In 'Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products', Nir Eyal explains the Hook Model, a four-step process (trigger, action, variable reward, and investment) that successful companies use to create products that users engage with habitually. The book provides practical insights and actionable steps for building products that capture widespread attention and encourage repeated use without relying on costly advertising. Eyal draws on his research, consulting experience, and practical knowledge to offer a how-to guide that is accessible and valuable for understanding user behavior and designing engaging products.
In 'Indistractable', Nir Eyal delves into the root causes of distraction, arguing that it starts from within and is driven by the desire to escape discomfort. The book offers a four-step, research-backed model to help readers master internal triggers, manage time effectively, hack back external triggers, and prevent distractions with pacts. Eyal also discusses how distraction affects various aspects of life, including work, relationships, and parenting, and provides novel techniques to overcome these challenges and live a more focused life.
Being easily distracted by the latest technologies has been a consistent feature of the human race since the time of Plato. But is the technology to blame? Or is the key to being more productive and present in life have to do with forming healthy habits around the technology?
Nir Eyal, writer, consultant, and former lecturer in marketing at Stanford, is the author of Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life and Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. In his work, Nir explores the psychology behind habit-forming technology.
Nir and Greg discuss the positive applications of habit-forming technologies, the timeless nature of distraction, the importance of forethought in combating impulsiveness, and practical strategies for becoming “Indistractable.”
*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*
Episode Quotes:
The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought
15:32: Studies have found that 90% of your distractions are not external triggers. They do not come from the outside world. Ninety percent of the time you check your phone, you check your phone not because of a ping, ding, or ring, but because of an internal trigger. Because 90% of distractions begin from within. They start because of these internal triggers. What are internal triggers? Internal triggers are uncomfortable emotional states—boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety. This is the source of 90% of our distractions. So what that means is, when you let those impulses take over, right? The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. When you allow yourself to check social media or watch something on the news or whatever it is that is not what you want to do, because of an immediate sensation, that tends to be, 90% of the time, the source of the problem. That is when it becomes something of, “Oh my gosh, what was I doing? I wasted the whole day worrying about somebody else's problems online,” as opposed to what I really need to do. Whereas if you plan that time in advance, it is fine. There is nothing wrong with it.
How do you become indistractable?
50:42: The first step to becoming indistractable is mastering internal triggers, or they will master you. So you can have the best tools, the best life hacks, the best—all that stuff. But if fundamentally you do not know how to deal with that sensation, you do not know how to process boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety—if you do not know what to do with that sensation—you are always going to find a way to escape.
Humans adapt and adopt with every new technology
07:29: The solution is not to abandon the technology. The solution is to make it better, to do what we as Homo sapiens have always done. We have always done two things in the face of dramatic technological innovation. What we have done is to adapt and to adopt, right? We adapt our behaviors. We adapt to new social norms. We adapt to the downsides of these behaviors by changing our manners, and then we adopt new technologies to fix the last generation of technologies.
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unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc 
