Hack back external triggers

Reduce the pings, badges, and interruptions that serve you, not the other way around.

Why it works

External triggers — notifications, badges, open tabs, interruptions — only help when they prompt something you actually want to do; the rest hijack attention on someone else’s schedule. Asking of each trigger "is this serving me, or am I serving it?" lets you remove the ones that pull you off your plan, cutting the volume of impulses you have to resist in the first place.

How to do it

1. Audit notifications and turn off any that do not prompt something you genuinely want to act on.
2. Mute or batch messages, and signal to others when you are in focused time.
3. Remove environmental cues (visible phone, open tabs) that trigger off-plan behavior.

Evidence

Consistent with interruption and attention-residue research showing that external interruptions fragment focus and carry recovery costs. The specific "serving me vs serving it" filter is a practitioner heuristic for applying that. (observational)

Removing external triggers helps, but Eyal’s own point is that it is secondary — internal triggers will find new exits if left unaddressed.

Sources

• Leroy (2009), attention residue from interruptions, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

Common mistake

Stopping at notification cleanup and assuming the distraction problem is solved, while the internal triggers that drive it go untouched.