If there’s one thing I struggle with, it’s staying focused on my writing after a long day at work. It’s not that I’m not excited to work on my book, or that I don’t want to make the best use of the time that I have, but once I’m tired, my capacity to focus is drastically decreased. If I have a game open in the background, or YouTube waiting for me in another tab, that’s it. No work is going to happen that evening.
To combat this, I help myself focus by closing everything I have open on my computer, from the random Word document that holds a few scattered thoughts from three days ago, to the tab with my YouTube playlist, to Twitter and Facebook and their endless scrolling. The only thing I allow myself to have open on my screen in this work period is the one thing I’m working on at that moment in time.
This has a couple of benefits. For one, my main distractions are closed. It’s a lot easier to catch myself before I go to Twitter if I have to open the browser first and click the bookmark, rather than switching tabs. Plus there’s no distracting notification numbers sitting at the top of my screen either, tempting me to move away from what I should be doing. Hiding the visual elements of these time wasters makes a huge difference to my ability to focus on the task at hand.
The other benefit is that I am forced to work on a single task at a time. Multitasking doesn’t work very well for me at the best of times, and especially when I’m tired, my capacity to jump from one task to another is greatly decreased. It takes me so long to move from working on one thing to working effectively on another that it’s simply not worth it. I find it much better to do one piece of work at a time, then close that off and then move on to something else.
Of course, I don’t use this method every time. Different things work on different days. But when I’m tired, or I really need to focus and am struggling to get into the swing of my work, closing everything off and allowing myself only one window, or one tab at a time, helps me to focus on a single time at a time, and helps keep me from getting so distracted. This one of my current favourite methods to help myself work on difficult days. I’d love to hear how you keep yourself focused on your writing, especially when you’re feeling distracted. Let’s chat, down in the comments!
