How to be Indistractable as a PM (or any tech worker)

It's the skill of the century, being “indistractable”. Here's how to manage the demands of meetings and stakeholders to get deep work done as a Product Manager.

Raise your hand if you can resonate:

You wake up to 47 unread Slack messages, wolf down breakfast while doom-scrolling email, sit through 6 hours of Zoom calls while half-listening and covertly working on other tasks, finally find 30 minutes to crank out a PRD, then stress-eat takeout while catching up on more messages after hours.

Whether you work in a feature factory or an empowered environment, the PM calendar tends to look like this:

Image: John Cutler

With days like that, it's no wonder so many PMs struggle to find time for strategy work. There are distractions from all angles. Slaying them all can feel about as doable as beating the Night King with a plastic spork.

So, I had to turn to the world’s leading expert on the topic.

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Introducing Nir

With 340K followers on LinkedIn and 103K on X, it’s likely you have heard of Nir.

But, if you haven’t, he’s the epic author of Indistractable and Hooked (both highly recommended). There’s probably no one else who has read more studies or written more about building good tech habits, and breaking bad ones.

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Today’s Post

Words: 6,668 | Est. Reading Time: 30 mins

We’re going to understand the Indistractable Model and then spend 75% of our time on the specific, tactical applications you need to succeed as a PM or product leader:

1. The Indistractable Model: The 4 key steps to being Indistractable

2. Calendar Tetris for PM Sanity: How to manage the insatiable demand for meetings

3. Distraction is a symptom of cultural dysfunction: How to redesign your company's culture for deep focus, even if you're not the CEO

4. Playing chess with your career: What to do if you’re work environment is toxic, and playing your career game for the next 10 moves

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A Warning About Today’s Piece…

This piece is not for the skimmers. It will challenge the way you think and break your bad habit of blaming tech for your distractions. We’ll finally get to the real root cause of the problem.

The beauty of this piece lies in how we build up your first principles understanding of why you want to employ certain tactics. As Nir says, “Tactics are what you do; strategy is why you do it.”

So dump dumb suggestions like greyscaling your phone or banning email, and let’s finally fix the problem of distraction once and for all.

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1. The Indistractable Model

Most people make the mistake of blaming the things that seemingly cause distraction: their smartphone, their meetings, their kids, and their apps.

But distraction isn’t about what distracted you; it’s about the action you take in response to it. Hence, the word distraction, ends in “action.”

Nir teaches that the opposite of distraction isn’t focus; it’s “traction.” Traction is any action that moves you toward what you say you will do, while distraction is any action that moves you away from your goals.

There are 4 key steps to becoming Indistractable.

The 4 steps of the Indistractable Model.

The first step is internal.

1.1 Master Internal Triggers

When it comes to distraction, we tend to blame our devices. But a closer look at the neuroscience suggests a different problem: your urges to check those distractions.

These are called “internal triggers.” According to Nir’s book, icky feelings like boredom, uncertainty, stress, and fatigue are the source of 90% of our distractions.

Here’s the deal: We distract ourselves to escape discomfort.

In light of this, many of us want to turn to mental abstinence. “I’ll just uninstall all the distracting apps!”

But this is impractical and can backfire. It can trigger rumination and make the desire grow stronger.

Instead, the idea is to master your internal triggers.

1. Look for the internal discomfort that appears before the distraction

2. Write down the trigger

3. Explore your sensations with curiosity rather than contempt

This will give you the space to catch these moments as they happen. Then, try to surf the urge. Say you’ll reach for the distraction after 10 minutes more of focused work.

Find the fun in things. Pay absurdly close attention to the details of unpleasant tasks. Like your local barista nerds out about coffee, and your local mechanic loves cars, grow to love the focused work you must do. This will help you escape the distractions that lead to discomfort in the first place.

Have you ever felt “spent” at the end of the day, justifying some Netflix at the end of the night?

This is actually a mistaken belief about how willpower works. Willpower is more like an emotion than a muscle. It doesn’t tire and doesn’t get “used up.” It’s subject to all the other things going on in our lives that take us to an exhausting place at night.

To hone your willpower emotion, recognize that willpower does not get spent down, and practice self-compassion with yourself. We tend to be our own toughest critics and grind down our own willpower that way.

1.2 Make Time for Traction

What really is a distraction? It’s something that takes you away from what you want to be doing.

So, the next step to becoming indistractable after mastering your internal triggers is to make time for traction proactively.

To be the best version of you, your calendar has to reflect your values.

This is where timboxing comes in. It helps you determine what you should actually not get distracted from.

The first circle to ensure you have time for is at the center of everything else in your indistractable plan: you. You have to make time for yourself to sleep enough, rest enough, and do what nurtures your soul.

It’s also critical to take pressure off yourself in this process.

