In my opinion, based on my personal observations, reading and listening to smart people of the past and present, the most important skill, even meta-skill, for every time and epoch is self-discipline - the ability to do things you need to do tolerating discomfort and suffering. Suffer now to thrive later.
The epoch one lives in and their social position will dictate critical skills an individual requires to survive and move up - be it martial prowess, persuasion, focus. People with strong discipline can grow those skills quicker and farther.
A good inspirational example for me was in David Goggins’ book “Can’t Hurt Me”, where he vividly describes his inner fight against his mind that always wants comfort now; he shares that the main reason he tortures himself with physical challenges is not to become physically strong, but to grow an armored mind, one that is prepared for real life struggles.
Self discipline is one of the psychology things which might not actually be a thing though. Often cited in this sort of discussion is the "marshmallow test" which has been found to be BS. Maybe there's something to willpower, but the discussion is stinky right now because of the replication issues. Same for "flow" which is another smell this article and related discussions have.
I find that I can be incredibly self disciplined when I setup my environment so that I don't have to fight myself. How do I fight distractions from my phone when I'm out with friends? I don't bring my phone. And yet somehow I always manage to meet with people at the time and place we decide on. I know not everyone can do this, I'm just using it as an example.
A feeling of a lack of self discipline is a symptom, much like procrastination. It's a mess of things all clumped together like a rats nest of wires. Everyone has their answer to procrastination (the book is in progress!) but beating procrastination isn't a skill because it isn't the root problem. Much like a headache could mean that you are going to die from cancer or you might just need some rest. If you feel you have procrastination problems, it's because something broke upstream and now you are blaming it on procrastination.
ETA: Herding my own actions is about preparation and personal story telling. If I setup a clear path for the next day and get good sleep, then it will work. If I get a bad night of sleep and I'm unorganized, then it's going to be a disaster and I'm going to complain about procrastination. If I see a cake which looks good and I have a weak reason not to eat it, I'm going to eat the thing. If I manage to convince myself to join the cult of low-carbs, then I wouldn't be caught dead with a piece of cake. If I'm working with people who are laid back, then I become laid back. If I'm working with people who are ultra-competitive, then I become competitive. It's all about pouring the kool-aid and then convincing myself to drink it. ;)
I agree 100%. This is going to sound weird, but bear with me.
I grew up as a skateboarder and am still super into the scene. What separates the pros from the wannabes isn't just talent. It's dealing with adversity, discomfort, and inconvenience. These pros are skating in places that are not comfortable to skate. The ground is very rough and/or has inconveniently placed cracks. There's a puddle in the way. The ground is dirty with tiny pebbles. They also fall A LOT. By the time they make this crazy trick, they're bleeding from a couple of places and half their board has gotten wet with yucky water. The kind of things that mean "end of the session" for 90% of skaters. The skaters that can deal with these inconveniences/discomfort are the ones that "make it."
Sometimes young skaters to go to famous spots and they are blown away by how rough the ground is, or how close traffic is zipping by at 40 MPH.
THAT's what separates the men from the boys. Grit.
Does anybody feel like these kinds of posts over-rationalize life? I feel like these complex logical guides can be replaced with a simple “put your phone away while spending time with your daughter”. Life should be simpler than having to think about all this stuff so hard. Life shouldn’t be an optimization of resources problem.
Part of the problem that I realized after hearing the author promotin this book in a podcast is that many people not only want to solve problems but also put their own spin/branding on it, even if it’s not actually much different from existing solutions.
But that slight difference in the new solution being promoted taps into our brains just in the right ways that it makes existing solutions seem inferior, thus the productive porn.
I think many people crave an authoritative voice that tells them what they need to do. It's why the self-help industrial complex works.
It can get much worse than a navel-gazing/over-thinking-it post on medium.
These kinds of blog posts easily segway into books/media, then courses, then workshops, then, before one knows it thousand dollar hotel conference room shindigs where people end up with binders and get a hard sell on ever more expensive "help".
Not saying the author is one of these snake-oil people at all. But it's a slippery slope from, say, Tim Ferriss to Ramit Sethi to Tony Robbins to (what's that "bitcoin genius"?) James Altucher.... and worse.
