Have you ever noticed how incredibly easy it is to get distracted while you’re writing? One moment you’re typing away on your novel, and the next you’re chatting on Twitter, or composing an Instagram caption, or answering an email, and your novel is the last thing on your mind. And it’s so easy to justify these distractions. When you’re interacting on Twitter, you’re building a following, which is going to be important when you release your book. That blog post you’re writing is important to keep your blog active. That email is keeping in contact with important connections. You’re busy. But are you really being productive?
See, I’ve noticed a huge difference between being busy, chewing through those tasks on the to-do list, and being actually productive, and that difference has a lot to do with my priorities, and my focus. Being active on social media can definitely be a good thing, but, as a writer, what is the most important thing for me to be doing? Well, writing of course. I should be working on that next book instead of stopping every five minutes to like someone’s Instagram picture, or answer that unimportant email right at that very second.
But the problem is, society likes us to be busy. We like to be busy. We like to move from task to task, ticking things off our list. As someone who relies heavily on to-do lists to make sure I get everything done in a day, I feel this a lot. But how of how much value are these other tasks when I’m not getting any writing done? They’re only important because they support my writing, not the other way around. Just because we’re busy and we’re doing lots of things all the time doesn’t make us productive, because these aren’t the important work. Our priority should be doing the actual writing.
It’s also a matter of focus. How can we do our best work when we’re flitting from one task to another the moment a new notification pops up, or a new message lands in our DMs? We can’t be thinking deeply about what we’re writing when we’re keeping half an eye out for something else to come along and distract us. And that means that we can’t do our best writing, because we can’t give it our full attention, which not only means that we’re lowering the quality of our work, but also the amount of it, and increasing the amount of editing we need to do further down the track.
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t be doing these other tasks like answering emails. It just means that we can’t let them overtake the important work. And that can be a struggle. Sometimes it feels like it would just be easier to leave social media, stop being active anywhere, delete accounts and stop relying to emails altogether, just to find some measure of focus. That’s not always a feasible solution however, especially when a lot of our work and our support networks, relies on us being connected via emails, messages, social media, and blogs. So, rather than simply removing this busy work completely, it becomes more important to contain it, and limit its impact on our work time.
For me, this means batching work. Writing up multiple blog posts on one day so that they’re all out of the way and can’t creep into multiple work sessions throughout the month. Scheduling a block of social media posts so that I don’t have time take time every single day to think of something to post. (I am the worst correspondent so writing emails isn’t a huge issue for me, because I never remember to reply anyway.) By putting my busy work all into large blocks of time, I can be productive by punching through the work quickly in a focused session, and it frees up more time for me to write in later.
I also try to remove distractions from my writing space. That might mean clearing my desk of clutter before I sit down to write, or closing all non-essential tabs in my browser, and shutting down games, or videos I might have playing in the background. Anything that is going to pull my attention away from the writing that I am actually meant to be doing. Being aware of what I’m most distracted by is a huge part of avoiding these distractions. (If you’re interested in more thoughts from me on how to be more productive when you are writing, I have a whole post on that HERE).
The most important thing is that we shouldn’t let our love of feeling busy, and our tendency for being distracted by other tasks, get in the way of the important work we should be doing, which is of course, working on our writing. We are writers. We’re not social media people. We’re not solely bloggers. We’re not email answering machines. We are meant to be writing, creating, imagining. And when things get in the way of that, we stop being productive in the way that we as writers are meant to be and we become merely busy. And busy is no way to get our most important work done. We are writers. And we should be writing.
How do you stay productive when there is so much busy work to be done? How do you cut down on distractions when you’re meant to be working? What is your biggest tip for being a productive writer? Let’s chat!
