Save My Writing: Focus for the Focus-Challenged

Question

I’m writing this in response to a friend who told me how difficult it is for her to focus on one thing at work. “It’s physically painful,” she confessed. I’ve seen her operate and like most of us, she bounces around between online surfing, answering the phone and random interruptions.

Answer

Focus is an ever-greater challenge as we live a more connected lifestyle, checking Facebook, Tweeting, scanning the Internet for yet more information.

But if you’re trying to write a book or create anything on a regular basis, you must learn to command a certain level of focus. The minute you leave your project and go off on another thread, it’s as if you’ve put yourself back at the beginning. You’ve taken one step forward and two steps back.

The trick is to honor your style of moving among various things but not being like a ball in a pinball machine, at the mercy of any random whack on your attention.

Start Small

Designate a specific period of time to write. Try a short period of 15-60 minutes. Shorter periods of time often work better than longer, 1-2 hour chunks.

Before that session, try to take care of any small ‘errands’ such as checking email, reading blogs, consulting your bank balance, and making lunch or coffee.

Also before the session, get clear on what you will work on. Say you’re writing a book. Know that you’ll work on writing new material, researching, or editing.

Tune Out to Tune In

This is totally obvious, but many of us don’t shut off the distractions.

At the beginning of your work session, shut down all programs on your computer except the one you’re using to write. If you can go offline, even better.

Feel free to try a program such as WriteRoom for Mac and CreaWriter for Windows or Jdarkroom . Other brilliant software for Mac users, the best of the recent minimalist writing apps, include Byword and iAWriter.

Turn off your phone. Shut the door. Shut down any audible notifications from your email or games programs.

Develop a practice that allows you to settle in. For me, once I start paging through my thesaurus, I automatically slow down and begin to relish the quieter, slower writing space.

Capture Incoming Thoughts

Here’s the part that will help you stay focused yet not feel constrained.

Keep a notebook or pad of paper next to you for all the ideas and thoughts that will pounce the minute you try to focus.
This could include a list of things to research for your writing. It could also include a list of things for work, or errands on the home front.

Your mind won’t stop its bouncy ways just because you’ve decided to focus, but you don’t have to follow its jumbled path. Get all those thoughts jumping around in your head down onto your “scratch pad” of paper as soon as they appear, to be process later.

Moving Around Within Your Project

Within the frame of your project, give yourself permission to bounce around. In this way, you can honor your need for variety but still stay focused. For example, I use Thursday mornings as my writing time. I have a list of articles I’m writing. I move between the different articles, writing, editing, and adding new ideas to my articles list.

I’m still writing, still driving the pieces to completion, but within my writing zone I feel free to move to another article if the one I’m working on has begun to feel boring or difficult.

Whenever you get the urge to do something else – check email, swing by Facebook, look up that thing you really need to know before you can write another word – write it on the list and go back to writing or editing.

Expand Your Comfort Zone

It’s almost guaranteed that if you try these things, you’re going to feel uncomfortable at first. You will want to rebel and go online, answer the phone, etc.

Stay with it. Take a deep breath. Start to acclimate yourself and your system to longer and longer periods of focus.

At the end of the 15 or 30 minutes, check your lists. You may find that the things that seemed so urgent and immediate when they arose aren’t really that important.

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What What works for you to stay focused?? What will you try this week to keep on task? Hope this advice has helped!

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Images courtesy of Pixies and Pixels and quacktaculous.