Nir Eyal

“You don't see with your eyes, you see with your brain based on priors, based on what's happened in the past. Your brain has been conditioned that that's the way reality works. So it's predicting a future that doesn't really exist.”

“Because people, people don't understand that there's a difference between an emotion and a feeling. Those are two separate things. An emotion is a physiological response. A feeling is an interpretation of that physiological response. So feelings are psychologi…”

“Telling yourself no doesn't work. It releases what's called psychological reactance.”

“Studies have found 10% of the time you check your phone, is it because of some kind of ping, ding, or ring? 90% of the time, it's because of an internal trigger.”

“Every time you think of a memory, you are actually revising it in your brain.”

“Whatever the limiting belief that we keep telling ourselves again and again and again, it has a physiological effect on us, just like Mr. A did.”

“The opposite of distraction is not focused. The opposite of distraction is traction.”

“Anything you want to do with your time and attention is fine. As long as it's done with intent, as long as you're doing it on your schedule, And not someone else.”

“We have external triggers. These are things in our outside environment, the usual suspects, the pings, the dings, the rings, all this stuff in our outside environment, which we tend to blame for distraction. But studies find that's only 10% of the reason we ge…”

“Like, I hear people say, like, oh, just form a writing habit. I think that's ridiculous. I don't know what they're talking about, right? A habit is defined as a behavior done with little or no conscious thought. I don't know how to write out of habit. Writing …”

“The flip that we need to change in people's minds is this ridiculous belief That technology is hijacking our brains. There's nothing we can do about distraction. That our focus is being stolen. It's not being stolen. We're giving it away.”

“You cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. I'll say that again. You can't call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from.”

“This fourth step won't work. But as the last line of defense, it's incredibly impactful.”

“We know that the only reason we do everything and anything from a neurological perspective Is not about the pursuit of pleasure. It is all about the desire to escape discomfort. Everything you do, even the pursuit of pleasurable sensations, the carrot is the s…”

“What I found in my research writing this book is that high performers in every industry, business, the arts, sports, high performers, they feel the same internal triggers. They also feel lonely. They also feel bored. They also feel stressed. They also feel anx…”

“On my desktop, I have a do not disturb set From midnight to 11 59 all the time. I, it's constantly on do not disturb because I don't want those constant notifications disturbing me when I'm doing when I'm doing focused work.”

“Now you can say, well, why don't I just put on headphones and my colleagues will know I'm not to be interrupted. Yeah, but then they think you're, you know, you're putzing around playing video games or something on your machine, as opposed to if you say, no, I…”

“Distraction is a symptom of dysfunction. Distraction is a symptom of dysfunction. And when it comes to the workplace, if you don't give employees that psychological safety to say, hey, you know, how do we deal with this problem? Just like any other problem, th…”

“The worst piece of personal productivity advice is, if you want to be better at time management, you need to learn how to say no. What kind of stupid advice is that? Only a tenured professor who can't get fired would give you that kind of stupid advice. If you…”

“The antidote, if you really want to summarize my work in indistractable into one mantra, it's that the antidote for impulsiveness is forethought. The antidote for impulsiveness is forethought. Fundamentally, distraction is an impulse control issue. That's all …”

“The leading cause of distraction and research bears this out. The leading cause of distraction is not what we call external triggers. It's not the stuff outside of us, but rather distraction begins from within what we call the internal triggers. That is the le…”

“So don't believe these chicken little tech critics that say video games are melting your brain and Facebook is melting your brain and everything is melting your brain. Ridiculous. The science doesn't support that at all, right?”

“The time you plan to waste is not wasted time. Any distraction can be turned into traction by simply making time for it in your day.”

“Every business is like a three-legged stool. You have growth. You have engagement and you have monetization G E M. And he's like you know, when you start your startup, you have none, you just have like, you know, a stool with no legs and then you need to get y…”

“So they interviewed me for three hours for this documentary. So I sat down with the director for three hours. We did this super long interview, and they completely cut me out of the film, and I don't really care.”

“What I discovered was that distraction, the leading cause of distraction and research bears this out. The leading cause of distraction is not what we call external triggers. It's not the stuff outside of us. But rather distraction begins from within what we ca…”

“Time management requires pain management. Time management requires pain management. You'll always be distracted by something, right? If it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, it doesn't matter. Something is going to distract …”

“The opposite of distraction, if you look at the origin of the word, the opposite of distraction is traction. That both words come from the same Latin root, trahare, which means to pull. And both words also end in the same six letters, A-C-T-I-O-N, that spells …”

“The time you plan to waste is not wasted time. Any distraction can be turned into traction by simply making time for it in your day.”

“One of my pet peeves in the personal productivity community is this horrible advice that I'm sure we've all heard a million times, which says, if you want to be more productive, if you want to focus, if you want to not get distracted, you learn, need to learn …”

“Everything that kills kids, everything that harms kids, not just kills kids, it harms kids, is down to record lows. Homicide, record lows. Truancy, record lows. Drug use, record lows. Pregnancy, record lows. Incarceration, record lows. All these things are at …”

“And I think the reason we see some of these mental health outcomes that, that, you know, these the deleterious outcomes is not the technology itself. It's what the technology is displacing, namely sleep, right? That that is the big culprit.”

“And this system of scoring how important something is comes in handy because when we have a disagreement small or large, it can be like, Hey, which place do you want to go for lunch? Or you know, how, how strongly do you think that our daughter should be homes…”

“I believe that as the interface shrinks, right, as we go from desktop to laptop to mobile and now to wearable, habits become more important. Why? Because there's less room, there's less real estate to trigger people. So it has to be a habitual behavior because…”

“That in a habit forming product, you have to have these four fundamental elements, these, this trigger, action, reward, investment. They have to be there. It's kind of the prerequisite for a product that builds what I call unprompted user engagement”

“Not every product needs to be habit forming, right? This isn't magic pixie dust that as long as you can make your product habit forming, it's going to be successful. Plenty of companies don't need to form habits. They can bring customers back with ads. They ca…”

“Facebook's business model couldn't survive if they had to pay for an ad every time someone checked their newsfeed, right? They couldn't afford it. It has to be unprompted. It has to be a habit.”

“The condition is that it needs to be something, it needs to be a decision or an action that's made with little or no conscious thought. And it has to occur frequently. So frequency is a kind of precondition for the ability to even form the habit in the first p…”