Distractions

Cooking for the Creative Beast

wood.tang — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 06:46:44 -0400

Guest post

Guest blogger, Matt Wood, learns how to feed his creative side (without giving it a big gut). —mdm

Earlier this summer, I was in the kitchen, trying to cook dinner. I had a pot on the stove and a fire going on the grill outside. I was fumbling with a bag of frozen peas when my three-year-old started shouting at me to fix one of his toys. “Hold on a second, son,” I said. “I can’t do two things at once.” He looked me, dead serious, and said, “But you have two hands, Daddy.”

Too Many Pots on the Stove

My life usually feels like this. I set out to do make something nice, and I end up with a scorched side dish, charred burgers, and crunchy peas. The output barely resembles that delicious-looking picture in Cooking Light, but hey, the toy trains are running on time!

My immediate solution has been to limit the inputs and not try to do so much at once. If I can’t cook a nice meal with a preschooler underfoot, then I won’t even try. Chicken nuggets and grilled cheese for everyone, and you’ll like it, thank you very much. While this approach to dinner fulfills various statutes regarding child neglect, it’s also not very satisfying. Apply this approach to work and it certainly creates more time to do Important Things, but it makes for soggy, microwaved output as well.

For example, around the same time my son was questioning my competency with opposable thumbs, I was going through a phase where I had stripped by my daily routine down to the bare bones. I wasn’t happy with my word count, and I blamed it on the internet. I unsubscribed from RSS feeds right and left. I shuttered my blog. I quit visiting forums. I stopped following half the people on my Twitter list. And it worked, for a while. In the first few weeks of this monastic regimen, I wrote a 20-page essay—with footnotes—about my childhood baseball hero that was accepted by the first publication to which I sent it. Score. I thought I was on to something.

Then my ideas ran out.

My creative beast is restless and hungry, and I’ve learned that if I starve it by arbitrarily limiting its routine, it’s not happy. It’s all well and good to cut the fat out of your life to make time for what’s important, but you can take it too far. By turning off the internet, I turned off my source of inspiration. I was trying to write in a vacuum.

Apparently this works for some people. I was in a workshop recently with a guy who has a cabin in the New Mexico desert where he holes up with four dogs, smokes pot, and writes novels. He said it was the only way he could get any work done, but that wouldn’t work for me. Not yet.

Batting Practice

I’m learning, slowly, that creative work requires both inspiration and a certain amount of warm up. Fooling around online gets my creative juices flowing and helps jump start more important work. The benefit doesn’t come from the sheer volume of information I consume; it comes from redirecting some of that stream and trying to synthesize it into a blog post or a pithy comment, none of which may be things I’ll put on my CV at the end of the day. But one-off, frivolous activities like that keep my brain working, and help me warm up to create things that will make me proud. I’ve cautiously reintroduced some of my old online haunts back into the routine since the summer drought, and sure enough it’s helped shake more ideas loose.

To torture another metaphor, it’s like baseball players taking batting practice. It’s fun for them to crank balls into the cheap seats to make the crowd ooh and ahh. It doesn’t count in the standings, and yet it’s serious work. They’re sharpening their eye, loosening muscles, working on hitting balls to the opposite field. If they went a week without launching a few crowd-pleasers into the stands, their performance in the real games would suffer because they’d be wasting their first few at bats working out the kinks that should have been worked out in practice.

The same goes for writing, or any other creative work. You need to let yourself practice with blogging, journals, or throwaway poems and work under less than perfect circumstances, the same way a guitarist noodles around with chords while watching TV, or an artist scribbles on a sketchpad while riding the bus. You can’t be too precious with your words or your notes or your brushstrokes. Believe me, someone will be there to trash your work anyway, no matter how long you petted it and brushed its hair. It’s more important to keep your brain switched on than trying to preserve every last bit of inspiration.

Distraction as a Role Player

Blaming your failures on wide distractions like the internet is just an advanced form of procrastination anyway. I’d gotten so used to blaming the amount of time I spent online for why I couldn’t get anything done that it became an all-or-nothing proposition: work or the internet. Dedication or distraction. The distraction became an excuse for why I avoided putting in time on things that matter.

