Defeat Distraction + Time Wasting Using Disinvestment

We all do things we know aren’t valuable. Whether we call them time wasters, downtime, or addictions; time we desperately need gets lost in predictable ways every week. 

My friends and I have noticed something called “phone time” has gobbled up our spare minutes. Things like scrolling social, streaming content, or pouring water (my own latest time-sucking game of choice) can devour hours every week.

If you’re not sure how “pouring water” could be done with your phone, much less take hours of time, you’re not missing anything. Like any puzzle game, you’re “sorting” patterns trying to “solve” each level of escalating difficulty. The tension of trying this -- ah! That didn’t work -- try again! keeps your brain hooked on the neurotransmitters associated with anticipation. It’s much like what happens in our brains when we gamble, and there’s no natural stopping point to the rhythm of play. Usually, eye strain and anxiety over blowing our schedule crop up long before we feel “done” with this type of activity. 

Behavioral psychologists talk about our attention being “hooked” by these activities because of an excitatory loop in our neurology. We get hooked in part because the payoff of engagement is not predictable. A steady payoff for steady investment would cause us to become bored. But an unpredictable payoff keeps us hanging around, trying “one more time” to see what happens. (If this reminds you of delivery schedules in classical operant conditioning, you’ve made a smart connection. This addictive payoff pattern is called Intermittent Reinforcement, and it does tasty things to our body chemistry to keep us repeating behaviors for the excitement of an uncertain payoff.) 

In his bestseller Hooked, Nir Eyal unpacks the “Hooked” cycle of automatic behavior (the things we do without even thinking about them), as starting with a Trigger, yielding an Action, which if followed by Variable Rewards will prompt more Investment by us. If followed by a re-initializing Trigger, the hooked cycle can repeat indefinitely until our power to act is used up.

Trigger → Action → Variable Reward → Investment

We could talk about policing our inputs (time-delayed lock box for your phone anyone?), building up our “won’t power” to restrain our action, or vow to only engage activities with a fixed reward schedule so the boringness of always knowing what we’ll get will keep us from having too much fun with it (spoiler alert: this strategy rarely works). But what Nir taught me in his perky yellow book full or terrifying information seems like a Wild + Brave place to start:

It’s called “Disinvestment.”

That fourth piece of the Hooked cycle, Investment, is what happens when we “store value” in an activity, app, or association. Here are some common ways we store value:

• Adding Photos or Videos to an Instagram account.
• Recording workouts in Strava or FitBit.
• Logging Mindfulness Sessions in My Life or the Calm App
• Tracking Intermittent Fasts to monitor “progress”
• Adding notes to Evernote, or filing a PDF in your Google Drive folders
• Leveling up in a game (accessing increased functionality powers, performance statistics, or earning game currency)
• Earning badges for volunteering, or bragging rights of increased rank in a club.

Smart organizations are learning how to make engagement more fun by adopting this practice. In one particularly well-run organization where I volunteer, we can earn happy little badges for logging volunteer hours during high impact shifts. Since the badges expire if you don’t feed them fresh hours during the month, getting the badge makes me feel more invested, and de-incentivizes missing or delaying shifts.

Early this year I got hooked on a game called State of Survival. Impeccably engineered to facilitate the Hooked process for users, I found myself blocking time in my calendar to be for clan attacks and special events, logging on first and last thing each day to maximize the time-sensitive reward that would expire if missed, and “working hard” to level up key systems for my defense and attack capacity.

I spent real money on this “free” game, and watched my attention shred with impressive speed. It started to be difficult to sustain focus for writing or strategizing. Stray thoughts of the game intruded into activities I found genuinely meaningful, interrupting my train of thought.

My brain was well and truly hooked.

So I started reading Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. I thought if I understood why this game was so sticky I’d have more success curbing the habit. By the end of chapter 4 I was in complete awe of how this game deployed Olympic-level variable rewards, but I was still no closer to quitting. 

And then I read the chapter on Investment. 

Turns out that we don’t do things because they make us happy; they make us happy in large part because we do them. A small investment of action shifts how we feel about the thing we’re doing. The more we do it, we experience something researchers call “Escalation of Commitment.”*

This is seen in something a team of researchers named The “IKEA Effect”** where our feelings about something’s value are deeply impacted by how much time or effort we’ve invested in making or obtaining it. This is why after having wasted hours doing something yesterday, we can be even more tempted to waste more time that way today. Yesterday’s investment makes the activity seem more worth doing, even if you’re embarrassed at the wasted time.

Though this could explain a lot of strange relationship choices, and why we often fail to follow our best instincts about when it’s time to quit doing something. It also gives us good news.

If you can interrupt your investment, you’ll decrease your craving for the activity.

I’ve started to call this “Disinvestment” in my head, because it’s a new way of handling the temptation to do something I’ve acknowledged isn’t valuable. 

In the past I’ve focused on “Stopping for Good” or some sort of perfect record that’s proved “I quit.” This creates a roller coaster of willpower battles won-and-lost with myself. If I see my options as “Quit” or “Give In,” that makes “resisting” doing something just wears me down. It means that unless I am certain I can quit completely, any resistance is just delayed failure.

But that’s not how the human brain works. 

Giving in to doing something you feel like doing increases your craving to do it. That’s why letting the urge to do something pass (without acting on it) can reduce your craving.

Take whatever your chronic time waster is, and any time you’re able, let the urge to engage the behavior pass. Don’t tell yourself you have to keep the good behavior up. It isn’t about quitting, it’s about taking yourself up on the opportunity to not invest in the craving by answering it. Each time you “disinvest” by letting the urge pass, you’ve accomplished something valuable. 

• You’ve reduced the stored value in the thing you’re doing.
• You’ve reduced your own investment in increasing your cravings for the action.

Because that’s what hit me. Every time I do this thing, it makes me want to do it more. Like a sugar habit, feeding the craving doesn’t satisfy, it gives the craving more room to push at my brain. I don’t like being chased around by frazzled brain cravings. 

So where are you investing more time than you meant to lately? Can you trace the pieces of a Hooked Cycle happening to you? (A Trigger, Action, Variable Reward, and responding Investment of time/energy/attention/money on your part?)

If you are hooked, give this a try. Instead of “stopping” altogether, notice which action on your part invests in the loop. If the action is eating donuts when you’re stressed, are you investing in your sugar craving by buying donuts to have at the house? Are you investing in your Starbucks habit by collecting stars that help you “get rewards”? 

What would happen if you didn’t scan for rewards next time you got a coffee? It wouldn’t take your coffee away, but it would be an act of disinvestment from the hooked behavior of feeling like you’re “achieving something” when you blow your coffee budget. 

Think about it. It’s worked wonders for me,*** and I’d love to hear about your experience with it.