Feeling Distracted? How to Cut Back and Focus In

We all dwell on unresolved personal conflicts from time to time. Who hasn’t ruminated on a hurtful comment or unintentional harm we might have caused someone? Feeling bad about something you did, or something done to you, is human. But while it’s expected that the arguments we’ve had, the negative events we’ve experienced, and the major decisions we face haunt us, rumination can also pile on new problems.

See if you can relate to Sarah. She’s a software engineer who loves her job—except for her manager, Tom. To Tom, everything is a crisis worthy of interrupting Sara, even when she’s trying to focus on her work. One morning, while Sarah was coding a critical feature, Tom called and asked her to drop everything to help with an urgent report for the CMO.

When I was growing up, you couldn’t pay me to read a book about self-help or business. Now, I read between 60 to 80 books every year. A good non-fiction book is the distilled knowledge of years of research and insight and costs just a few bucks. Why wouldn’t you take advantage of such a cheap, efficient way to learn lessons that could change your life without having to do the work or live the experiences the author had to bear?

It’s one thing to eliminate distractions in meetings. It’s another to do the same in virtual meetings. Now that virtual teams are becoming a norm, many coworkers have never met each other in person. Yet, they’re expected to work every day toward a shared goal.

When I moved from a Google sales team in New York City to a Google operations team in Boulder, Colorado several years ago, I expected to find differences in culture and team norms. But one particular practice took me by surprise. Multitasking during meetings was rampant. Everyone was so distracted. This became grossly apparent during my first presentation in my new role.

Think you’ll explode if you try one more ineffective productivity hack? Here’s what you need to know to actually hack back distraction: there are only three causes of any distraction: an internal trigger, an external trigger, or a planning problem. A distraction tracker is the only way to help you figure out which of those is causing you to get distracted so you can do something about it. Download ours here.

Because I write about distraction and how to avoid it, I often get asked the question “Aren’t distractions sometimes a good thing? Don’t we all need some distraction in our lives?” Nope!

People make time for who and what they want, and you should, too. Though the author is unknown, this saying has become an axiom to soothe distraught thoughts. Some use it as reasoning to understand why another person isn’t making time for them.

I once tried a digital detox. It failed miserably. When I realized I was distracted during quality time with my daughter, I blamed my smartphone and made some extreme changes. One might think, given all the bad press about so-called “smartphone addiction,” that using no technology would be the right cure.

It seems we’re all checking our phones constantly these days. But all that time spent on our phones leaves little time for anything else. We need time to think in order to come up with novel solutions to our business challenges.

Does my book Indistractable work for the ADHD brain? It’s a question I’ve been getting a lot lately. Though I didn’t specifically write the book for people with ADHD, I wanted to get an honest opinion from an expert. I reached out to Caitlin O’Brient Bauer, who was diagnosed with ADHD at age 8 and is now a certified ADHD coach.

Overcoming distraction is the struggle of our time. Here are 4 simple steps to manage your wandering mind.

Even when something is weighing on your mind, taking a minute to write it out can help you get the most out of your day. Here’s how…

We live in a world of too much information, and it’s nothing less than a blessing. Throughout most of human history, access to knowledge was limited. Power equated to how much information you had access to. Kings built great libraries, and texts were rare and valuable things. Today, however, what was once scarce is abundant. We’re drowning in information.

You have a big deadline looming, and it’s time to hunker down. But every time you start working, you find that, for some reason, your mind drifts off before you can get any real work done. What gives? What is this cruel trick our brains play on us, and what do we do about it? Thankfully, by understanding why our mind wanders and taking steps to deal with distraction, we can stay on track. But first, let’s understand the root of the problem.

Distractions seem ubiquitous today, but they’ve always been a part of human life, even going back to Greek mythology. Here’s how to resist them.

Let’s say you’re on a diet. You’ve cut calories and avoided junk food like a champ. But now you’re faced with a powerful adversary: chocolate cake. You somehow muster the strength to resist, but as you exit the kitchen, you can’t stop thinking about the chocolatey goodness you could’ve enjoyed. Abstinence can often backfire.

From Homer to Franzen, productive people lean on precommitments as a proven way to stick to their goals.Famed director Quentin Tarantino “never use[s] a typewriter or computer.” He prefers to write screenplays by hand in a notebook.Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa...

You have time for everything, even if it doesn’t feel that way.People are always saying “there aren’t enough hours in the day” to get stuff done. And yet research suggests that the average working American has four hours of leisure per day. If we have so many hours to...

In my research and consulting work, I’ve heard countless people tell me how difficult it is to manage their time. Yet, when I ask them what they got distracted from, that is, what they planned to do with any given moment in time, they have trouble answering the...

In 2017, I decided I’d had enough of my smartphone and the companies that make the apps that were robbing me of my time and attention. I thought I found the perfect solution: the card phone. The card phone is what it sounds like: It’s a $18 tiny phone with no social...

By promoting the idea that technology is hijacking our brains and getting all of us addicted to our devices, techno-fearmongers elevate the exception rather than the rule.Josh Hawley, a Republican senator from Missouri, introduced the Social Media Addiction Reduction...

Over the past few weeks, people have asked me for my review of the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma. It’s no surprise. One of the film’s central themes is that social media is like an addictive drug, and I wrote the book on habit-forming technologies: Hooked:...

Want to be Less Distracted? Try This: Find the Fun in Tedious TasksFrom comic books and radio programs to TV shows and Atari games, the world has always been full of things that distract us. Today, most of us blame our phones or, more specifically, social media, Words...

Recently, the BBC asked me to provide a few tips for how to distraction-train our minds to manage distraction. Notice the phrasing. It’s not about how to eliminate distractions from your phone or your computer, but rather it’s about us. To regain control over our...

How Slack’s culture kills distraction by building psychological safety, telling employees to go home, and using lots and lots of emojis.If there’s one technology that embodies the unreasonable demands of the always-on work culture that pervades so many companies...

Distraction is a curse of modern life. Between our cell phones and computer screens, not to mention our kids and coworkers, our attention is constantly being diverted. It can become difficult to focus on any one task—or any one person—for very long. If anything, the...

This week Apple follows Google by announcing features to help people cut back on their tech use. Why would the companies that make your phone want you to use it less? If tech is “hijacking your brain” with their “irresistible” products, as some tech critics claim, why...

In this talk, I describe a new model for managing distraction — how to become "Indistractable." I'll write more on this topic in the coming months and I'm finishing a book with the same title. Also, please share this video with people who may benefit from watching it....

Technology is taking over our lives, especially in the workplace. What can we do to put technology in its place to finally get focused work done? Below are resources, tools, and articles for regaining focus in your digital life. These are tools I use myself but is not...