But the trick isn’t cutting out that distraction completely, it’s acknowledging it, admitting its power over you, then drawing lines and finding its proper role in your life. There is a big difference between surrendering your attention to the demands of someone else and simply letting your brain wander off and play on the swings for a while.

Your boogeyman may be Guitar Hero, or fantasy football, or long phone conversations with your friends. This isn’t permission to mainline RSS feeds or wire Wikipedia straight into your brain. We all know where that leads. But you’ll find that in responsible portions, your creative side feeds off those rejuvenating distractions. It can’t live on chicken nuggets and grilled cheese for long.

”Cooking for the Creative Beast” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 15, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Simplicity must be possible.

grant — Mon, 19 May 2008 12:20:28 -0400

Two stories that I know I should be learning from:

Paul Graham on overcoming distractions. By creating an Internet-Only computer.
Quote:
I now leave wifi turned off on my main computer except when I need to transfer a file or edit a web page, and I have a separate laptop on the other side of the room that I use to check mail or browse the web. (Irony of ironies, it's the computer Steve Huffman wrote Reddit on. When Steve and Alexis auctioned off their old laptops for charity, I bought them for the Y Combinator museum.)

My rule is that I can spend as much time online as I want, as long as I do it on that computer. And this turns out to be enough.
NY Times on overcoming clutter. By giving everything away.
Quote:
Chasing a utopian vision of a self-sustaining life on the land as partisans of a movement some call voluntary simplicity, they are donating virtually all their possessions to charity and hitting the road at the end of May.

“It’s amazing the amount of things a family can acquire,” said Mrs. Harris, 28, attributing their good life to “the ridiculous amount of money” her husband earned as a computer network engineer in this early Wi-Fi mecca.

The Harrises now hope to end up as organic homesteaders in Vermont.

I can't quite see myself going as far as homesteading... but I always get that uncanny feeling when I read stories like these that it really IS that simple to make a change.

”Simplicity must be possible.” was written by grant balfour for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on May 19, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Snow Day Hobbies

wood.tang — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 18:16:27 -0500

It snowed almost a foot here in Chicago last night, and looking at all that white stuff made me think about junior high, when my school was out an entire week for snow. I built most of the eastern seaboard in SimCity 2000 that week, on a 33 MHz PC no less. I was a nerd. It was awesome.

I thought about how fun that sounded today after I finished shoveling, and considered digging around for an updated copy of SimCity online. Then I reminded myself that the last thing I need is another hobby involving the computer. I use a computer for work. When I’m finished working, I screw around on the internet. When I’m tired of that, I read books, which isn’t a whole lot different, if a little easier on the eyes and attention span.

Pardon me while I get out the nostalgia hankie, but I miss the days when my hobbies had nothing to do with staring at a glowing screen. When I was a kid, I could sit down in my room over an unopened wax box of Topps baseball cards and completely tune out the outside world until four hours later, when my mom called me to dinner, handed me a napkin, and told me to wipe the drool from chewing 36 sticks of gum off my chin.

Earlier this winter, I took my son to a model train show. The convention center was filled with little boys, their parents, and retired men wearing pinstriped overalls. As I watched those old boys hunched over their hand-painted landscapes, tinkering with a broken crossing gate or resetting an errant boxcar on the tracks, I envied them. They had that thing I used to have with my baseball cards, a hobby that completely absorbs their attention for hours at a time, something wholly disconnected from work and daily hassles, a place where they could go and forget about everything for at least a little while.

I need that again. Model trains won’t do; as much fun as those old coots looked like they were having, the last thing I need in my house is more toy trains. And baseball cards won’t cut it either. Since I stopped collecting, they’ve taken on too much stink of commercialism, ruined by glossy UV coatings, foil stamping, and limited editions. Besides, I need something that’s less about acquisition and more about simple escape.

I’m sure I’ll find it if I keep trying, whether it’s drawing, or cooking, or simply going to the gym more often. The point of my whole weepy ramble here is that we need to have hobbies that can completely whisk us away from the grind for a few hours, preferably something that involves working with our hands and doesn’t result in credit card debt or physical addiction. If you find it, it’ll be like having a snow day all over again.

