Author
Nir Eyal
The writer who explained how products hook us, then how to become indistractable anyway.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Nir Eyal taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and its design school, and wrote Hooked in 2014, a widely used account of how products build habits in their users. It made him a reference for product teams and, he has said, uneasy about what the same techniques were doing to attention.
Indistractable, published in 2019, is the other half of that argument: how a person keeps control of their attention in a world built to take it. Its central move is to locate the source of distraction inside, in the discomfort we are trying to escape, rather than in the phone.
The signature
Eyal's signature is the internal trigger: the claim that distraction begins with an uncomfortable feeling and that managing the feeling beats blocking the app. He is practical and a little contrarian, skeptical of moral panic about technology and of anyone selling willpower, and his advice always ends in something you can schedule.