Yeah, I completely agree. Not only these kind of posts, but 99.9% of self-help books too. The answer, in general, comes down to: get good rest, meditate, drink enough water, and get some damn work done. Coffee as needed.
This made me think of "focus" from Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" where individuals are converted to narrow their entire life down to a particular subject area so that they can be used as components in distributed systems.
Edit: One of the reasons for requiring this kind of approach is that they don't have "real" AI for reasons that would only be apparent if you have read the earlier novel.
Gets distracted. Thinks long and hard about distraction. Has an insight on how not to get distracted. Writes a book about it. Writes a blog post to market the book. Future book reviews complain that you could have just read the blog post.
Some of this seems to be a rehash of GTD. Sometimes your distractions are something which you really need to do. Write it down so that you can feel at ease forgetting about it again. Then when you are doing your GTD thing, you can take care of your list.
The rest just doesn't sit easy for me. It seems like he's over-rationalizing a certain slice of life and it feels strange, like a bad aesthetic.
There's work time and then there's personal time. In each case, distraction is okay, it's just that you need to herd the distractions so that you are seeing more of X distractions and less of Y. A client walking in the door may be a valuable distraction. Getting a FB notification while working may be a costly distraction.
Personal time is also all about the right distractions. Interesting things are distractions. In the author's example, the child asking a question is a distraction. We can argue semantics, maybe an interesting thing which captures your attention is called something other than a distraction, but it's still the same thing. Your brain is pointed in one direction and something comes along to redirect that attention to something else.
This is just more productivity porn. Schedule fun time. Look, it's fun time on my calendar. I will enjoy it. I'm having fun... for 20 minutes.
> This is just more productivity porn. Schedule fun time. Look, it's fun time on my calendar. I will enjoy it. I'm having fun... for 20 minutes.
I've long since accepted that I am not the type of person who can work from a strict hourly schedule (or time-boxing in general). Yet somehow I manage to have quite good output, especially if I look at what I've accomplished personally and professionally over the last month or the last year.
I think the real story with productivity is that you have to figure out how you work best as an individual, and figure out a system which helps to take advantage of that. I think it's worth reading up on how other people approach the problem because often it can lead to useful insight, but prescriptions and magic bullets rarely hold much weight with me.
"Sometimes your distractions are something which you really need to do"
The key is to be able to determine the validity of the distraction, without getting distracted, meaning without even diverting your mind a bit to think about the distraction. I don't think you can. You need to context switch a bit, examine what the distraction is and then switch back. Easier said than done. It leads to a trail of IFTTTs since every distraction has it's own context and lifespan. If someone has ways of accomplishing this, I'm all ears.
We all have multiple roles in life we’d like to play. And limited time/attention/energy. So we look back on our time and ask “was I the person I want to be in that moment?” And hear our intuition sigh “no...”.
But we were. In that moment reading an article on your phone, you were the well-informed citizen living the life of the mind, which is something you aspire* to be. But you couldn’t simultaneously be the caring father. And the regret of that moment stings more sharply than the satisfaction of thinking about the article you read.
One theory I have for how to be more focused: narrow or combine your set of things you aspire to. This is hard. If you aspire to be both a caring father and a moderately-skilled hobby carpenter, you might find your daughter is interested neither in woodworking or in having a treehouse. And so in any given hour, you must choose.
(* assumption I’m making about you just so I can write less abstractly)
> On a side note, I don't like when people make up words like 'indistractable', but that's personal taste.
It's likely that the success of this book will rely entirely on this word. After all, Cal Newport wrote recently on the same subject, so I'm not sure what this book brings new, other than the catchy/annoying word.
Eliminate all notifications from your phone with a 1-second 'empty' .mp3
I set this empty.mp3 as my notification (android) for emails, texts, applications, etc etc. The only thing that makes a sound in my phone is phone-calls and alarms. Eliminate the "top bar" notifications too. If you want to find out about emails, open the app. To find out about instant messages, open the app.
For me this has been absolutely great. I don't have social media installed (reddit, facebook, twitter, etc), so that helps.
Yet the phone doesn't "suck me into it". I hope somebody finds this useful!