”Snow Day Hobbies” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on February 01, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Re-evaluating Your Online Commitments

wood.tang — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 10:34:27 -0500

This is the time of the year for everybody to make lame, half-hearted resolutions about how they’re going to lead a better life in the new year: lose weight, stop smoking, eat less fried cheese, take a ceramics class, etc. My gym is already full of flabby, confused-looking people who spend more time adjusting their iPod cases and checking out their new track suits in the mirror than actually doing reps. I usually treat January as my month to be lazy; I stay away from the gym for a few weeks until the interlopers poop out.

But it is a new year, and it’s not a bad idea to at least try to alter some of your bad habits, pick up a new skill, or do something to make yourself happier. My suggestion for this year addresses a problem I suspect many of the people who read this site have: the sheer number of online commitments—that is, blogs, social networks, message groups, IM accounts, Flickr, Twitter, and any other online time sink that ends with an R—that we try to maintain.

Consume vs. Produce

A couple of my posts in the past few weeks dealt with the problem of trying to consume too much information. What about how much we try to produce? At one point last fall, I realized I was trying to run five blogs, two Flickr accounts, and a del.icio.us page, all the while keeping up a constant patter on Twitter, IM, and email. Only two of those things were strictly necessary for my work; the rest just made their way into my life somehow. Sure, I was doing a lot of it because it was fun, but I knew I had to scale back or else I was going to end up speaking only in 140-character, hyperlinked sentences.

I knew I had to scale back or else I was going to end up speaking only in 140-character, hyperlinked sentences.

And I fear I may be a lightweight in this arena. I won’t touch MySpace or Facebook with a ten-foot pole, mainly because I’m afraid if I do I might stop sleeping. Many of those sites and services crept into my attention span through slow accretion: first I had a blog, then another, then I started sharing photos on Flickr, then I started bookmarking at del.icio.us, etc. After a while, I just hung on to everything out of habit.

My problem, and I suspect this will resonate with many of you, is that I felt like I needed to do many of these things to keep up with the techno-jonses. “All the cool kids have a blog, and I want to be a cool online guy, so I should too. I don’t know anyone on Twitter personally, but everyone says it’s fun, so I should try it too. Hey, what’s your IM handle? Did you see that link I put up on del.icio.us?” As a self-styled writer, I also felt this constant tug to promote myself, to put my work out there for everyone to see, to network and make connections and hope I could stumble into a break (nevermind that my best opportunities have always come from good old fashioned resume passing and phone calls).

Why do we saddle ourselves with so many unnecessary commitments? It’s one thing to sign up for a bunch of accounts then never use them, but I was actively participating in all of those things. And like any time you spread yourself too thin, I was turning out half-assed, unimaginative slop most of the time. This may be a unique problem for me because I want to put a lot of care into what I write everywhere, all the time, but it’s as if constantly jabbering in all those places was using up all my words. If you can pull it off, or if you’re just doing it for fun, then more power to you. I just crossed a threshold of diminishing returns, probably not long after I branched out from a simple personal site.

Cutting Ties

Eventually, I dropped a few of the side-project blogs and toned down the bookmarking. So where do you start trimming the online fat?

Take baby steps - Chances are there’s one online outlet that you know you just don’t have the heart to maintain anymore, be it a blog, Twitter, Facebook, whatever. Drop one of them, then see if any other candidates fall to the bottom by attrition.
Don’t be sentimental - Consider it a mercy killing, you may even be relieved to let it go. Personally, I’m eyeing my eponymous blog too; it’s long past it’s expiration date, and I’ve kept it up all these years simply out of a sense of loyalty because it was my first real stake in the online ground. But I’m not really enjoying it anymore.
Be realistic - Not to be mean, but are there really that many people reading your blog about six-fingered chimpanzees who learned how to reprogram discarded vibrators to hum college fight songs*? Will your social life crumble if you dump MySpace? Like I said before about spreading yourself too thin, dropping a few online activities may actually improve your following elsewhere, because you’ll be more focused and do better work.

