If the trigger helps us do the thing we planned to do in our schedule, it’s helping us gain traction. If it leads to distraction, then it isn’t serving us.

  In the next chapters, we will look at some very practical ways to manipulate our technology and our physical environment to eliminate unhelpful external triggers. We’re going to hack back our devices in ways their makers never intended, but that’s exactly the point—our technology should serve us, not the other way around.

  REMEMBER THIS

  •External triggers often lead to distraction. Cues in our environment like the pings, dings, and rings from devices, as well as interruptions from other people, frequently take us off track.

  •External triggers aren’t always harmful. If an external trigger leads us to traction, it serves us.

  •We must ask ourselves: Is this trigger serving me, or am I serving it? Then we can hack back the external triggers that don’t serve us.

  Chapter 14

  Hack Back Work Interruptions

  Hospitals are supposed to help heal the sick. How, then, do we explain the four hundred thousand Americans harmed in hospitals every year when patients are given the wrong medication?

  In addition to the devastating human toll, these preventable errors cost an estimated $3.5 billion in extra medical expenses. According to surgeon Martin Makary and research fellow Michael Daniel of Johns Hopkins University, “If medical error was a disease, it would rank as the third leading cause of death in the U.S.”

  Becky Richards was part of a special team tasked with developing ways to save lives by fixing the medication-error problem at the Kaiser Permanente South San Francisco Medical Center. As a registered nurse, Richards knew many of the mistakes occurred when highly trained, well-intentioned people made very human errors that were often a result of a work environment filled with distracting external triggers. In fact, studies found nurses experienced five to ten interruptions each time they dispensed medication.

  One of Richards’s solutions did not go over particularly well with her nursing colleagues, at least at first. She proposed nurses wear brightly colored vests to let others know they were dispensing medication and should not be interrupted. “They felt it was demeaning,” Richards said in an article on the nursing website RN.com. After initial resistance, she found one group of nurses in an oncology unit whose error rate was particularly high and who were desperate for a solution.

  However, despite these nurses’ initial willingness, the test was met with more objections than Richards anticipated. For one, the orange vests looked “cheesy,” and some complained they were uncomfortably hot. They also attracted interruptions from doctors who wanted to know what the vests were about. “We were really thinking about abandoning the whole idea, because the nurses did not like it,” Richards said.

  It wasn’t until the hospital administration provided Richards with the results of her experiment four months later that the impact of the trial became clear. The unit recruited for Richards’s experiment saw a 47 percent reduction in errors, all thanks to nothing more than wearing the vests and learning about the importance of an interruption-free environment.

  “At that point we knew we could not turn our backs on our patients,” added Richards. One by one, nurses started sharing the practice, until it spread throughout the hospital and to other care centers. Some hospitals even devised their own unique solutions, like creating a specially marked “sacred zone” on the floor where nurses prepared medications. Others created special distraction-free rooms or blacked-out windows so nurses couldn’t be interrupted while they worked.

  More data emerged about how effective these practices were at reducing errors by shutting out unwanted external triggers.

  A multihospital study coordinated by the University of California, San Francisco, found an 88 percent drop in the number of errors over a three-year period.

  Julie Kliger, director of the university’s Integrated Nurse Leadership Program, told SFGate.com in 2009 that her inspiration to expand the program came from an unlikely place—the airline industry. It’s called the “sterile cockpit” rule, a series of regulations passed in the 1980s after several accidents occurred as a result of distracted pilots. The regulations banned commercial pilots from performing any noncritical activities when flying under ten thousand feet. The regulation specifically calls out “engaging in nonessent
ial conversations” and bars flight attendants from contacting pilots during the most dangerous parts of the flight, takeoffs and landings.

  “We liken it to flying a 747,” Kliger said. “[The zone of dangerous distraction] for them is anything under ten thousand feet . . . In the nurses’ world, it’s when giving medications.” Richards reports that nurses not only make fewer mistakes while wearing the vests but also feel that focused work time passes more quickly. Suzi Kim, a nurse at Kaiser Permanente West Los Angeles Medical Center, said that while wearing the vests, “we can think clearly.”

  While the impact of distraction is rarely as lethal as it is for those in the medical profession, interruptions clearly have an impact on our work performance for any job requiring focus. Unfortunately, interruptions are pervasive in today’s workplace.

  The misuse of space is often a significant contributing factor. Seventy percent of American offices are arranged as open floor plans. Instead of individual workspaces separated by walls, workers today likely have a clear line of sight to their colleagues, the break room, reception, and, well, virtually everything else.

  Open-office floor plans were supposed to foster idea sharing and collaboration. Unfortunately, according to a 2016 metastudy of over three hundred papers, the trend has led to more distraction. Not surprisingly, these interruptions have also been shown to decrease overall employee satisfaction.

  Given the toll distractions can take on our cognitive capabilities, it’s time we took action, just as Becky Richards did. While I’m not advocating the wearing of bright orange Do Not Interrupt vests at the office—nor am I insisting on a floor-plan overhaul—I am suggesting a solution that is explicit and effective at deterring interruptions from coworkers.

  In the middle of this book, you’ll find a piece of card stock. (If you’re reading an e-book edition, you can download and print your own by visiting NirAndFar.com/Indistractable.) The card contains, in large font, a simple request to passersby: I NEED TO FOCUS RIGHT NOW, BUT PLEASE COME BACK SOON. Place the card on your computer monitor to let your colleagues know that you don’t want to be interrupted. It sends an unambiguous message in a way that wearing headphones can’t.