Adapted for the George C. Young American Inn of Court (Orlando, Florida)1 from Nir Eyal’s guide “How to be indistractable” in Psyche, and his book Indistractable (2019).
A client does not retain a lawyer for hours. A client retains judgment, and judgment is the product of sustained attention applied to a difficult question. The same is true of the bench: a ruling is only as sound as the attention that preceded it. Yet attention is the one professional asset for which no rule of procedure, no docket, and no billing system holds us to account. Nir Eyal’s argument, developed over a five-year study of his own distractibility, is that we have been indicting the wrong defendant.
The internal trigger.
Eyal’s central claim is that distraction is rarely caused by the thing we turn toward; it is caused by the feeling we turn away from. He catalogues the usual suspects: boredom, uncertainty, fatigue, insecurity, the fear of having missed something. Every lawyer will recognise the pattern in professional dress. The summary-judgment brief that has been “almost started” for a week is not waiting on research; it is waiting on the discomfort of committing to a theory that might be wrong. The inbox refreshed for the ninth time before lunch is not diligence; it is relief from the tedium of a privilege log. The judge who reaches for a bench memo mid-argument may be fleeing the uncertainty of an unfamiliar area of law. Eyal’s prescription is disarmingly modest: when you notice the pull, pause and name the feeling before acting on it. His authority for the practice is a smoking-cessation study in which participants trained merely to observe and investigate their cravings quit at roughly twice the rate of a leading program. Naming the discomfort does not dissolve it, but it converts an impulse into a decision.
Anticipation and the ten-minute rule.
Because internal triggers are predictable, they can be intercepted. Eyal’s most portable device is the ten-minute rule: commit to the avoided task for ten minutes only, after which you are free to stop. Boredom cannot mature in ten minutes; nor can the anxiety of a blank page. Applied to practice, the rule converts the dreaded brief into a ten-minute outline, the neglected file review into a ten-minute triage, the difficult client call into a ten-minute draft of what must be said. Few lawyers stop at the ten-minute mark. The point is not the duration but the removal of the negotiation with oneself that precedes every avoided task.Reframing the task and the temperament.
Eyal recommends two reframes. The first concerns the work: to treat obligation as opportunity, and to search for the puzzle inside the tedium. He cites the game designer Ian Bogost for the proposition that fun is a matter of chosen attention rather than inherent enjoyment. Lawyers are unusually well placed to exploit this. A contract review is a hunt for the clause that will matter in litigation five years hence; a deposition transcript is a character study; a discovery dispute is a study in the opponent’s anxieties. The second reframe concerns the self. Eyal found, and the wellbeing literature confirms, that self-reproach for being “a distracted person” worsens the condition. The alternative is the tone one would take with a valued associate who had drifted: acknowledge it, ask what caused it, and return to the work.
Traction: values rendered as hours.
Eyal’s term for the opposite of distraction is traction, meaning the actions that move you toward what you have decided matters. His method is to translate each value into a fixed quantity of calendared time, so that “health,” “family,” or “mentorship” becomes a definite block rather than an aspiration. For lawyers this cuts two ways. Deep work on a matter must be placed on the calendar with the same rigor as a hearing, or the day dissolves into responsiveness. Equally, the pursuits that keep a lawyer whole, including the monthly Inn meeting and the hour with a protégé, must be scheduled or they will be the first casualties of a busy docket. Eyal adds a liberating corollary: leisure that is scheduled is not a distraction. The scheduled hour of idleness is honest; the unscheduled one is theft from something else.
Hacking back the external triggers.
Only after the internal work does Eyal turn to devices, and the sequence is deliberate: environmental controls imposed on an unexamined habit simply relocate it. His measures are ordinary and effective. Email is answered in set windows rather than on arrival. Real-time channels are used sparingly and by agreement. The telephone is stripped of applications that no longer earn their place and of notifications that never did. The media diet is curated with the same judgment one would apply to a witness list. For a law office this translates into a small number of institutional rules: no telephone on the table during a client conference; an out-of-office reply during trial that gives an emergency number and thereby dissolves the fear of missing something; a practice-management system configured to summarize rather than interrupt.
Pre-commitment as the final firewall.
Eyal’s last resort is the pact made in advance: a choice that removes the future self’s discretion. He describes wagering a substantial sum with a friend against his own deadline, and keeping both the money and the deadline. The legal profession is already built on pre-commitment devices; the filing deadline, the pre-trial order, and the scheduling conference are all mechanisms by which the system protects itself from the advocate’s procrastination. Eyal’s insight is that the same architecture can be turned inward: a colleague who expects the draft by Friday, a fee arrangement that rewards early completion, a standing appointment with a protégé that would embarrass one to cancel.
A note for the bench and the mentor.
Judges and senior lawyers carry an additional obligation, because their attention is observed. The advocate who watches a judge check a device during argument draws a conclusion about the weight of the proceeding. The protégé who watches a mentor answer a message mid-conversation draws a conclusion about the weight of the relationship. Eyal’s account opens with such a moment, involving his young daughter, and it is the more instructive for being ordinary. The remedy is not abstinence. Eyal is explicit that the digital-detox school, the flip telephone and the cabin, failed him within days, because the distraction followed him to the bookshelf. The remedy is to know what one is avoiding, to make time for what one has chosen, and to arrange one’s surroundings so that the choice survives contact with the day.
A closing caution on the evidence.
Eyal is candid that the popular case against social media rests on weaker science than its proponents suggest, citing Amy Orben’s review of the field’s methods. He does not conclude that technology is harmless, only that the question is how much, by whom, and in place of what. Lawyers, who are trained to weigh evidence, will find that a more useful posture than either panic or complacency. Attention is ours to govern, and the tools to govern it require no software update.
Suggested companion reading for members: Eyal, Indistractable (2019); Gazzaley and Rosen, The Distracted Mind (2016), on the difference between a break and a distraction; Bogost, Play Anything (2016).
1 Euribiades Cerrud II, Esq. is Chair of the Mentorship Committee at the George C. Young American Inn of Court in Orlando, Florida and a member of its Board of Directors.