When I'm doing something that's both interesting and challenging I can happily ignore literally everything else until I'm done. I think most people are very similar; phones and games and Slack messages are only a distraction if you're just not that into what you're supposed to be doing. If it happens a lot you might need to address that problem.
This sounds similar to what people on the spectrum of autism or adhd call "hyper-focus". The problem with hyper-focus is that you rarely have control over it. It's heavily skewed towards the interesting part, not what you need to be doing or how challenging it is. You'll often see absurd levels of complexity for the sake of making it challenging, only to support working on something interesting.
It's ironic that the author who introduced a ton of tech people to psychologically manipulative product design with his book "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products" is now selling the solution to the problem that he helped create.
Here's how he described his last book:
---
How do successful companies create products people can't put down?
Why do some products capture widespread attention while others flop? What makes us engage with certain products out of sheer habit? Is there a pattern underlying how technologies hook us?
Nir Eyal answers these questions (and many more) by explaining the "Hook Model" -- a four steps process embedded into the products of many successful companies to subtly encourage customer behavior. Through consecutive “hook cycles,” these products reach their ultimate goal of bringing users back over and over again, without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging.
Hooked is based on Eyal’s years of research, consulting, and practical experience. He wrote the book he wished had been available to him as a startup founder – not abstract theory, but a how-to guide for building better products. Hooked is written for product managers, designers, marketers, startup founders, and anyone who seeks to understand how products influence our behavior.
---
To top it off he's trying to growth hack his new book by putting a branded red "do not disturb" sign in the book, that he expects you to put up on your desk for all of your stressed out colleagues in your open office to see. (https://youtu.be/XVbH_TkJW9s?t=906)
In fact he notes this "irony" in the first paragraph of the linked article!
> or over a decade, I’ve helped tech companies build products to keep you clicking. In fact, I wrote the book on it. Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, which came out in 2014, was written to help companies build healthy habits in their customers, like regularly going to the gym and eating right. But in the process of researching the book, I found that some products drew some people in too much. Including me.
Just skimming the post, it seems to be highly convergent with what is used in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)[1], or more generally of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).
The article doesn't seem to point to such a connection, but people interested with the topic might like to have a look at these well documented methodologies. Analyzes and critics of these methods and their claimed results are also widely available.
As someone with attention defecit disorder, I can only applaud the further development of attention-as-a-skill, be it by introspection (e.g. meditation) or technological (e.g. parmacological) enhancement!
I hope not. Many people in open-space offices with smart phones have attention span of a chipmunk. That makes it possible for remote workers to compete :-)
I think this would be the single most important differentiator for wealth creation. The world would be divided between creators and consumers. The consumers are increasingly trained for only consuming with a singular goal of generating wealth for the creators.
I'd say that title goes to intelligence, which can't be trained so people are going to consistently have either a lot or a little their whole working life. Technology is progressively taking away the ability of low IQ people to do anything productive at all and giving it to a shrinking pool of people smart enough to do the remaining not-yet-automated things.
Off topic to the article, because I can't read it. I blocked Medium's annoying pop-up and now there is no way for me to click somewhere to open the article. Ah well, I'll just see this as a step towards being indistractable by medium articles.
weird, he literally wrote the book about making websites and apps addictive through grabbing as much attention as possible. now he's got a book on how to avoid getting distracted by those sites/apps
Meh, people are allowed to change their minds about things they've done once they've seen the effects of their prior work. At the start of this post he uses that as evidence that he's qualified to write this book; I don't disagree.
[+] [-] playing_colours|6 years ago|reply
The epoch one lives in and their social position will dictate critical skills an individual requires to survive and move up - be it martial prowess, persuasion, focus. People with strong discipline can grow those skills quicker and farther.
A good inspirational example for me was in David Goggins’ book “Can’t Hurt Me”, where he vividly describes his inner fight against his mind that always wants comfort now; he shares that the main reason he tortures himself with physical challenges is not to become physically strong, but to grow an armored mind, one that is prepared for real life struggles.
[+] [-] gexla|6 years ago|reply
I find that I can be incredibly self disciplined when I setup my environment so that I don't have to fight myself. How do I fight distractions from my phone when I'm out with friends? I don't bring my phone. And yet somehow I always manage to meet with people at the time and place we decide on. I know not everyone can do this, I'm just using it as an example.
