Last time, I offered guidelines for a writer using the Web to get the work done with fewer distractions. This time, I have recommendations on good habits that might save you from the Internet's siren song.
1. Track your activity. This does not have to be the lawyers habit of logging every 15 minutes (although that works well). Simply writing down your estimates of how much time you spend online in the morning, afternoon, and evening can be eye-opening. Get a good sense of where your time is going to see if it is in proportion to your goals. One week of tracking every few months can help you see how close you are to activity that will help you reach your hopes and dreams.
2. Start your day without connection. While the Web is not all junk food, it offers a lot of sugary treats. (I almost wrote tweets.) Just as starting your day with candy pretending to be cereal is a bad idea, hitting all your favorites (email, social media, videos) before you’ve gotten any work done will not help your productivity. Two suggestions: Three suggestions:
First, get something started at the end of the day and put it where you can’t miss it. I usually place an ideas paper on the kitchen table (since I often wake up with story solutions or concepts), as well as a page with three to five open questions (in case I don’t wake up with things I need to get on paper right away).
Second, turn your wifi off before you go to bed. This puts temptation a step away.
Third, avoid anything digital for the first hour of the day. The morning is the best time to cultivate connection with the tangible world. It helps if you actually turn a mechanical timer to one hour and give yourself those minutes as a gift.
3. Time box distractions. Being open most of the day to every bell, buzzer, and alarm that pulls you into email, Facebook, and other Internet lure hands control of your time over to other people. It’s also hugely inefficient since most of these are not valuable. Interrupt mode work is less productive that batching your responses. So set times during the day where you permit yourself to respond and keep to those times. It helps, again, to set a timer for these activities.
Time boxing is difficult if you normally have no barriers to these activities (or worse, find yourself checking email or social media repeatedly during the day). Rather than enforce optimal rules right away, it might be good to turn your computer’s sound off or reset alerts or just set an hour or two of quiet time you know you can commit to. Building good habits gradually (perhaps with each step on your calendar) is often less discouraging and painful.
4. Have “insteads” ready. One vulnerability for writers is unexpected free moments, especially 10-20 minutes that becomes available unexpectedly. I often hear that writers “reward” themselves for getting something done early by checking on social media. The ten free minutes easily become 30, 40, or 50 minutes of low-value engagement. Having something valuable to do, designed for short openings, can help support good habits.
I call these interstitial tasks “insteads.” Instead of making yourself vulnerable to a time sucking activity, read a poem or memorize something or make a list of possible titles for a story or answer a plot question or interview one of your characters or read an article. All of these (for me) have natural stopping points that allow me to use open time well, and then get on with priority work.
It’s best if these task require Web searches or the possibility of real-time interactions. Writerly things (like marketing, cultivating an audience, looking for opportunities, or discussions with peers) carry the risk of being snared into bigger (and less valuable) time commitments.
5. Make physical activity part of your routine. I stretch every 40 minutes. It helps keep me healthy, and it also makes it impossible for me to keep my hands on the keyboard longer that I should. It stops my brain from restless cycling. And even if I’m productively engaged in the Internet (say, by doing research), it forces me to reflect on the purpose and value of the activity. It makes it harder to make excuses for less than productive activity.
The focus above is on positive activities, good behaviors that can support productive work without invoking shame or (currently) impossible objectives. You don’t have to do them all at once. You don’t have to do any of them perfectly. And you can substitute your own positive activities, these are not rules that must be obeyed.
No matter how obsessive your relationship with the Internet may be now, you can take small steps to keep things proportional. To not be a slave to alerts or twitch behaviors. Those steps may help you to prioritize how you use your time so you can do your best writing.
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