Wendy, a freelance marketing consultant, knew exactly what she had to do for the next hour at work. Her calendar told her that she needed to be in her office chair at 9 am to write new client proposals, the most important task of her day. She fired up her laptop and opened the client’s file on her screen, eager to win new business. As she held her coffee mug with both hands and took a sip, a fantastic addition to the proposal entered her head. “This is going to be great!” she thought to herself.
But before she had a chance to write down the idea—ping!—her phone buzzed with a notification. Wendy ignored the intrusion at first. She jotted down a few words, but then the phone buzzed again with a different notification. This time her focus faltered, and she became curious. What if a client needed her?
She picked up her phone, only to find out that a trivial tweet by a celebrity rapper was reverberating through social media. After tapping out of the app, another notification caught her eye. Her mom had messaged her to say good morning. Wendy fired off a quick emoji heart to let Mom know she was fine. Oh, and what was that? A bright red notification bubble over the professional social networking app, LinkedIn. Perhaps there was a new business opportunity waiting for her? Nope. Just a recruiter who had seen her profile and liked what he saw.
Wendy was tempted to reply, but she remembered the time. It was now 9:20 am, and she hadn’t made any progress on her proposal. Worst of all, she’d forgotten the big idea she had been so excited to add to it. “How did this happen?” she moaned to herself. Despite having important work to do, Wendy wasn’t getting it done. She was, once again, distracted.
Does this sound familiar? Many of us have experienced just that kind of morning. The source of the distraction during these moments, however, isn’t an internal trigger. The ubiquity of external triggers, like notifications, pings, dings, alarms, and even other people, makes them hard to ignore.
It’s time for us to hack back. In tech speak, “to hack” means “to gain unauthorized access to data in a system or computer.” Similarly, our tech devices can gain unauthorized access to our brains by prompting us to distraction. Facebook’s first president, Sean Parker, admitted as much when he described how the social network was designed to manipulate our behavior. “It’s a social-validation feedback loop,” he said. “Exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”
To start hacking back, we first need to understand how tech companies use external triggers to such great effect. What exactly is the “vulnerability in human psychology” Parker described that makes us susceptible to the external triggers that so often lead to distraction?
In 2007, B. J. Fogg, founder of Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab, taught a class on “mass interpersonal persuasion.” Several of the students in attendance would later pursue careers applying his methods at companies like Facebook and Uber. Mike Krieger, a cofounder of Instagram, created a prototype of the app in Fogg’s class that he eventually sold for $1 billion.
As a student at Stanford’s business school at the time, I attended a retreat at Fogg’s home, where he taught his methods of persuasion in more depth. Learning from him firsthand was a turning point in my understanding of human behavior. He taught me a new formula that changed the way I viewed the world.
The Fogg Behavior Model states that for a behavior (B) to occur, three things must be present at the same time: motivation (M), ability (A), and a trigger (T). More succinctly, B = MAT.
Motivation is “the energy for action,” according to Edward Deci, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester. When we’re highly motivated, we have a strong desire, and the requisite energy, to take an action, and when we’re not motivated, we lack the energy to perform a task. Meanwhile, in Fogg’s formula, ability relates to facility of action. Quite simply, the harder something is to do, the less likely people are to do it. Conversely, the easier something is to do, the more likely we are to do it.
When people have sufficient motivation and ability, they’re primed for certain behavior. However, without the critical third component, the behavior will not occur. A trigger to tell us what to do next is always required. We discussed internal triggers in a previous section, but when it comes to the products we use every day and the interruptions that lead to distraction, external triggers—stimuli in our environment that prompt us to act—play a big role.
Today, much of our struggle with distraction is a struggle with external triggers.
“When BlackBerry launched push email in 2003, users rejoiced: They didn’t need to constantly check their inbox for fear they’d miss important messages. When email comes, BlackBerry promised, your phone will tell you,” David Pierce wrote in Wired magazine. Apple and Google soon followed and made notifications part of their phone operating systems. “Suddenly, there was a way for anyone to jump into your phone when they wanted your attention,” Pierce continued. “Push notifications proved to be a marketer’s dream: They’re functionally impossible to tell apart from a text or email without looking, so you have to look before you can dismiss.”
Checking those notifications comes at a high price. External triggers can rip us away from our planned tasks. Researchers have found that when people are interrupted during a task, they tend to subsequently make up for lost time by working faster, but the cost is higher levels of stress and frustration.
The more we respond to external triggers, the more we train our brain in a never-ending stimulus–response loop. We condition ourselves to respond instantly. Soon, it feels impossible to do what we’ve planned because we’re constantly reacting to external triggers instead of attending to what’s in front of us.
Perhaps the answer is to simply ignore the external triggers. Maybe if we don’t act on the notifications, phone calls, and interruptions, we can go about our business and quickly silence the interruptions when they happen.
Not so fast. A study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance found that receiving a cell phone notification but not replying to it was just as distracting as responding to a message or call. Similarly, the authors of a study conducted at the University of Texas at Austin proposed that “the mere presence of one’s smartphone may impose a ‘brain drain’ as limited-capacity attentional resources are recruited to inhibit automatic attention to one’s phone, and are thus unavailable for engaging with the task at hand.” By having your phone in your field of view, your brain must work hard to ignore it, but if your phone isn’t easily accessible or visually present, your brain is able to focus on the task at hand.
Thankfully, not all external triggers are harmful to our attention. In many ways, we can leverage them to our advantage. For example, short text messages providing words of encouragement are effective at helping smokers quit. A metastudy of interventions from ten countries found that “the evidence provides unequivocal support for the efficacy of text messaging interventions to reduce smoking behavior.”
The trouble is, despite the potential benefits external triggers can provide, receiving too many can wreak havoc on our productivity and happiness. How, then, can we separate the good external triggers from the bad? The secret lies in the answer to a critical question:
Is this trigger serving me, or am I serving it?
Remember that, as the Fogg Behavior Model describes, any behavior requires three things: motivation, ability, and a trigger. The good news is that removing unhelpful external triggers is a simple step toward controlling unwanted distractions.
When I challenged Wendy, the marketing consultant struggling to stay focused, to ask herself the critical question, it empowered her to start putting unhelpful external triggers in their place. She could begin to decide for herself which triggers led to traction instead of allowing her attention to be controlled by other people.
Viewed through the lens of this critical question, triggers can now be identified for what they rightly are: tools. If we use them properly, they can help us stay on track. If the trigger helps us do the thing we planned to do in our schedule, it’s helping us gain traction. If it leads to distraction, then it isn’t serving us.
In the next chapters, we will look at some very practical ways to manipulate our technology and our physical environment to eliminate unhelpful external triggers. We’re going to hack back our devices in ways their makers never intended, but that’s exactly the point—our technology should serve us, not the other way around.
REMEMBER THIS
• External triggers often lead to distraction. Cues in our environment like the pings, dings, and rings from devices, as well as interruptions from other people, frequently take us off track.
• External triggers aren’t always harmful. If an external trigger leads us to traction, it serves us.
• We must ask ourselves: Is this trigger serving me, or am I serving it? Then we can hack back the external triggers that don’t serve us.