A feeling of a lack of self discipline is a symptom, much like procrastination. It's a mess of things all clumped together like a rats nest of wires. Everyone has their answer to procrastination (the book is in progress!) but beating procrastination isn't a skill because it isn't the root problem. Much like a headache could mean that you are going to die from cancer or you might just need some rest. If you feel you have procrastination problems, it's because something broke upstream and now you are blaming it on procrastination.
ETA: Herding my own actions is about preparation and personal story telling. If I setup a clear path for the next day and get good sleep, then it will work. If I get a bad night of sleep and I'm unorganized, then it's going to be a disaster and I'm going to complain about procrastination. If I see a cake which looks good and I have a weak reason not to eat it, I'm going to eat the thing. If I manage to convince myself to join the cult of low-carbs, then I wouldn't be caught dead with a piece of cake. If I'm working with people who are laid back, then I become laid back. If I'm working with people who are ultra-competitive, then I become competitive. It's all about pouring the kool-aid and then convincing myself to drink it. ;)
[+] [-] joncrane|6 years ago|reply
I grew up as a skateboarder and am still super into the scene. What separates the pros from the wannabes isn't just talent. It's dealing with adversity, discomfort, and inconvenience. These pros are skating in places that are not comfortable to skate. The ground is very rough and/or has inconveniently placed cracks. There's a puddle in the way. The ground is dirty with tiny pebbles. They also fall A LOT. By the time they make this crazy trick, they're bleeding from a couple of places and half their board has gotten wet with yucky water. The kind of things that mean "end of the session" for 90% of skaters. The skaters that can deal with these inconveniences/discomfort are the ones that "make it."
Sometimes young skaters to go to famous spots and they are blown away by how rough the ground is, or how close traffic is zipping by at 40 MPH.
THAT's what separates the men from the boys. Grit.
[+] [-] fasicle|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] huntertwo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eswat|6 years ago|reply
But that slight difference in the new solution being promoted taps into our brains just in the right ways that it makes existing solutions seem inferior, thus the productive porn.
[+] [-] crispyambulance|6 years ago|reply
It can get much worse than a navel-gazing/over-thinking-it post on medium.
These kinds of blog posts easily segway into books/media, then courses, then workshops, then, before one knows it thousand dollar hotel conference room shindigs where people end up with binders and get a hard sell on ever more expensive "help".
Not saying the author is one of these snake-oil people at all. But it's a slippery slope from, say, Tim Ferriss to Ramit Sethi to Tony Robbins to (what's that "bitcoin genius"?) James Altucher.... and worse.
[+] [-] Japhy_Ryder|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arethuza|6 years ago|reply
Edit: One of the reasons for requiring this kind of approach is that they don't have "real" AI for reasons that would only be apparent if you have read the earlier novel.
[+] [-] bitwize|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gexla|6 years ago|reply
Some of this seems to be a rehash of GTD. Sometimes your distractions are something which you really need to do. Write it down so that you can feel at ease forgetting about it again. Then when you are doing your GTD thing, you can take care of your list.
The rest just doesn't sit easy for me. It seems like he's over-rationalizing a certain slice of life and it feels strange, like a bad aesthetic.
There's work time and then there's personal time. In each case, distraction is okay, it's just that you need to herd the distractions so that you are seeing more of X distractions and less of Y. A client walking in the door may be a valuable distraction. Getting a FB notification while working may be a costly distraction.
Personal time is also all about the right distractions. Interesting things are distractions. In the author's example, the child asking a question is a distraction. We can argue semantics, maybe an interesting thing which captures your attention is called something other than a distraction, but it's still the same thing. Your brain is pointed in one direction and something comes along to redirect that attention to something else.
This is just more productivity porn. Schedule fun time. Look, it's fun time on my calendar. I will enjoy it. I'm having fun... for 20 minutes.
[+] [-] skohan|6 years ago|reply
I've long since accepted that I am not the type of person who can work from a strict hourly schedule (or time-boxing in general). Yet somehow I manage to have quite good output, especially if I look at what I've accomplished personally and professionally over the last month or the last year.
I think the real story with productivity is that you have to figure out how you work best as an individual, and figure out a system which helps to take advantage of that. I think it's worth reading up on how other people approach the problem because often it can lead to useful insight, but prescriptions and magic bullets rarely hold much weight with me.
