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How to Reduce Distraction With Nir Eyal

On being intentional with your time and other ways to become less distracted

Hoang Samuelson
7 min readMar 15, 2021
Cartoon image courtesy of Bizarro.com

Recently, I was roasted by my eight-year-old daughter.

While glancing at my computer screen one day, she saw that I had a lot of tabs opened on my browser. Now, if you know me well, you’d know that I have (what I consider) a major character flaw — I always have too many tabs open, because I always think, “I’m going to get to that eventually.” That ‘thing’ can be a video that I want to watch, a podcast I want to listen to, or a website with beautiful pictures that I can admire, or something related to a task that I have to do (check bank account means having the bank’s website open). If only I had more time. I tell myself, “I’ll get to that.” Every time I do so, I’m always confident that I’m right.

So when my daughter saw I had quite a few tabs, she remarked, “You have a lot of tabs open!”

“So what?” I replied.

“You say I have too many tabs on my iPad, but you have, like…” she started counting. “10!”

“Just because I have a lot of tabs doesn’t mean you should do it too,” I retorted. Monkey see, monkey do, right?

“Well, where do you think I learned it from?!” she exclaimed.

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Hoang Samuelson
Hoang Samuelson

Written by Hoang Samuelson

Features Editor @ Chowhound. Former lead editor @BooknBrunch.com. Writer of food, family and fiction. Based in Portland, OR. More at hoangsamuelson.com

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