I’m not suggesting you try to make a lot of deep, metaphysical decisions about who you are and how you want to represent yourself, but if you’re doing something online that you just don’t like anymore, or can’t understand why, drop it. Just like one of those knuckle-cracking, tobacco–stained, whiskey-breath real world vices, the new year is as good a time as any to let it go.

*-On second thought, if you have a blog about this, by all means, keep it.

”Re-evaluating Your Online Commitments” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 01, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Concentration strategies for students

Merlin Mann — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 14:43:49 -0400

Here’s a wonderful tour de force on Concentration that’s written for students and which includes tips on identifying distractions as well as a useful list of techniques for putting your attention where you want it to be and keeping it there.

A few I liked:

At the beginning of a study period, spend a few minutes to calm and relax your mind and body. (Try ‘Focus on Your Breath’ exercise, below.)…

Do not tell yourself off or tell yourself to concentrate. When you are thinking about not concentrating, you are not concentrating….

If you find yourself feeling overwhelmed by all the things you have to do in your life, remember that you can only do one thing at a time…

We have lots more here on battling distraction, including this excellent essay on “good” distractions by Paul Ford.

”Concentration strategies for students” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 03, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Dave Cheong on staying focused at work

Merlin Mann — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 05:10:38 -0500

18 Ways to Stay Focused at Work

In this post from last August, Dave Cheong pointed out some of the hazards of working in a cube farm, and he proposes some handy tips for wresting back your attention from a room full of interruptions and distractions. I think a few of these tips are big winners.

Allocate time slots colleagues can interrupt you…Instead of having people stop by your desk every 10 mins and asking you questions, let them know of a time in the day, say between 2-4pm you can be interrupted. At all other times, you can really get some work done…

Apply time boxing…Instead of working at something till it is done, try working on it for a limited period, say 30 mins. By that time, the task is either completed or you allocate another time slot, perhaps in another day, to pick it up again…

Find the best time to do repetitive and boring tasks…For example, I’m more alert at the start of the day, so it’s better to work on things which require brain power early. Working on boring tasks that can be done via auto-pilot are better left towards the end of the day when I’m usually tired.

I realize that many of these ideas assume a lot of autonomy and control over your work day as well as how you conduct it — obviously not every career is conducive to the enforcement of what amounts to “office hours” — but I think that’s kind of the point as well as the irony and the big, bottom-line challenge.

If the typical knowledge worker were removing shrapnel, driving a fire truck, or piloting a shrimp boat, people would know to leave him or her alone; clearly that person is “working.” But if someone is “just typing with headphones on,” there’s a seemingly small disincentive to, say, just ask a quick question or even conduct the equivalent of a 5-minute meeting.

It’s really up to each of us to learn these tricks and (one hopes) to eventually develop some structures — bulwarks against interruption and attention larceny — and to encourage an atmosphere where all our colleagues can know, respect, and support one another’s need to minimize unnecessary distraction.

For now, we’ve got headphones and an icy stare, and I guess that’s better than nothing.

”Dave Cheong on staying focused at work” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 08, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

MacBreak: Minimize distractions on your Mac

Merlin Mann — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 10:58:59 -0500

MacBreak 33: The Distracted Mac (Direct MOV Download)

Although it covers a lot of the same ground as a previous MacBreak we did on the subject, I think Leo and my segment on un-distract-ifying your Mac turned out pretty good (my atrocious hairstyle at shoot time notwithstanding). Download 10:28 MOV file now…

Here’s the apps and tricks that we covered, with links:

Hide Others - In the front app, select “[Application name menu] > Hide Others”
Turn [Dock] Hiding On - In the Dock, CTRL-Click the Dock’s vertical separator bar, and select “Turn Hiding On”
Backdrop - Create a black background that still lets you easily interact with Desktop contents
MenuShade - Alter the brightness of your Menu — or totally black it out, like I do
Spirited Away — Hides non-active applications after the interval of your choice (thanks for the legacy download link, Don)
Path Finder - Totally tricked out Finder on steroids that I love love love; where I made the Desktop black and hid all mounted drives, folders, etc. (doable in the regular Finder, too)
Hazel - Automagically clean up the contents of folders and the Desktop (e.g., “move old MP3s here” or “archive files older than a week” etc.)
Textmate - My favorite text editor. Which I apparently love to plug for no particular reason.

