What's Distracting You From Writing?

Imagine there is a fly in your office.

You are probably hyper-aware of it. Where it is. What sound it’s making. Whether it’s landing on your head.

Now, imagine seven flies.

You can’t quite keep track of where they all are, so you keep looking around, checking on them, making sure they’re not landing on you.

Now, imagine sitting down to write a detailed proposal with those seven flies buzzing all around you. Impossible, right?

That’s what we try to do all the time. Email, tabs, and the omnipresent phone that’s ready to ping, buzz, and jiggle whenever it gets the wiggles. Everything is competing for your attention. Your brain knows that all of these “flies” might suddenly move or change at any moment — so you devote part of your attention to tracking them.

Why does writing seem so hard?

Because it’s deep-brain work. It requires concentration. It can’t handle all those flies buzzing around.

But as humans, we’re naturally lazy. We prefer doing tasks that don’t require that kind of deep-brain work. This is the beauty of social media — scrolling through it makes us feel like we’re doing something, but it takes very little effort. No wonder it’s so tempting.

On top of that, when we sit down to write, our brains are whirling with all the other information we’ve already absorbed today.

While I was writing this article, I thought about calling my mom back to plan dates for her visit. Then I thought about whether I should develop a new workshop for one of my favourite clients. Then I wanted to check a jacket online. Oh, and I really should email my landlord about the defective tiles on the deck. In short, I wanted to think about anything but this article.

So, here’s my solution: recognize that writing takes hard work and dedication — which don’t come to us naturally.

You will need to keep making the decision not to think about other things.

You will need to keep making the decision not to check one more thing.

You are not superhuman. When you’re trying to focus, take away the temptations and help yourself out.

Shut down the other tabs on your browser. Turn off your email. Turn off your phone and put it away.

Sounds drastic, doesn’t it?

Here’s why I say that. Research shows that if you are concentrating on your work and you get interrupted by just one thing, it will take you 23 to 25 minutes to regain the level of concentration you had before*.

Will this magically make it easier to focus on your writing?

It will help.

Writing will still be hard because it’s deep-brain work.

But imagine if you actually got your work done. How satisfying would it be to put your thoughts and ideas into words that will persuade other people to act or change their minds?

Words have power. There’s a reason they ask for your full concentration.

*Gloria Mark, Victor M. Gonzalez, and Justin Harris, “No Task Left Behind?: Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work,” in Proceeding of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 321-3330 (Portland, OR: ACM Press, 2005). https://www.ics.uci.edu/~gmark/CHI2005.pdf