Years ago, Nir experienced sleepless nights as he tried hopelessly to sleep within his prescribed timebox. What he learned was that you have to detach yourself from the outcome of good sleep and stick to the input.

Did you show up to bed at the right time with all your devices put away? If so, then the body will take what it needs.

Nir found that when he relieved himself of the pressure, sleep came. Science shows that the same should happen for you.

The second circle is your relationships. It’s too easy to let work and yourself, especially once you have kids, take over your life.

In practice, we all need strong relationships with our spouses and friends. The science is clear: you live longer, stay happier, and even make more money.

So we need to make time for it. For Nir, a few practices have helped in this area:

1. A weekly afternoon with his daughter

2. Dates every two weeks with his wife, as well as scheduled time for household chores

3. Meeting 3 other families for a lunch every two weeks to discuss a deep topic like, ‘should we force our kids to learn things they don’t like, such as piano?’

These types of regularized activities create the basis for the part of our lives we’re talking about in this piece today…

That’s work. As PMs, we constantly feel pressure to respond to messages outside of work hours and catch up with e-mail when we can.

But these work-related distractions ultimately compromise the quality of time we have for ourselves and our relationships.

And we are calling them distractions for a reason. An email when you are scheduled for family time is exactly that, a distraction.

So the key is to right-size the amount of work and produce high quality without compromising on our other times.

We’ll go in detail on all the tools in further sections, but the point to understand for now is that you want to schedule out your work and provide transparency about it to your boss and stakeholders.

It’s just like scheduling with your wife, friends, or kids. You want them to be happy, and you do so, in part, by helping them understand what you are doing when.

1.3 Hack Back External Triggers

A hospital study by Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco asked nurses who were prescribing medication to don a red ‘I am dispensing medication’ vest. The ideas was for no one to disturb them at that time, with the bright red.

The nurses hated them. So the study administrators were skeptical. But, 4 months later, when the results came in, they saw a massive 47% decrease in providing the wrong medicine.

It was an intervention that speaks exactly to the power of having a bright red, ‘let me focus’ sign up. You can hack back your external triggers at work with something similar:

1. Put up a Do Not Disturb - Focus Time message up on Slack

2. Add a deep work block to your calendar and share it with your co-workers

3. If you work in an office, put up a physical Red card on your monitor that you are focusing

Most of us just throw up the headphones, but a more serious intervention like the nurse’s red vest can really work.

There are loads of other external triggers, like meetings and email, and slack messages that still come biting. Here’s the high level to hacking back the 7 most common triggers we face:

1. E-mail: send less email, slow down your delivery, and eliminate unwanted messages. You can use techniques like scheduling office hours and labeling emails by when they need a response, then scheduling time into your calendar to respond.

2. Group chat: stay a while but then get out. Realize that as a real-time communication channel, it should be used sparingly.

3. Meetings: have fewer meetings but better one’s, with a prepared agenda and document. The goal is for consensus, not alignment. Make sure folks are present and engaged, not distracted.

4. Smartphones: remove all the apps you don’t use, and even consider social media. When you’re left with a few apps, rearrange them so your home screen is just essentials. Then, minimize sound and sight notifications.

5. Desktop: Clear away all the icons on your desktop except for 1-2 needed one’s, and turn off desktop notifications. You’re on your computer to work or be entertained, not distracted.

6. Online articles: Instead of reading articles in your browser, save content to read later and then read it in your timeboxed times. Instead of opening a myriad tabs and clogging up your focus, keep them in that app. Then, listen to them when you’re working out or cleaning.

7. Feeds: Use an extension like Feed Eradicator to not even see the news feed. These feeds have been hacked to steal your attention. If you want to keep some, consider going to direct URLs outside of feeds when you do have scheduled social media time.

We’ll triple click into the PM-related one’s like meetings, Slack, and email in sections 2-4.

But before we get there, let’s complete our model of indistractability.

1.4 Prevent Distraction with Pacts

The last step to preventing distraction is to make powerful precommitments to keep the distractions out.

Tie yourself up like Ulysses passing the sirens as a last resort. Painting: Waterhouse

Jonathan Franzen, who Time Magazine called the Great American Novelist, literally saws off his ethernet ports. While you might not want to go to such lengths, you should consider:

• Effort pacts: Apps like Forest, Selfcontrol and others can help you stay off certain websites or software when you don’t want to.

• Price pacts: Add a cost to getting distracted, like burning a dollar if you don’t burn calories. But be sure to be self-compassionate in this process.

• Identity pacts: This is a precommitment to a self image or a noun, like indistractable. Then share this with others and adopt rituals to reinforce it.

Through these pacts, and the four steps of the indistractable model, you can break through the forces that are tugging at your deep work time.

So now that we understand the key concepts of indistractability, let’s get into the nitty gritty of applying this to PM’s daily lives and career choices. This is where we get tactical and relate back to exactly what to do to do better work.