On distractions and filters… and a call for information

12 August 2007 | Culture, Internet, Media, Personal | Comments

This post is about setting up the right environment for the right work and pre-emptively eliminating distractions, which is hard.

As a few people know, for the past few years I’ve been writing a novel called Redcrosse — it’s set in the near future — and I always struggle to carve out writing time. By day I’m a busy media business guy and by morning and night my heart is with a six year old girl and a two year old boy, not to mention a lovely wife. For the next week or so, Kathi and the kids are visiting our Oregon family, so I have one and a half weekends as well as early mornings (my best writing time) and what energy I have in the evenings to make some progress on finishing the second draft.

Wow is it hard. The television beckons with its sultry excuses: “you’ve been productive, but it’s still the weekend. Why not relax a bit?” Then the internet chimes in, “Brad, you can post to your blog… that’s writing too! It’s not procrastinating… and don’t you need to do just a LITTLE more research?”

Yesterday, as I was trying to move myself into the mental space where there is no television — even though I have TV built into my mediacenter PC — a drive-by post by Chris Anderson on productivity and a clever idea by Bud Parr on creating computer isolation by setting up a different profile for writing helped me to get quite a lot done. Today, Sunday, I have another full day in which to write.

Parr’s idea — create a profile with only the programs you need to work on the project and no email, IM, iTunes, Joost, digital calendar or the like — reminds me of Irving Goffman’s theories of cognitive framing (essentially that you are a different person in different contexts as different parts of your identity get activated).

So, I’m doing it: I’ve created a “Redcrosse” user profile on my computer and after posting this will retire from the cyber-fray for the rest of the day to write.  I’ve stopped my work line from forwarding and I’ve got a hot cup of coffee steaming next to me on my desk.  I’ve hauled my special kneeling chair — the one I wrote the first draft of the novel sitting in — back into my little home office and I’m working in Courier font because that’s different than the Arial that signifies work to my mind.

I’m consciously limiting both the actual access I have to distraction as well as the mental triggers to distraction. While this is good and worthy work, it does annoy me that I have to do it.  Earlier, in “Unplugging… why is it so hard?,” I discussed the simple fact that we now have to spend considerable effort to create situational airlocks and frame changes that geography used to take care of for us. My friend Joseph Carrabis is taking on something similar in an endless arc called “Media Free & Gridless” right now, and I think he has more personal success in creating environments in which to focus than I am.

What about the rest of you? Do you struggle to unplug? Do you worry that all your frames — work, home, play — are shattering into a kaleidoscopic mess?

Let me know (comment below, or link from your blog, or simply contact me), and please wish me luck on the writing.