Niklas

If you want to regain some control over your digital distractions, this is the right book for you. That said, if you have already read other books on this topic, there won't be a lot of new concepts here.

Still, I think the book is well-written and I appreciated the reminders of strategies I heard about but neglected to use over time. To deal with your distractions, Eyal advises you to timebox your schedule, so you always know what you should be doing. This way you don't pivot to social media when you are done with one task and don't know which one to choose next from your seemingly endless to-do list. That's definitely what used to happen to me.

Another main takeaway for me is to allow for urges to be distracted to exist and not suppress them. Instead, Eyal suggests using the “ten-minute” rule: tell yourself you can give in to the distraction in ten minutes. Not right now. By the time these minutes have passed, the urge has usually faded away and you are working on a task you actually want to instead.

I also believe that the part about raising indistractable children offers good insights. As someone who grew up with digital devices but does not have kids yet, I appreciated the perspective. I wish my parents had approached screen time the way Eyal recommends - collaboratively, not prescriptively. Give your children the necessary information to know the dangers but also enable them to profit from new technologies. And when you don't set strict rules for your children but let them develop the rules with you, they are more likely to follow through and harbor less resentment towards them.