Edit 2006-12-21 16:51:22: Check after the cut for reader suggestions from comments for this post…

43f Podcast: David Allen on interruptions

Merlin Mann — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 11:34:19 -0500

Productive Talk #06: Interruptions

43 Folders and The David Allen Company present the sixth in a series of conversations that David and Merlin recently had about Getting Things Done.

Summary

In this episode David and I talked about interruptions. How you can minimize the bad interruptions and make the best of the good ones.

(Running time: 10:17)

Grab the MP3, learn more at Odeo.com, or just listen here (after the cut).

Merlin’s comments

In this episode, David makes the excellent point that if interruptions are a baked-in part of your job, they shouldn’t necessarily be seen as a Bad Thing. It’s just something you need to prepare for by “clearing the decks” in a way that opens you up for the opportunities and game-time input that new information can bring into your world.

Something not to miss — David is just truly a whiz at changing gears based on his own system. If new stuff interrupts what he’s currently working on, he scoops all the current work back into “pending,” and basically says “Bring it on!”

As I mentioned in the interview, watching David work like this took me back to Martin Ternouth’s paper-based system, which turns on a couple key, GTD-esque ideas: 1) you’re only ever working on one thing at a time, and 2) everything current gets emptied and re-evaluated daily.

I think it’s that jog between in-the-moment work and frequent review that really makes a system like GTD work. When (not if) interruptions arise, you trust the system to hold your work in situ, and then your reviews ensure you never miss a beat.

And, finally, although we didn’t get into it as much as I’d like, I really think it’s important to understand and distinguish between interruptions as opposed to distractions. In other words, there are those things that immediately need our attention in life (poopy babies, family emergencies, buildings on fire) versus those notifications, pings, and existential shovelware that we’ve chosen to accept (*waves at RSS feeds and AIM*).

So, if you’re feeling overwhelmed by interruptions, make sure you’ve done everything you can to reduce the noise. In other words, consider clearing your own decks today for the serendipity and kismet that might be coming your way this week.

To paraphrase Thomas Edison, sometimes interesting opportunities arrive dressed as a huge pain in the ass.

Listen to Episode #06 of Productive Talk

Grab the MP3, learn more at Odeo.com, or just listen from here:

”43f Podcast: David Allen on interruptions” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 06, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Managing around interruptions

Merlin Mann — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 05:30:55 -0400

Being organized means marshalling resources - The Boston Globe

Cindy Krischer Goodman’s recent article on time management for the overcommitted and overwhelmed contains a gem from Stephanie Winston, who points out how senior executives learn to manage around the interruptions in their lives:

To do this, she says, start by blocking an hour or half-hour each day as power time to accomplish priorities. That may mean coming in early or hiding in the cafeteria to escape interruptions.

Break tasks into 10-minute segments; when you get interrupted, jot a phrase or cue to bring you back into the task later. When people drop in or call, give them your full attention, she suggests.

I think this is one reason why I like getting up early; time like that is so much easier to claim and defend before the world’s demands start banging down your door.

”Managing around interruptions” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 10, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

WriteRoom: Free full-screen writing app for OS X

Merlin Mann — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 10:16:01 -0400

WriteRoom | Hog Bay Software

O, how we distraction-prone people pine for persistent and ubiquitous full-screen mode. And it looks like the good folks at Hog Bay have come up with an elegant freeware app to help save the beleaguered writer from him or herself.

For Mac users who enjoy the simplicity of a typewriter, but live in the digital world. WriteRoom is a full screen, distraction free, writing environment. Unlike standard word processors that focus on features, WriteRoom is just about you and your text…

It’s a primitive application, to be sure — I suspect completely by design — but it may be just what the doctor ordered if you need to get your head out of your butt and put some words on the page. I can see myself spending a lot of time in WriteRoom.

[ via RickP_in_AZ on the board ]

”WriteRoom: Free full-screen writing app for OS X” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on June 30, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"