How To Academy Presents...

Nir Eyal advises the world’s biggest companies on the psychology of motivation. He’s here to teach us how to escape procrastination and distraction and realise our life’s ambitions.

In the whirligig of the digital age we have all become masters in procrastination. Whether on our commute, at work, or at home with our families, we’re bombarded by phones, colleagues, and screens that distract us from what really matters. How can we possibly hope to realise our personal and professional goals when everything in our world is built to steal our attention away from realising our deepest desires?

Nir Eyal is the former Stanford psychologist and business thinker who helped design many of the attention-grabbing technologies that power our digital age. Now he joins How To Academy to help us take back control.

In this talk, he’ll present a four-step framework to reclaiming your attention and choosing your life. Too often technology is blamed as the source of the problem, when it is actually a symptom of a deeper issue: our desire to escape something we're not enjoying. Fixing our distractibility isn't a simple case of limiting our time with technology, but of identifying what we're really trying to escape.

From mental exercises to identify the internal triggers that lead to distraction to learning how to deal with external triggers like pop up notifications and chatty co-workers, this is an essential guide for overcoming distraction and leading more focused, fulfilling lives.

Nir Eyal

Nir Eyal spent years in the video gaming and advertising industries where he learned the techniques described in Hooked to motivate and influence users. He has taught courses on applied consumer psychology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and at Fortune 500 companies. His writing on technology, psychology and business appears in the Harvard Business Review, the Atlantic, TechCrunchand Psychology Today.

Rangan Chatterjee

Dr Rangan Chatterjee is a practicing NHS GP. He is a member of the Royal Colleges of Physicians and the Royal College of General Practitioners. Often referred to as the doctor of the future, Rangan is changing the way that we look at illness and how medicine will be practised in years to come.