Dealing with Distraction as a Creator
The line between mindless scrolling and active engagement can be pretty thin when you’re a creator. What are strategies to deal with distraction when it’s time to get down to business?
Whenever I talk to creators about challenges they face, getting distracted inevitably comes up. It’s so easy to go from engaging on Twitter as a growth strategy to mindlessly scrolling Twitter as a distraction from pressing work. And sometimes it feels like you just get sucked in, which is why today’s newsletter is all about strategies to become less distractible.
The same patterns that make a good habit more appealing can create products that are downright addictive and very distracting. These last two weeks I dove into Nir Eyal’s book Indistractible, where he reckons with the consequences of building habit-forming products and focuses on how to manage the distractions these products create.
Here are some of the basic principles of Eyal’s roadmap for dealing with distractions.
Understanding Traction, Distraction & What Causes Us to Get Distracted In The First Place
As Eyal describes it, distraction and traction are opposite poles of the same continuum. In short, traction helps us accomplish goals, while distraction leads us away from them.1
If distraction is leading us away from our goals, why do we engage in it so often (or at least I do)? The short answer is because distraction is an escape from reality. And reality isn’t always pleasant, nor are we generally content with our realities (there’s actually some evolutionary science behind why this is, but that’s for another day).
But while you might be the one ultimately making the decision to “get distracted,” distraction doesn’t just spontaneously happen. Distraction is an action you take after being triggered by something.
And that something might be internal or external.
Internal Triggers
Internal triggers cue us from within. They might say “I’m hungry” (and then you’ll look for a snack) or they might say “I’m feeling overwhelmed,” “I’m anxious about my abilities,” “I’m bored,” and all manner of other feelings that are uncomfortable and lead us to seek escape with the help of our little friend, distraction.
But even though our internal feelings might cause us to want to escape, the actions we take as a result (aka the decision to give into the urge for distraction) are nevertheless in our control.
Managing your Internal Triggers
That’s where strategies for dealing with these internal triggers come in. Here are a few:
A. Becoming Mindful
Managing our internal feelings of discomfort starts with recognizing the actual root cause of the urge to do something else. So for example, my mindless Twitter scrolling is really just a reaction to how overwhelmed I feel when trying to summarize a 300 page book in less than 500 words 😋
Over time noticing the root cause of your distraction helps you become more mindful and capable of turning to alternate coping strategies in the moment.
B. Surfing The Urge
Instead of trying to resist the urge entirely (which can backfire), next time a triggering emotion comes up, delay. Tell yourself that you can act on the urge in 10 minutes. And while you may go ahead and open Twitter or do your other action of choice after those 10 minutes, you might just as well find that after 10 minutes the urge has passed. You successfully "surfed the urge."
C. Getting Curious
Part of doing challenging or boring things and not getting distracted is staying curious. How can you reimagine your task with an absurd attention to details you didn't notice? Can you make a game out of your task?
For example, I sometimes find myself struggling to focus when it comes to editing podcasts. But reframing this activity, being curious about the craft of storytelling or audio engineering can (hopefully) bring renewed focus!
D. Practicing Self Compassion
We all struggle with distraction, but if that's followed by toxic guilt, we're more likely to seek more distraction to escape our feelings of shame.
Although it sometimes feels like the advice to practice self compassion is almost cliche, there is so much science about how self compassion helps you become more resilient to mishaps.
External Triggers
The second kind of trigger is external. These are cues in our environment that prompt us to do some sort of action. Here you might think of your Slack message pings from work, random notifications on your phone, your coworker or kid coming up to you in the middle of focusing, or myriad other external interruptions.
These digital interruptions in particular can literally hijack your attention and they’re often not easy to ignore. In fact, in studies, it’s been shown that even receiving a cell phone notification but not replying to it is just as distracting as responding to a message or call.2
To be clear, there are some external triggers we purposefully set up. Your alarm clock or alert reminding you to go exercise is just such an example.
So while not all external triggers are harmful, the key is to ask the question: is this trigger serving me, or am I serving it?
Handling External Triggers
One way of dealing with external triggers is by diminishing your ability to engage with them in the first place. Make a behavior more challenging and you’re unlikely to do it. Here are a few ways to reduce unwanted external triggers.
A. Removing Notifications
We’re all aware that taking the time to unsubscribe to unwanted emails, remove notifications, and otherwise proactively limit pings is a good practice. For me, at least, taking the time to unsubscribe feels like a lot of effort, until you put into perspective how much time is actually hijacked by these notifications and emails in the first place!
B. Timeboxing
Timeboxing is a straightforward and highly effective strategy for making active decisions about how you spend your time more generally. But timeboxing when you reply to messages, when you sign onto your Slack, etc can actually make your far more effective. You can schedule in multiple times in your day for checking and replying to email without being perceived as “unresponsive.”
C. Defending Your Focus
Whether its working from home and facing family interruptions, working from the office where people cruise by your desk, or just dealing with the onslaught of immediate requests on an app like Slack, defending your focus is about having conversations in advance communicating your strategy for being indistractable. And once you communicate your “non-responsive” blocks of time, you can create reminders such as:
Physical Reminders
Try placing a physical sign on your desktop. For example, "I need to focus right now, but come back soon."
Virtual Reminders
Block time on the calendar or add an "away" status in your group chat to indicate you currently need focus time and give individuals a sense of when you will be available again.
D. Commitment Tools
There are dozens of digital and physical tools that remove external triggers entirely. From extensions that remove access to specific websites, to devices that make it impossible to access your internet during certain hours, creating actual barriers helps you stay in control of your time.
E. Accountability Buddies & Pacts
Finally, use social pressure to help you stay focused. Work alongside a buddy or create a commitment pact with said buddy (I will have to pay $X if I don’t finish this) as additional ways to help you stay in traction rather than distraction.
Wrapping Up
In the last week, I’ve found noticing the root cause of my distractibility incredibly helpful. While there are countless interventions (including tracking every time you’re distracted, using commitment tools, etc) that I haven’t explored, I’ve also been thinking about what kind of distraction I find healthy and what kind I don’t. So many tech-originated self improvement books have a bias towards optimizing time & productivity. And while I tend to embrace a certain level of optimization (I mean who actually wants to feel like their attention is hijacked unwittingly), there’s also a degree of distraction that is positive.
Letting your mind wander is a key part of creativity, 3 not to mention the fact that a lot of the work that creators do involves curating and repurposing. In other words, it’s work that summarizes some of the inputs from scrolling through a feed or reading too many newsletter emails. While I’ve summarized some of Eyal’s strategies for dealing with distraction, my own desire is to deal with the distractions that don’t serve you so you can make more time for those that do 😊
Eyal, Nir. Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. Illustrated, BenBella Books, 2019.
Study from the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance in Eyal, Nir. Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. Illustrated, BenBella Books, 2019. p.84
Kieran CR Fox, Roger E Beaty, Mind-wandering as creative thinking: neural, psychological, and theoretical considerations, Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 27, 2019, Pages 123-130, ISSN 2352-1546, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2018.10.009.