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So, after we’ve mastered the internal triggers, made time for traction, the next step is to hack back the external triggers. And I use this term, because in my first book, Hooked, about how to build habit-forming technology, I revealed how tech companies hack your attention. And here’s the thing: we can hack back.
External Triggers
The external triggers are the usual suspects that people think about when they think about distraction. It’s the pings, the dings, the rings — all of the things in our environment that prompt us to either traction or distraction. So, if an external trigger reminds you that it’s time to do something you plan to do in your timeboxed calendar, like go work out, go to a meeting, spend time with your kids, then wonderful; that external trigger can be very helpful because it is moving you towards traction. But if an external trigger, like a ping or a ding on your phone, moves you to do something you didn’t plan to do, for example, start using your phone when you planned to be in a business meeting or with your kids, well, now it’s moving you towards distraction.
So, the key question we have to ask ourselves is which external triggers serve us versus which do we feel we are serving? And we want to excise the ones that we feel like we’re serving and only keep the ones that serve us. We can hack back the external triggers on our phone very quickly in only just four steps.
The first step is to remove. Meaning, what you have to do is look at your phone and just delete the apps that you find are not very helpful or the ones that you find particularly distracting. Now, the next step is to replace. You want to ask yourself, is the phone the best place to use those products? For example, I love social media, but I don’t really find much value in using Facebook on my phone. I like using it on my desktop. The third step is to reorganize. So, on your home screen, you don’t want just any old app to be able to attract your attention when you first open your phone. You only want the apps that serve you most. So, on my home screen, it might be my email, maybe GPS, maybe an app that I use to track my workout, my to-do list. I have my calendar, and I have very little else that might distract me. Then the last step is to reclaim. So, when it comes to reclaiming these notifications, we want to make sure that we only allow the notifications from apps that really do serve us, that are the most urgent, to have the privilege of interrupting us with site and sound triggers. So, it should only be your phone calls, your text messages, the most urgent notifications. Those are the only ones that should have the privilege to send you a ping or a ding that might interrupt you in the middle of something that you otherwise wanted to do.
Reclaiming the Workplace
When we talk about external triggers, the pings, dings, and rings in our environment that prompt us towards distraction, we don’t only need to focus on our devices, we also need to consider the physical environment as well. Fixing the external triggers and hacking back on your phone and your computer, that’s easy. That’s kindergarten stuff. However, those are only two of eight different environments that we operate under where these external triggers can lead us towards distraction. So, we also have to hack back these external triggers in open floor plan offices. These are a very common source of distraction. We need to hack back these external triggers in meetings, in group chat. Email can be a huge source of potential distraction.
There’s one industry where external triggers are literally a matter of life and death. Turns out thousands of Americans every year are harmed by prescription mistakes. This occurs when healthcare professionals dose out the wrong medication in hospital settings. Now, most hospitals in America believe that this is just a fact of life until a group of nurses at UCSF decided to tackle this problem. And what they found was that the source of this 100% preventable human error problem occurred because of distraction. Nurses, as they were dosing out medication, were getting distracted by their colleagues and patients, and they were making mistakes. And interestingly enough, they didn’t realize they were making these mistakes until it was too late. And this is exactly what we knowledge workers do every day. We think we’re doing a pretty good job, but we don’t realize how much better our work output could be if we did our work during focused periods of time where we were free of distractions and interruptions.
So, here’s the solution. This group of nurses discovered a solution to this problem of prescription mistakes that cost just pennies and reduced the number of prescription mistakes by 88%. Their solution was cheap plastic vests. Vests that nurses wore that said, “Dosing rounds in progress, please do not disturb.” And that signal hacked back the external triggers of constant interruption by their colleagues, and they reduced the problem by 88%. So, what can we learn from this in the modern workforce? How can we adopt the same lesson for knowledge workers?
Well, in every copy of Indistractable, I give folks a cardstock screen sign. They can literally pull it out of the book, fold it into thirds, and put it on their computer monitor. Now, this sign is bright red, and it tells your colleagues, “I’m indistractable at the moment, please come back later.” And so, we’re sending a clear signal to our colleagues, if we happen to work in an open floor plan office, that, “right now I’m doing my focused work, please do not interrupt.” Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re probably thinking, “Well, why can’t I just put on headphones and that’ll send the signal?” Well, here’s the thing. When people see you wearing headphones, they think you’re watching YouTube videos. So, we want to make sure we send a very clear signal that it’s okay to do focused work in this workplace and that we value this time that we have to do our best work and become indistractable.