Coaching practices for Add Friction to Distraction

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Add Friction to Distraction, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

  • The escape is one tap away and so frictionless that I’m three videos deep before I even realize I caved
  • My thumb opens the app before I’ve even decided to
  • The second the work gets boring or hard or makes me anxious, my hand is already reaching for my phone before I’ve even decided to
  • Something just landed and I’m too wound up to deal with it sanely right this second
  • I sit down to focus and within minutes I’ve drifted to my phone, an open tab, the snack on the desk

Practices that may help

  1. Use effort pacts
    Add friction that makes distraction harder to slip into without thinking.
    Indistractable, Made Practical
  2. Add friction to attention-capture apps
    Increase the effort required to open distracting apps so the default path is not the lowest-resistance one.
    The Attention Economy: Reclaiming Your Focus from Systems Designed to Capture It
  3. Master your internal triggers
    Identify the uncomfortable feeling that precedes distraction and address it directly.
    Indistractable, Made Practical
  4. Use distraction deliberately as a short-term regulation tool
    Deliberately shifting attention away from an emotion-generating stimulus can provide a short-term window for recovery — if used strategically.
    Attentional Deployment, Made Practical
  5. Reduce cues for competing behaviors during focused periods
    Your focus is partly controlled by what stimuli are in your environment — reducing competing cues protects target behaviors.
    Stimulus Control, Made Practical
  6. Attentional deployment
    Direct attention away from the emotionally provocative element of a situation before the emotion fires.
    Cognitive Reappraisal vs. Suppression, Made Practical
  7. Keep an attention capture list during hyperfocus
    Write down every impulse, distraction, and off-topic idea that arises during a session rather than acting on or suppressing it.
    Hyperfocus: Directing Intense Attention to What Matters Most
  8. Laser: defend focused attention
    Engineer your environment so the Highlight gets uninterrupted, distraction-free attention.
    Make Time, Made Practical
  9. Correct distracting by returning to what was avoided
    When you’ve changed the subject or made a joke, come back to the thing that felt threatening.
    The Satir Model
  10. Use a pre-commitment device to lock in hyperfocus sessions
    Commit to a specific focus block in advance and introduce a friction cost to abandoning it.
    Hyperfocus: Directing Intense Attention to What Matters Most

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