How to Escape the Vicious Cycle of Distraction

You have time for everything, even if it doesn’t feel that way

Nir Eyal
Forge
Published in
3 min readJan 19, 2021

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Photo: visualspace / Getty Images

People are always saying “there aren’t enough hours in the day” to get stuff done. And yet research suggests that the average working American has four hours of leisure per day. If we have so many hours to play with every day, why do so many of us feel like we don’t have time to accomplish our big goals?

Because a lack of time is not the problem. It’s not why we fail to accomplish what we want to do. The real problem is the vicious cycle of distraction. As I discuss in my book Indistractable, we spend hours upon hours each day distracted by pseudo-work like checking email unnecessarily, having too many meetings, and corporate politicking. We allow ourselves to be constantly interrupted by notifications. And all that wasted time just pushes us further into distraction.

But the good news is that anyone can break out of this cycle — you just have to understand how it works.

The time crunch is what you see on the surface, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the time crunch, there’s a massive ocean of overwhelm and frustration. And at the bottom of that sea of bad feelings is the real problem.

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Nir Eyal
Forge
Writer for

Posts may contain affiliate links to my two books, “Hooked” and “Indistractable.” Get my free 80-page guide to being Indistractable at: NirAndFar.com