What does your browser look like right now? How many tabs do you have open? I’m not asking in any attempt to shame the reader, I typically have between five and ten tabs open at any given time.
We’re all busy most of the time. We have jobs, school, pets, maybe kids, chores, errands, cooking, cleaning, maybe trying to stay healthy, maybe trying to have an active social life, and at the end of all of that it can be hard to find time to pursue our own interests, too. For me — and probably most of the people who read this blog — that’s writing. And when there is time to do that, there’s the internet. The internet is so full of distractions (profound, I know — don’t worry, that was sarcasm) that it can overwhelm any intention of doing something more fulfilling than scrolling and scrolling.
This has been a huge problem for me. I have struggled with maintaining focus for as long as I can remember. I am still very easily distracted.
In fact, right after I typed the phrase “I am still very easily distracted,” I leaned back to stretch and then took a sip of my coffee, and that was all it took for my attention to be broken away from the blog post that I am actively in the middle of writing. I tabbed over to Twitter, saw a tweet about book blurbs, composed a response to it, realized I didn’t know or care enough about the series specifically in question to get into any kind of debate about it, especially not at 6 in the morning, deleted the tweet, tabbed over to Facebook and checked that, and then caught myself and came back here..
And you know, for me it’s not social media. I mean, it is partially social media, but not as much as other things. My big weakness in terms of focus-killing is mindless games. Online jigsaw puzzles are a big favorite. That’s part of why I have an easier time with the drafting process. A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog post about how I’ve turned my fixation on instant gratification into a kind of game I play against myself by tracking my word count. But right now I’m not drafting, right now I’m editing one project and outlining another. I don’t have a quick fix for those processes yet.
And I can’t just… stop myself from losing focus. I have tried. The harder I try to force myself to pay attention the more my mind wanders all over the place. Instead, I’m trying to find ways to mitigate it, to work around or within it. For me, this has meant not trying to control when I get distracted, but rather trying to guide how I get distracted.
I’ve started trying to keep only certain tabs open on my laptop. I still have Facebook and Twitter up, because I know myself, and if I tried to not include them then all I’d do is take the time every distraction-cycle to open a new tab, go to those sites, scroll around, and then close the new tab, every time. So I’ll skip that futility and just leave them up. But the other tabs I keep all focused on one theme. I have my email inbox open, because I exclusively use that for my book club and for short story submissions; this website’s page; Google docs with notes on current works in progress, ideas for my website, a file where I track my submissions, and shared drafts of novels with suggestions from my beta readers; reedsy with its story prompts; when I’m drafting, nanowrimo for the word count tracker; Google, to research for my writing; inkarnate.com, where I have my worlds’ maps for my own reference; and submittable.
With the exception of my social media accounts, all of my tabs on my laptop are themed around my writing. It helps me keep my head in the right space for what I want to be doing even when the distraction does hit and I wander away from my current project and onto the internet. What I’ve found is that it helps me get back to what I want to be doing faster, and it mitigates the loss of my momentum when I do get back to it.
It’s not perfect. I still have my phone right here in easy reach, and my phone has my current favorite time-wasting game on it. And nothing actually stops me from getting distracted in the first place. But it does help. I think that it could be applied to any kind of profession or hobby, not just writing. If you’re the kind of person who gets distracted in the same way that I do, you might try it and see if it helps you as well.
What methods do you use to keep your focus? Or to mitigate your distraction when it does hit? How do you bring your wandering mind back to where you need it to be?