I pulled off the impossible yesterday – I finished not one, but three projects and took a large chunk out of two others. I was able even to squeeze in one of the SOS requests. It’s amazing the amount of work you can accomplish when you avoid distractions.
I’ve been thinking about the distractions that pull at my time lately. I thank Lisa Gates for that – if you haven’t decided to take her Craving Balance workshop, do it. It’s a great focusing exercise and honestly, it has been a huge help in a number of ways. But the distractions that I noticed were taking up my time were two of my most essential tools – email and Internet.
I have Outlook set to alert me when new mail comes in. It’s also set to download new mail every five minutes. Sometimes, I have to know. If I’m having an email conversation and things are on deadline, it’s a must. But how often does that happen? Not much. So I’ve trained myself to hit “No” when Outlook asks if I’d like to open the new mail. Most times, it’s just more sale ads – those are VERY dangerous for me, especially if shoes are involved. That’s why I’ve decided to trim my email subscriptions, too. The fewer distractions, the better.
But the Internet, well, there’s another thing. I realized a while ago that my home page – Yahoo! – was a huge distraction and one I was justifying all too easily. There’s all that news. There are story ideas in there! And yes, I do need to hear about the dog that found its way home two years later or the campers who were rescued with duct tape (not really, but you’d read that too, wouldn’t you?). So I did what anyone searching for sanity would do; I switched home pages. I love Yahoo! but Google gives me a bare page with a search bar. I figure I’ve saved at least an hour a day by avoiding the distractions.
I have a phone problem, too, but it’s not too pronounced. Thanks to telemarketers, I’m already trained in letting everything go directly to voice mail when I’m busy. I let the world know I won’t answer if I’m in the middle of a project. My clients get my full attention, and if a prospective client is calling, he or she might appreciate knowing I will give the same attention to their project. If instant access is their hot button, I’m probably not their writer.
One thing that’s easy for me, and probably for you, is those low-paying clients. There are projects that, when you’re not busy, are nice time fillers. But when you’re busy, you reassess the need for such things, especially when they’re not paying you much. I have had a few of those in my life. I’m loyal to clients, but I’m not terribly interested in remaining loyal to clients who undervalue my work. In those cases, I push back and ask for a raise. If none is forthcoming, I decide if it’s worth my time to put work hours into an area that may be reserved for people who don’t mind paying a fighting wage. In general, I say don’t take them. But there are times we take that one quick-and-easy job that pays little for minimal effort. In those cases, we should all think twice about A) starting down that road, and B) continuing.
What are your distractions? How can you fix them?
4 responses to “Don’t Distract Me!”
For me being online is a huge distraction with emails, facebook and news. The problem is I am online when I am writing. I am always being distracted and I find it difficult to manage.
Checking my emails constantly used to be a big time suck for me. When I finally got a blackberry it helped so much, because you know those times when you've done everything you can and you're just waiting on that one source to get back to you? I was always glued to my computer at those times, and now I can take care of other things without worry.
When I really need to write without distractions I put my phone on silent and turn off the volume on my computer so I can't hear the ding of mail coming in. I use my email checking addiction to my advantage–no checking on it till I've accomplished xyz.
Email and Internet are my big distractions, too — and I imagine they will be most writers', for much the same reasons. I'm online for writing and research, and my email is open 99 percent of the time. I can't tell you how many times I've been researching something for a project, thought "Hey that's interesting" about something related, and an hour later I find myself still surfing the 'Net. Or how many times I've been working on a project, gotten an email from another client (or even from Facebook), and 30 minutes later finally got back to the original project.
As for fixing them… Working toward better mental discipline is the only real solution I can think of. It's hard to close email entirely, and nearly impossible to stay off the Internet altogether when I'm working. I just need to have the perseverence to NOT LOOK when my computer announces that I have new email, or save links and wait until later to go off on my little tangents.
Supposedly, a less cluttered home page is also better for your computer–makes the Interwebs load faster or some such nonsense.
As for the types of things that distract me, I–ooh look, a seagull!
😉