2.5 stars
Like many self-help books, Indistractable is full of both hits and misses.
While there are definitely some interesting and applicable points made (particularly the recommendation to timebox your schedule), most aren’t explored thoroughly enough or feel a little too generic. While there are definitely some benefits to the short-and-sweet approach—including bring easy to digest, quick to read, and full of memorable sound bites—in this instance it felt light on content and substance, much like a drawn out blog post. This book would have benefitted from either additional evidence or deeper exploration of the information that was presented, along with more presentations of how to apply the approaches in practice.
This setup also gave the book the feeling of being rushed, like the author didn’t thoughtfully flesh out the content of this book in favor of meeting a deadline. Which very well may have been the case, as we learned in Chapter 24 when the author revealed he made a price pact with his friend that Eyal would owe the friend $10,000 if he didn’t complete his book in time. Is it really meeting your deadline if the book feels unfinished? The final product felt like a long article rather than a full-fledged book, or like a beginning draft, like the author got the surface-level high points to paper, but hadn’t yet reached the round of revision where he’d fill in the gaps with additional research, evidence and studies.
While I appreciated the “Remember This” section at the end of each chapter because it made highlighting my ebook easy, it almost felt unnecessary because of how short each chapter was and how little content was covered.
I also found myself conflicted by the writing style of this book. While the simple, straightforward, and to-the-point approach made the content easily digestible and quick to read, it further exacerbated the feeling of the book being light on content. However, I will say one benefit of this sound bite writing style is it did make the tips easy to remember, even if the ideas, suggestions or action items weren’t necessarily novel concepts. For example, the reminder that allowing yourself to fall into distraction means you’re taking away time that can be spent on things you value makes a good mental note to tell yourself when you find yourself reaching for a distraction when you should be doing something else.
Another aspect I found frustrating about the writing style was the slightly condescending or braggadocious tone that occasionally cropped up (especially when it came to subtly flaunting his wealth). I imagine that wasn’t the intention, but it was hard to ignore when he bragged about what other books he wrote and what companies he invested in.
Overall, this book served the purpose of being a broad, high-level introduction to the topic of becoming indistractible, but didn’t have enough substance to take it all the way. You’d get about all you need to glean from this book by simply reading the the “Remember This” synopses at the end of each chapter, or the chapter takeaways that are helpfully compiled together towards the end of the book. Whether you read the summaries or the full book, don’t expect a fully flesh out investigation on what it takes to eliminate distractions from your life.