[+] [-] deepGem|6 years ago|reply
The key is to be able to determine the validity of the distraction, without getting distracted, meaning without even diverting your mind a bit to think about the distraction. I don't think you can. You need to context switch a bit, examine what the distraction is and then switch back. Easier said than done. It leads to a trail of IFTTTs since every distraction has it's own context and lifespan. If someone has ways of accomplishing this, I'm all ears.
[+] [-] em-bee|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ohduran|6 years ago|reply
By the way is not being able to hear your daughter screaming for attention because you're deeply focused on your phone being distracted, or not?
Sounds like laser focusing to me. Which means that it's not a matter of being 'indistractable', but one of prioritising what's worth your attention.
On a side note, I don't like when people make up words like 'indistractable', but that's personal taste.
[+] [-] afarrell|6 years ago|reply
But we were. In that moment reading an article on your phone, you were the well-informed citizen living the life of the mind, which is something you aspire* to be. But you couldn’t simultaneously be the caring father. And the regret of that moment stings more sharply than the satisfaction of thinking about the article you read.
One theory I have for how to be more focused: narrow or combine your set of things you aspire to. This is hard. If you aspire to be both a caring father and a moderately-skilled hobby carpenter, you might find your daughter is interested neither in woodworking or in having a treehouse. And so in any given hour, you must choose.
(* assumption I’m making about you just so I can write less abstractly)
[+] [-] gniv|6 years ago|reply
It's likely that the success of this book will rely entirely on this word. After all, Cal Newport wrote recently on the same subject, so I'm not sure what this book brings new, other than the catchy/annoying word.
[+] [-] knob|6 years ago|reply
I set this empty.mp3 as my notification (android) for emails, texts, applications, etc etc. The only thing that makes a sound in my phone is phone-calls and alarms. Eliminate the "top bar" notifications too. If you want to find out about emails, open the app. To find out about instant messages, open the app.
For me this has been absolutely great. I don't have social media installed (reddit, facebook, twitter, etc), so that helps.
Yet the phone doesn't "suck me into it". I hope somebody finds this useful!
[+] [-] onion2k|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vegardx|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m_ke|6 years ago|reply
Here's how he described his last book:
---
How do successful companies create products people can't put down?
Why do some products capture widespread attention while others flop? What makes us engage with certain products out of sheer habit? Is there a pattern underlying how technologies hook us?
Nir Eyal answers these questions (and many more) by explaining the "Hook Model" -- a four steps process embedded into the products of many successful companies to subtly encourage customer behavior. Through consecutive “hook cycles,” these products reach their ultimate goal of bringing users back over and over again, without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging.
Hooked is based on Eyal’s years of research, consulting, and practical experience. He wrote the book he wished had been available to him as a startup founder – not abstract theory, but a how-to guide for building better products. Hooked is written for product managers, designers, marketers, startup founders, and anyone who seeks to understand how products influence our behavior.
---
To top it off he's trying to growth hack his new book by putting a branded red "do not disturb" sign in the book, that he expects you to put up on your desk for all of your stressed out colleagues in your open office to see. (https://youtu.be/XVbH_TkJW9s?t=906)
[+] [-] fortran77|6 years ago|reply
> or over a decade, I’ve helped tech companies build products to keep you clicking. In fact, I wrote the book on it. Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, which came out in 2014, was written to help companies build healthy habits in their customers, like regularly going to the gym and eating right. But in the process of researching the book, I found that some products drew some people in too much. Including me.
[+] [-] drankula3|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ukj|6 years ago|reply
P.S my manager calls me 'uncooperative'.
[+] [-] psychoslave|6 years ago|reply
The article doesn't seem to point to such a connection, but people interested with the topic might like to have a look at these well documented methodologies. Analyzes and critics of these methods and their claimed results are also widely available.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acceptance_and_commitment_ther...
[+] [-] bencoder|6 years ago|reply
[0] http://www.calnewport.com/books/deep-work/
[+] [-] baxtr|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] atrilumen|6 years ago|reply
(I'm tired of deleting their stupid cookies just to read a goddamned blog post.)
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