We’re meeting in a café in midtown New York on a sultry August day, ahead of the September 10 publication of Eyal’s new book, “Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life” (co-written with Juli Li; BenBella Books).
Eyal’s 2014 book, “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products,” was a favorite among executives in the high-tech industry. It starred on The Wall Street Journal’s best-seller list and has become Amazon’s top-selling book in the industrial and product design category. Officials from Google, Facebook and Instagram have come to consult with the person who claims to know how to create addictive technology of the kind that consumers will never want to stop using. The new book addresses the other side of the equation – those same users – and offers tools for staying focused in a technological world that offers us endless distractions.
Hadera-born Eyal immigrated with his parents to Florida in 1983 when he was 3. After obtaining an MBA at Stanford, he and fellow students established a company for placing ads in Facebook applications, becoming the CEO. While employed in the company he began taking an interest in the psychology of users and became a product-design consultant for startups. He publishes a blog, nirandfar.com, dealing with the “psychology of technology.” In 2012, he became a lecturer at Stanford, where he gave a course on the effect of the nervous system on human behavior; he now lives in New York.
How many hours a day do you spend on your phone?
“Many. But it’s correct use. Even when I waste time in aimless surfing, I do it from choice, as a healthy habit. After all, we are human.”
So you’re on the social networks?
“Of course. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. The thing is to control behavior and set a schedule. I set aside times in my schedule that are devoted to social networks and email.”
On his phone, Eyal shows me the next time slot he has designated for those activities: 6:30 to 8 that evening. “When the time is up, I close the email and Facebook. The idea of being undistracted is to succeed in doing what you set out to do.”
It seems to me that we all want that: to be perfect people who surf Facebook only at a time they decide on in advance. But for most of us it doesn’t actually work like that.
“Yes, it took me five years to figure out how to make that happen. The first step is to understand that you have power and not to believe the nonsense that the media is bombarding us with: that these technologies have control over us. We use those ideas as an excuse. Our children don’t behave well not because they are hooked on technology, but because we aren’t good enough parents. It’s easier for us to accept assertions that say companies and technologies hijack our children’s brains, than to contend with the fact that we allow them to spend many hours in front of screens.”
Do you think you exercise effective control over your 11-year-old daughter’s use of technology?
“Completely. I had a talk with her when she was 5. I didn’t tell her that screens take control of the brain and melt it. I read the research, and there is no study that shows negative or extreme influences, or any at all, from using the technology two hours a day or less. So I explained to her that the cost of the technology is her time. Instead of being in the swimming pool, playing with friends outside or being with your parents, you are opposite a screen. I asked her how much screen time she wanted every day, and she said two episodes of [shows on] Netflix, meaning 45 minutes altogether.
“I didn’t want to be the policeman who would be responsible for that time allotment, so I explained to her that she needed to take responsibility for it. Not the person who created the application, not her parents – her. I asked how she could make sure she wouldn’t spend more than 45 minutes in front of the screen. She came up with a great idea: She set the microwave timer and it would beep when the time was up, and she turned off the device. I told her: If we see that you are not being honest with yourself and with us, we’ll have another talk like this. Six years later, that talk hasn’t happened.”
But not all children display such advanced levels of self-control. I know quite a few adults who do intensive bingeing on TV shows and can’t stop themselves after two episodes. Isn’t this a somewhat exaggerated demand of our children?
“Would you throw your child into the pool without teaching him how to swim? Probably not – so why do it with digital devices? Before I give my child a device, I need to be sure that he knows the rules of its use: to put it aside when doing homework, to turn it off when friends come over. Children in our society have deficiencies in their basic needs, and when they don’t have enough of what they need in the real world, they look for and find it in the virtual world. Our children need autonomy and a sense of control in their life, but the levels of regulation that are exercised today on youngsters, at least in the United States, resemble those applied to prisoners. They are told what to eat, where to go, what to do. And then they play Fortnite and for a moment they’re able to feel like God in their universe.
“Our children also need a connection to others. It used to be that in every neighborhood in America you would hear the sound of children playing outside. Today they’re all in the house, because the parents are afraid of kidnappings. It makes no difference that this is the safest period in history – that isn’t what the media is selling us. So either they are alone at home or they have a schedule as packed as that of a CEO, moving from extracurricular sports to a group learning Chinese. Our kids don’t have free time, they don’t have time to play with other kids their age, and so they look for – and find – all of that online. I am speaking as a parent. We have to stop accusing the devices and start doing something about the real problem, which is to provide for our children’s real needs.”
I was with my family on vacation, and in the hotel restaurant there was silence: All the children were hooked up with headphones and screens, except my kids, who naturally were making the most noise. It was hard for me to decide who was normal and who wasn’t. Maybe the right thing to do is to set our kids up before a screen in situations when we want them to be quiet.
“That reminds me how a few days ago, my wife and I and our daughter went out for dinner with our neighbors and their two delightful daughters. Through the entire meal, our neighbors’ daughters were on their phones. Well, we went out for dinner with them once, but we won’t do it again. They don’t share our world of values. If their girls had hit our daughter, or if the parents had smoked at the table, I also wouldn’t go out with them again. That’s just rude behavior. A child shouldn’t be using technology during a social encounter, or at a meal, or in the middle of a class.”
[“source=haaretz”]
