Indistractable

This is not an ADHD book, and it does not present itself as one. Because it is a bestselling book about attention, it shows up often on the shelves of readers with ADHD, which is why it is here.

Its full title is Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. Nir Eyal wrote it, with Julie Li as co-author. It was first published in 2019 by BenBella Books; the UK edition is from Bloomsbury. The page count varies by edition, between 290 and 336 in the records I looked at.

The Turkish edition came out from Nova Kitap in 2021 under the title Pürdikkat: Dikkatinizi Nasıl Toplar ve Hayatınızın Kontrolünü Elinize Alırsınız?, translated by Vildan Kalafat Ceylan. The Kitapyurdu page lists 312 pages. Below I use the original title.

Let me say one thing up front: this review is based on the book's table of contents, the publisher's description and published reviews. I take the chapter names from the list I verified, and I describe the content only to that extent.

The author's background

Eyal did an MBA at Stanford and taught marketing there for a time. His field is behavioral design: the psychology of products that get people to form habits. In 2014 he wrote Hooked, which reads like a handbook for this work. The book, which describes the loop of trigger, action, variable reward and investment, became a bestseller.

The name of Indistractable's opening chapter does not hide this transition: From Hooked to Indistractable. The man who explained how to design products that pull people in now explains how not to get pulled.

This duality is both the most interesting and the most controversial side of the book. I will come back to it below.

The starting idea

Eyal's basic move is this: the opposite of distraction is not focus but traction. Traction is any action that takes you where you want to go. Distraction is its opposite, anything that pulls you away from what you set out to do with intention. The two words share a root meaning to pull, and Eyal makes this the book's frame.

This definition has a consequence, and I think the book's best idea is here: you cannot tell whether something is a distraction by looking at the app. The same video can be part of a rest you planned, or the escape from work itself. If you have no plan, you cannot say what counts as an escape.

The second idea is that most distraction comes from within. According to Eyal, what pulls a person away from their work, before any notification on the screen, is the discomfort the work itself creates. The phone is the nearest exit from that discomfort. The publisher's description says this too: taking the device away is not the solution, because deprivation makes the craving bigger.

The four-part model, part by part

The book opens with three introductory chapters: From Hooked to Indistractable, What's Your Superpower? and Being Indistractable. Then comes the main model in four parts, each like a booklet of its own.

Part one: Master Internal Triggers. Six chapters: What Motivates Us, Really?, Time Management Is Pain Management, Deal with Distraction from Within, Reimagine the Internal Trigger, Reimagine the Task and Reimagine Your Temperament.

This section, which reads motivation less as chasing pleasure than as the wish to escape discomfort, is the most philosophical side of the book. The tools described in summaries are these: writing down the feeling you have just before you get distracted, watching that feeling with curiosity and without judgment, turning the task into a game and looking for novelty in it, and noticing that telling yourself "I am someone who gets distracted easily" feeds the pattern. Its best-known tool is the ten-minute rule: when the urge comes, set a timer, and for ten minutes either keep working or watch the urge without giving in to it. Most of the time, it says, the wave passes.

Part two: Make Time for Traction. Four chapters: Turn Your Values into Time, Control the Inputs, Not the Outcomes, Schedule Important Relationships and Sync with Stakeholders at Work.

Here the book turns to the calendar. Turning your values into time, that is, making room in your calendar for every area you care about, planning the day with a template, controlling the input rather than the outcome. The part about syncing with others is about making expectations visible at work and at home. At the back there is also a Schedule Template and a Distraction Tracker; the book leaves you pages to fill in as well.

Part three: Hack Back External Triggers. Nine chapters, and the most practical section. First Ask the Critical Question: is this trigger serving me, or am I serving it? Then Hack Back Work Interruptions, Email, Group Chat, Meetings, Your Smartphone, Your Desktop, Online Articles and Feeds.

What stands out in summaries: labeling the response time on emails and leaving replies to set blocks, going into group chat and leaving at fixed times, not going to a meeting without an agenda, moving attention-grabbing apps from the phone to the desktop, turning notifications down. The publisher's description also lists rearranging the home screen.

Part four: Prevent Distraction with Pacts. It opens with The Power of Precommitments, followed by three kinds of pacts: Effort Pacts, Price Pacts and Identity Pacts. That is, pacts that increase the effort, that put a price on it, and that bind you through identity. The idea is to make the decision before the temptation arrives.

Work, children and relationships

After the main model there are three more parts. In the workplace part come Distraction Is a Sign of Dysfunction, Fixing Distraction Is a Test of Company Culture and The Indistractable Workplace. Here Eyal treats distraction not as a personal flaw but as a symptom of company culture; in summaries, the emphasis on psychological safety stands out.

The part on children proceeds under five headings: Avoid Convenient Excuses, Understand Their Internal Triggers, Make Time for Traction Together, Help Them with External Triggers and Teach Them to Make Their Own Pacts. The "psychological nutrients" in its title point to the needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness; the idea is that a need not met offline is sought online. One reviewer mentioned this part as the one they liked best, because it does not join the panic that screens are turning children into zombies.

