The key here isn’t to avoid or even to reduce the total amount of time you spend engaging in distracting behavior, but is instead to give yourself plenty of opportunities throughout your evening to resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom.

Distracted from distraction by distraction

Make your environment reflective of your tastes. Eliminate distractions, including the distraction of being without any of the distractions you need.

If any distractions come along during that period, don’t ignore them or focus on them. Don’t give them any energy at all. Let them pass, like clouds parting around a mountain. Regularly engaging in this practice builds the muscle of focused intention, which you can use in everything you do. Eventually, tuning out the undermining voices and losing yourself in the work will not be an effort of will, but an earned ability.

You can disrupt a behavior you don’t want by removing the prompt. This isn’t always easy, but removing the prompt is your best first move to stop a behavior from happening. A few years ago I went to the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. I walked into my hotel room and threw my bag on the bed. When I scanned the room, I saw something on the bureau. “Oh nooooo,” I said out loud to absolutely no one. There was an overflowing basket of goodies. Pringles. Blue chips. A giant lollipop. A granola bar. Peanuts. I try to eat healthy foods, but salty snacks are delicious. I knew the goody bin would be a problem for me at the end of every long day. It would serve as a prompt: Eat me! I knew that if the basket sat there I would eventually cave. The blue chips would be the first to go. Then I would eat those peanuts. So I asked myself what I had to do to stop this behavior from happening. Could I demotivate myself? No way, I love salty snacks. Can I make it harder to do? Maybe. I could ask the front desk to raise the price on the snacks or remove them from the room. But that might be slightly awkward. So what I did was remove the prompt. I put the beautiful basket of temptations on the lowest shelf in the TV cabinet and shut the door. I knew the basket was still in the room, but the treats were no longer screaming EAT ME at full volume. By the next morning, I had forgotten about those salty snacks. I’m happy to report that I survived three days in Austin without opening the cabinet again. Notice that my one-time action disrupted the behavior by removing the prompt. If that hadn’t worked, there were other dials I could have adjusted — but prompts are the low-hanging fruit of Behavior Design. Teaching the Behavior Model Now that you’ve seen how my Behavior Model applies to various types of behavior, I’ll show you more ways to use this model in the pages that follow.

Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.

Sometimes, distractions can actually serve a purpose. Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, they warn us — when we feel ourselves regularly succumbing to them — that our work is not well defined, or our tasks are menial, or the whole project we’re engaged in is fundamentally pointless.

Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction, Nass discovered, it’s hard to shake the addiction even when you want to concentrate. To put this more concretely: If every moment of potential boredom in your life — say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives — is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the “mental wrecks” in Nass’s research, it’s not ready for deep work — even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.

Look, I’m not joking around. Smartphones are dangerous. Not because they may cause stress, anxiety, and even depression, but because they change your behavior. It seems like we can’t focus on one thing for more than 5 seconds. Why? Well, we can’t because our smartphone is constantly going off. Not because people are calling you (it seems like people are afraid of calling these days, but that’s another topic), but because you’re constantly getting notifications about THINGS THAT DON’T MATTER. Change Your Smartphone Behavior The same study I mentioned above also found something else: “Researchers asked participants to perform a concentration test under four different circumstances: with their smartphone in their pocket, at their desk, locked in a drawer and removed from the room completely.” The results are significant — test results were lowest when the smartphone was on the desk, but with every additional layer of distance between participants and their smartphones, test performance increased. Overall, test results were 26% higher when phones were removed from the room.” Sure, it’s just a study. And you don’t have to believe everything you read. But this is something I can personally attest. For the past two years, I’ve significantly changed my smartphone behavior. Namely: I have turned off ALL my notifications except messages and calls I’ve removed myself from all Whatsapp groups except for one with my closest friends I’ve removed all news apps (if something important happens, you’ll hear it from the people around you) I only consume music, paid journalism, articles from specific authors I follow, podcasts, YouTube videos (mostly to learn, but also for entertainment because I’m not a robot), books, and audiobooks on it For the rest, I use my phone to call, text, and to take notes, photos and videos Also, I’ve stopped immediately responding to notifications. That doesn’t mean I don’t value other people who try to reach me. It means that I refuse to be a slave to my

"I. Utilize the "two-minute rule" to avoid persistent interruptions. The two-minute rule specifies that you have to give someone an uninterrupted two minutes to explain their thinking before jumping in with your own. This ensures that everyone has time to fully crystallize and communicate their thoughts without worrying they will be misunderstood or drowned out by a louder voice.
j. Watch out for assertive "fast talkers." Fast talkers are people who articulately and assertively say things faster than they can be assessed as a way of pushing their agenda past other people's examination or objections. Fast talking can be especially effective when it's used against people worried about appearing stupid. Don't be one of those people. Recognize that it's your responsibility to make sense of things and don't move on until you do. If you're feeling pressured, say something like "Sorry for being stupid, but I'm going to need to slow you down so I can make sense of what you're saying." Then ask your questions. All of them. p367"

choose a productive or meaningful object of attention; eliminate as many external and internal distractions as you can; focus on that chosen object of attention; and continually draw your focus back to that one object of attention.

There are distractions, of course, but meditation doesn't eliminate distractions, distractions, it manages them.

In the long run — and often in the short-run — your willpower will never beat your environment. — JAMES CLEAR, AUTHOR OF ATOMIC HABITS Let’s say you decide to remove refined sugar from your diet. There’s overwhelming evidence that it’s not good for your health, and you’re convinced your quality of life would improve if you can kick the habit. There’s just one problem: sugar tastes good, and you experience cravings that are difficult to resist. How can you make it easier to change your eating habits? One of the most effective strategies is simple: don’t purchase products with refined sugar at the grocery store, get rid of any food with added sugar in your house, and purchase a few healthy snacks that meet your new criteria. If sugar isn’t available when and where you experience hunger, and if there are easy alternatives to your typical choices, there’s no need to resist temptation: the structure of your immediate Environment makes your new behavior automatic. A few minutes of willpower applied to altering the world around you can make it much easier to act in the ways you’ve decided to act.

Follow the wandering, the distraction, find out why the mind has wandered; pursue it, go into it fully. When the distraction is completely understood, then that particular distraction is gone. When another comes, pursue it also.