I am easily distracted. I suspect most of you reading this are the same way. It could be that people who are prone towards this lack of focus are more likely to be the types of people who would start a blog on Hive (or a blog in general). It could be that blogging or using the computer tends to influence one towards having less focus. It could be that society itself is becoming more distractible and so everyone is in this situation. It's probably a mix of all three, as well as numerous other hypotheses that you could come up with. The bottom line, however, is that this is how it is, so the question we have to ask ourselves is how are we going to deal with it?

I want to explore some of the ways that I've deal with it in my life in regards to my writing. At the very least, maybe some of these things will give you some ideas for tackling the problem of focus in your own life.

First and foremost, we have to be aware of the problem of multitasking.

The Problem of Multitasking

^{Image by Serena Wong from Pixabay}

Multitasking is the idea that we can do multiple things at the exact same time. It's an attractive idea. But it's fantasy. The one thing I've realized is that multitasking is just not possible. I say this as if it's my sole and unique insight. No no—many many others have been saying the same thing for a long time. When I say I've realized this, I simply mean that I realize this thing I've heard from many people smarter than me is true.

Our minds work in a serial way. We think about this one thing, then move on to this one thing, then this one thing. These thoughts are like a series of boxes moving down an assembly line. At least this is the optimal way to think of things: One, then the next, then the next.

Our mind is vast and we do have the ability to have more than one thought, or more than one assembly line to carry on the metaphor. But we can only run one at a time. If we are thinking about a paper we are writing but then our friend Bob calls us, we have to stop thinking about the paper and start thinking about our conversation with Bob. We can't do both. If we then try to do both, we do a lousy job of both, writing nonsense and also making Bob angry because he can tell by our responses that we aren't really paying attention to him. To go back to our analogy of the assembly line, when we want to run another line we have to shut this one down, run over to that one and turn it on, and run it. Then to switch back we have to shut that one down, run back to the previous one, turn it on, then run it.

In other words, rather than do both things we are quickly jumping back and forth. Do some of this, then some of this, then back here for some of this. Some people might be better at this than others, but even the best at it suffer some and don't do as good a job at either thing as they would otherwise. Whenever we switch to something, that's not instant. We can't instantly resume what we were previous doing perfectly. It might take our brain a second to refresh our memory of what we are doing. With complex tasks it might take even longer. These seconds add up if we switch back and forth a lot.

There is also the fact that it takes a while when focusing on something to really get in the grove, or in the zone, or to achieve flow state as some put it. This is when we are really working well. If we are constantly switching tasks, we never get to this state.

How Do I Tackle the Problem of Multitasking?

^{Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay}

The above in mind, when I do get on my computer I try to eliminate multitasking as much as possible and force myself to monotask.

First and foremost, this means no Discord. No Discord! Discord is a wonderful app, and in the years since Hive's creation Discord has functioned as the social background of Hive, where we meet, talk, network, problem solve, etc. This is all good. But it is also distracting as hell. Even if I disable all notifications and minimize it, part of my brain still knows it's there and is actively trying not to give in to the desire to switch to it just for a few minutes. And what happens if I alt-tab to my browser to, for example, search for an old post to link to in my writing? I see the icon for Discord. I am reminded of it. The part of my brain that is actively trying to suppress the urge to switch to it has to work a little harder.

It's the same with many other apps as well. If I see a Steam icon, part of my brain has to put down the urge to go play a game for five minutes. If I see an Excel icon, part of my mind has to resist the desire to switch to it and improve one of my spreadsheets. If I see a browser icon, part of me has to resist going there to check price of Bitcoin.

Resisting any one of these may be easy, but it adds up. Resist, resist, resist. A single drip of water can destroy mountains over time. A single thought is much more destructive and we have millions of them. Even small things add up to a big thing. Better to put myself in a situation where I don't have the temptation and therefore don't have to waste the willpower to resist. Better to save it for other things.

No Steam in the background, no Music app, no Excel. I used the example of switching to a browser: well, no browser either. Anything that can distract in any way—which is pretty much everything—gets closed while I am writing. I basically try to single-task on my computer. Computers may be more than capable of multitasking, but I am not. So I get rid of all of it and turn my PC into a dumb terminal: a digital typewriter.

Single-tasking when Writing

^{Image by Pexels from Pixabay}

Even when writing my brain will jump around and I'll have stray thoughts. These can be useful thoughts like "I want to look up URLs I need to link to in my post", and they can be not so useful thoughts like "What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?" I don't want to follow up on these distracting thoughts because they would take me right away from writing, but I also don't want to waste the willpower to ignore them. So what I'll do is jot all these thoughts on a notepad next to me. Doing this seems to reassure my monkey mind that I'm not ignoring them and will get around to them eventually, so the thoughts go away. Then later when I finish writing, I can check this notepad and cross out anything worthless (which is most of it) and follow up on anything useful.

Within my writing itself I also try to monotask as much as possible. This means no editing: going up and rewriting a previous line or moving things around, and so on. No setting formatting: playing with putting titles in quotes or italics, no wondering if I should use a hyphen in between these two words or skip it, etc. I just write. I pretend the backspace key doesn't work and I just move forward. This is the rough draft or draft number one. Then when I'm completely finished, I will read through what I have and make corrections, rearrange things, or add more. This is the second draft. I might repeat this step a few times for more drafts. Only after I'm happy with the basic content of what I wrote will I go back and edit for style. This is how people used to do it in the typewriter days and I think it remains the best way. If you try to do writing, rewriting, editing, and correcting all at once your mind can't really focus on any one of them and everything suffers.

When I really need something error-free I'll print it out and go over it with a red pen. For whatever reason, it is much easier to catch mistakes when we are reading off a physical page. For Hive posts I usually don't care about this level of correctness. A typo or grammatical mistake here isn't critical. Most of you probably won't even notice. But this is a step I use sometimes when the job calls for it.

The Draft System

^{Image by Ulrike Mai from Pixabay}

I don't tackle all of these steps in a row. Well sometimes I do, but usually not. One advantage of using a draft system like this is you can switch between drafts of different projects. I learned this in school, but I learned it best from Stephen King. When he writes a draft for a story, his system is he will then stick it in a drawer and won't look at it for a month. When he does open his drawer to look at all his drafts for various stories, he can go thru them and pick the one he wants to work on. I do something of the same. I save all drafts to a folder and color code them based on which draft they are.

When I went to write today's post, for instance, I opened up my drafts folder and browsed all the posts I had that were on draft two or above. I picked this one out, am giving it the final tweaks now (and adding this paragraph), then will paste it into Hive and schedule it to go off at slightly after midnight UTC.

End

And that is pretty much my daily system for getting my writing done. This is how I manage to write a roughly 1000 word post everyday instead of wasting all my time watching Youtube or searching for cat memes to share on Discord. I'm not perfect and still waste more time than I wish, but the more I use this system the better I get.

How do you sharpen your focus and avoid distraction? I look forward to hearing your own ideas in the comments.

❦

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku.