Indistractable - Nir Eyal

There's traction and distraction. You should set yourself up to maintain as much traction in your life as possible. To do that, you need to master your triggers, which can be internal (think feeling anxious every time you sit down to write) or external (think a notification from your phone). Ideally, you can setup triggers that lead you to traction, or at the very least, have strategies for managing triggers that lead you to traction.

Mastering your internal triggers largely comes down to maintaining awareness and having strategies for dealing with discomfort. We're wired for novelty, so it's natural for us to want to move on - to progress. But if we're doing something that's important to us, we need to resist that urge. One of the sayings in the book is "time management is pain management". I think that encapsulates this idea well. Figure out ways to manage the discomfort to stick with things that are important to you.

Techniques for mastering external triggers are the typical ones you'd see in other pop-psyche books. Turn off notifications on your phone. Make pacts. That sort of thing. I can't say much of that stuck with me.

I think my biggest takeaway from this book is to align your time with your values. You need to allocate your most precious resource to the things that are important to you. If something is truly important, you'll find ways to manage the inevitable discomfort of sticking with it. Figuring out what's important is its own topic. But if you haven't done it already, you should probably devote some time to it.