How better tech could protect us from distraction

What does it mean to spend our time well?

I spend a lot of my time

thinking about how to spend my time.

Probably too much.

I probably obsess over it --

my friends think I do.

But I feel like I kind of have to,

because these days,

it feels like little bits of my time
kind of slip away from me,

and when that happens,

it feels like parts of my life
are slipping away.

Specifically,

it feels like little bits of my time get
slipped away to various things like this:

like technology --

I check things --

I'll give you an example.

If this email shows up --

how many of you have gotten
an email like this, right?

I've been tagged in a photo.

When this appears,

I can't help but click on it right now.

Right?

Because what if it's a bad photo?

So I have to click it right now.

But I'm not sure going to click the photo,

what I'm actually going to do
is spend the next 20 minutes.

(Laughter)

But the worst part is

that I know that this
is what's going to happen

and even knowing that that's
what's going to happen

doesn't stop me from
doing it again the next time.

Or I find myself in a situation like this:

where I check my email and pull
down to refresh,

right?

But the thing is that 60 seconds later,

I'll pull down to refresh again.

Like, why am I doing this?

Right?

This doesn't make any sense.

But I'll give you a hint
why this is happening.

What do you think makes more money
in the United States

than movies, game parks
and baseball combined?

Slot machines.

How can slot machines make all this money

when we play with such small
amounts of money?

We play with coins,

how is this possible?

Well, the thing is ...

my phone is a slot machine.

Every time I check my phone,

I'm playing the slot machine to see:

what am I going to get?

What am I going to get?

Every time I check my email,

I'm playing the slot machine

to say, "What am I going to get?"

Every time I scroll a news feed,

I'm playing the slot machine to see:

what am I going to get next?

Right?

And the thing is that again, knowing
exactly how this works --

and I'm a designer,

I know exactly how
the psychology of this works,

I know exactly what's going on --

but it doesn't leave me with any choice,

I still just get sucked into it.

So what are we going to do?

Because it leaves us

with this all or nothing relationship
with technology, right?

You're either on,

and your connected
and distracted all the time,

or you're off,

but then you're wondering,

am I missing something important?

In other words,

you're either distracted

or you have Fear of Missing Out,

right?

So we need to restore choice.

We want to have
a relationship with technology

that gives us back choice
about how we spend time with it,

and we're going to need
help from designers.

Because knowing this stuff doesn't help,

we're going to need design help.

So what would that look like?

So let's take an example that we all face:

chat --

text messaging.

So let's say there's two people,

Nancy's on the left and she's
working on a document,

and John's on the right.

And John suddenly remembers,

"I need to ask Nancy for
that document before I forget!"

Right?

So when he sends her that message,

it blows away her attention.

Right?

And that's what we're doing all the time,

we're bullzodering each other's
attention left and right.

And there's serious cost to this,

because every time
we interrupt each other,

it's takes up about 23 minutes on average
to refocus our attention.

We actually cycle through
two different projects

before we come back to the
original thing we were doing.

This is Gloria Mark's research

combined with Microsoft's
research that shows this.

And her research also shows
that it actually trains bad habits.

The more interruptions we get externally,

it's conditioning and training us
to interrupt ourselves.

We actually self-interrupt
every three and a half minutes.

This is crazy,

so how to fix this?

Because Nancy and John are in this
all or nothing relationship.

Nancy might want to disconnect,

but then she'd be worried,

what if I'm missing something important?

So design can fix this problem.

Let's say you have Nancy again on the left,

John on the right,

and John remembers,

I need to send Nancy that document,

except this time,

Nancy can mark that she's focused.

Let's say she drags a slider