I was going to start writing this post a couple of hours ago, but I got distracted. At first I checked Twitter - lots of chatter about the debate there. Then I did a side-shuffle to Facebook, where I saw a friend just purchased a lovely new plant! Then Tumblr, to look at some funny animated gifs of Fearless Felix. Then Instagram. Then Twitter again. (And don't get me started on the distractions luring my editor, who was supposed to post this hours ago!)
Although all of these distractions are wonderful for our creativity and sanity, they can also be incredibly unproductive when it's time to get some real work done. Even for someone like me, who relies on Twitter and Facebook for reporting and sharing articles, it is important to turn it all off. (After all, Steven Spielberg probably doesn't watch a movie while he's directing one.)
Lately I've been experimenting with new ways to keep my distractions to a minimum, especially when I have a looming deadline. In the morning I now use an hourglass to ward off distractions. Once it's flipped, my phone goes into Airplane Mode and I completely turn off the Internet in my home. I don't allow myself to enter the Web's vortex until every last grain of sand has drained into the base of the hourglass.
I reached out to a few authors to find out what they do to fight their urges to “Like†an animated gif or become lost in the labyrinth of Twitter. This is their advice:
Tim Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Body.â€
First I am an inveterate note-taker. I copy scraps of blog posts, tweets, street signs, things on lampposts - I magpie all of that. That's the raw material. That all ends up in SimpleNote, this super-simple notes database. My day is basically this: I start in the morning (I'm not one of those people that has their two or three hours of writing). I stop writing as soon I feel friction, or slow down. I start to notice that friction and I take a walk. I take a lot of walks. The way I solve a problem, figure out how something is going to go down on the page, is, I walk.
David Carr, author of “The Night of the Gun†and New York Times columnist.
For months, I worked on my book late at night after work, but that will only get you so far. Eve ntually, I went to a cabin in the woods, yes, that had no Internet. It did have dial-up access, which is like having no Internet at all. Things moved very quickly after that. I sat in a room full of books, read some of them, stared at others, but mostly tried to work on my own. I slept, wrote and ate in the same room. That way, when I woke up, there was only the book; when I went to sleep, there was only the book. I put my notes up in sequence around the room, and when I finished with this action, I would take them off the wall. Eventually, the walls were empty, and the book was done.