The relationships part is short: Spread Social Antibodies Among Friends and Be an Indistractable Lover.

Its strongest sides

First of all, the simplicity of the frame. Four parts, one question in each: is it coming from inside or outside, do you have a plan, did you decide in advance? Publishers Weekly also highlights the practical solutions and diagrams at the ends of chapters. The book is built not like a list of problems but like a diagnostic sequence.

Second, it does not put the blame on the device. Asking about the calendar instead of banning the phone is a more honest stance. The idea that without a plan anything can count as a distraction is, I think, the book's lasting contribution.

Third, its structure. At the end of each chapter there are points to remember, and at the back there are chapter summaries (Chapter Takeaways) and a book club discussion guide. A skeleton like this suits reading by jumping to whichever chapter you want.

Its weak sides

It is not new. One published reviewer liked the book's practical suggestions but wrote that they already knew most of the content. I think this is fair: for someone who reads books on focus and habits, it is a new package for familiar ideas.

It holds the individual responsible. Eyal is someone trained in designing habit-forming products, yet he opposes proposals for broad regulation of such products and hands the responsibility to the user. Critics compare this to the tobacco industry's rhetoric of personal responsibility. For my part, I do not reject the book because of this, but the "the problem is me, the solution is me" tone needs to be kept in mind while reading. In the workplace part Eyal himself defines distraction as a system problem; this tension is not resolved within the book.

The evidence stays at the level of popular science. At the back there is a Notes section of about twenty pages (from 248 to 268, going by the page numbers on Google Books), so it cannot be said there are no references. But this does not show that the suggested tools have been tested in the form described in the book. I have not seen a study that tried this book's methods on adults with ADHD.

The limit for ADHD

There is no part of this book devoted to ADHD. ADHD is not mentioned in the table of contents or in the publisher's description.

This is not a shortcoming; it is not the book's aim. But because of this, it needs to be read carefully.

First, by the book's basic assumption, most distraction comes from escaping a discomfort. In ADHD this is sometimes true. And sometimes attention slides away without any displeasure being felt: the mind wanders off on its own, and by the time you notice, ten minutes have passed. The suggestion to notice the urge and watch it is written for someone who can notice the urge. Whatever makes noticing hard may already be part of the problem.

Second, calendar-based solutions assume you can feel time. For someone with time blindness, planning a template is easy, carrying it out is not. The site's article on pomodoro and time blocking looks at why these methods often do not stick with ADHD and how they can be adapted.

Third, the identity pact. In my review of Atomik Alışkanlıklar (Atomic Habits), I criticized identity-based change. Declaring yourself "someone who does not get distracted" can turn into a defeat of identity the day you slip. This is a reservation I drew from the book's description and chapter titles. If it were me, I would skip the third kind of pact and try the first two.

Fourth, hyperfocus. You sink into something so deeply that everything else is wiped out; by Eyal's definition even this may or may not be planned traction. I could not see a heading in the table of contents that deals with hyperfocus separately.

Who it is for, and who it is not for

A good introduction for adults who want to set up their work routine, who are overwhelmed by the load of email and meetings, and who want to rebuild their relationship with their phone. Someone with mild ADHD symptoms, or who sees their attention problem as mostly environmental, may also benefit from it.

For a reader who is diagnosed and on medication, with marked executive function difficulties, it is not enough on its own. Such a reader needs a book on structure and a clinical source. The tools in this book can be a complement; they cannot replace these. The decision about medication is made with a doctor.

For someone who has just been diagnosed and is still in the shame phase, it is also too early. The "it can be solved with the right tool" tone can slide into blaming yourself for something not yet solved.

Its place on the shelf

On this shelf, Indistractable sits closest to Derin Çalışma (Deep Work). Derin Çalışma argues for long, uninterrupted blocks, and as I wrote there: those blocks were written for another life. Eyal is more flexible: a plan instead of a block, intention instead of being uninterrupted.

On the ADHD side, it makes sense to read this book together with The Adult ADHD Tool Kit and The Disorganized Mind. Those were written for readers with ADHD and deal directly with difficulties in planning and getting started. Eyal, for his part, looks at a common source of attention problems, namely escape. For notifications and tabs, too, the site's article on digital clutter looks in the same direction as Eyal's chapters on external triggers.

On the philosophy side, what comes to mind is akrasia, that is, failing to do what you know. In my akrasia diary I wrote that ancient philosophy debated this problem two thousand years ago. Eyal's pacts are an attempt to overcome this problem by deciding in advance.

My stance

This book is not a foundational book but a complement. I read the claim that most distraction comes from within as a thesis that starts from the right place and generalizes too much. The best things to come out of the book are the idea that without a plan distraction cannot be defined, and the chapters on email, meetings and the phone.

For a reader with ADHD, I think the order should be this: first a structure that supports executive functions, then Eyal's chapters on external triggers. The other way round makes you read the book wrong.