How to Be Less Distracted at Work — and in Life

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 24 September 2019

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Nir Eyal, an expert on technology and psychology, says that we all need to learn to be less distracted into activities that don't help us achieve what we want to each day. Unwelcome behaviors can range from social media scrolling and bingeing on YouTube videos to chatting with colleagues or answering non-urgent emails. To break these habits, we start by recognizing that it is often our own emotions, not our devices, that distract us. We must then recognize the difference between traction (values-aligned work or leisure) and distraction (not) and make time in our schedules for more of the former. Eyal also has tips for protecting ourselves from the external distractions that do come at us and tools to force us to focus on bigger-picture goals. He is the author of the book "Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life."

Transcript

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0:00.0	How do you navigate gender in your workplace?
0:04.0	HBR's fan favorite podcast Women at Work is back with personal stories, the newest research,
0:09.2	and practical advice on navigating disability, career failures, and joining a board.
0:14.0	Listen for free to H-BRA's women at work wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HPR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Allison Beard.
0:36.0	When you come to work each day, it's usually with the best of intentions.
0:46.0	You're going to fix that code, write that client proposal, finish those performance reviews,
0:50.4	flesh out those strategy goals.
0:53.0	But then you get an email notification or a slack message
0:56.6	or a call from a colleague, and suddenly you've lost 30 minutes
1:00.1	or an hour dealing with something that was much less important than the work you'd
1:03.6	plan to do. You've been distracted. This happens to so many of us so many times a
1:09.6	day and our guest is an expert on this problem.
1:13.0	Five years ago, he wrote a book telling companies how to build habit-forming products,
1:18.0	that is how to addict and distract us.
1:21.0	In the years since, he's been studying how people can break those bad
1:24.5	habits, not just with the devices we use but also in our own minds. He's here
1:29.8	today to offer advice for both individuals who want to be more focused and managers who want to
1:34.8	create less distracted workplaces.
1:37.8	Nere E yol is the author of the book Indestractable, how to control your attention and choose
1:42.1	your life.
1:43.0	Meer, welcome to the show.
1:44.0	Thanks so much, Allison. So you literally did write the book on how companies can develop phones and
	...

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