Quoting Nir ‘you can’t identify distraction unless you know what they are distracting you from’ These are the ones that either worked for me or I am going to add to my routine. As he says, today we have use data that companies should not only alert people that their service or product could be addictive, but actively inform and protect users that show unhealthy attachments.Īfter learning how much thought companies put into capturing my attention, I read Indistractable to see if I could add new tools (or Hack backs as they are called in the book) to my Make Time framework. What I personally loved the most is the analysis on the ethic of manipulation. When is it wrong to manipulate the users? Nir offers a simple matrix to answer the key question: should we attempt to? I am not be able to recap it, but I encourage anyone in product or services to look it up on his blog /Hooked. Indeed it works well, as long as we are indeed focusing on what the user wants to do and not forcing new models. If this sounds familiar, it’s the theory behind the recent gamification of products and services. As for investment? IKEA showed us that the more effort we put into something the more we tend to value the end product. People increase their motivation as they believe they are nearing a goal, therefore showing progress is a powerful motivator to act (also showing some progress above zero at the beginning prevents people from giving up), and rewards draw us to act not for the reward itself (we may or may not win the lottery) but because we can temporary alleviate the need for that reward. The keys to keep people engaged are Progress and Rewards and Investment. Reducing the effort to do something will always be more effective than getting people to start something new.

Hooked reiterates the key concepts that for anything to become a habit (even a good one) it needs 3 main characteristics: a minimal starting effort (even having the smallest mindset change before attempting to start a new habit will make us more likely to stick to it), must be linked to triggers (initially external ones, ideally shifting to internal triggers later) and needs to be easy. Reading Hooked first, will give you a better understanding on what we are up against, thou it isn’t necessary, I would recommend to read the two books together back to back. Hooked is focused on the art of building habit forming product (or how they are sometimes called in ‘Make Time’ distraction pools). Indistractable focuses on how adult, companies and children can create active shields against those distractions and be able to focus when and how much they need. I read Hooked as it was recommended in my favorite book of 2019 “Make time”, and I followed with Indistractable because I enjoyed Nir writing style and the data and science base research behind every seemingly simple statement.

Hooked and indistractable