Productivity wanted
It's early morning on hump day (I fucking hate that term) and I'm sitting at my newly repositioned writing desk with the curtains open watching the sun come up over the top of the houses behind the garden through the window.
My phone is off. Not on silent or airline mode. I don't even want those gigahertz waves washing over me. Caressing my skin with their data packets, hiding bundles of Facebook notifications and emails and TikToks in the fabric of the air. Invisible, I breathe them in, and wonder if I'll be infected.
Whilst I remove my tin foil hat and step out of my Faraday cage, I should mention that I'm feeling particularly creative this morning. I didn't sleep well - my mind was awash with a flame of ideas that kept Sleep hiding in the tree line.
Something that has stayed with me through the night like the twisting gut pain of a bad kebab is how much I can actually get done when I give myself the space to focus, distraction free. Distraction really is the bane of progress. I didn't realise how much I was allowing myself to become it's mistress.
Here's a good scenario for you. I'm sitting at the desk, laptop open, getting myself into a headspace to create something. There's a warming up period required. The neurons need time to shift into the right context.
For some reason I've got 6 tabs open in Google Chrome. One of those is the news that I keep flitting back to. There's some music playing (I find it impossible to work in silence). Twitter hovers on one. I've got emails in another. My phone is letting me know someone I follow on Twitch has just started streaming an episode of Screaming in Australian. My cat claws at my leg as she demands feeding. I notice a spider crawling down the curtains. That clock in the bedroom is suddenly ticking so loudly it’s making my ear drums rattle. I get up and pull the batteries out, then head into the kitchen to make a coffee and feed the cat.
I've written 2 words so far, "fuck" and "me".
Sometimes I think it's easy for us not to notice the intense and overwhelming wave of sensory stimuli at our disposal, and equally easy to be swept away by it. There's so much vying for our attention, both externally and internally. The expectations we place on ourselves, the things we need to do, our work, the people in our lives we need to care for. If you couple that with easy access to the entire repository of human knowledge in the palm of your hand (including all those cat videos), it's no surprise that we become distracted.
I feel like avoiding the distractions requires practice and patience. We start to work on something and from the corner of our eye a little hand waves at us. Look at me. I’m important. Witness me.
We require an input of energy to keep the distractions at bay, but once we start, once that creative momentum builds, we overcome the inertia of distraction. The flow state kicks in as our mind settles into a groove, our thoughts fluid and effortless.
The difficult part is giving our minds enough energy and momentum to get to that state. Here’s how I (try to) do it.
Turn the phone off and put it out of sight. I don’t even want to look at it.
Put on some headphones and play some music that’s not going to be distracting. I can’t listen to anything with words whilst I’m working, so it tends to be some sort of Cyberpunk playlist on YouTube.
Have everything I might need to sustain me through the period. A cup of coffee or glass of water. Something to snack on. I don’t want to have to get up and break the flow.
Get comfortable.
Feed the cat before I start, and check the curtains for spiders.
Breathe.
That last one is more powerful than it sounds. In meditation, I often use my breath as an anchor to keep me in the present. It’s useful to use it as well to keep me focused on the task at hand. Breathe into it. Be of the moment. There is only you and what you’re working on until the boundaries between become blurred and intermingle.
In creating, we must become both the action and the agent.
Much love
David