Right now I’m reading the book Stolen Focus, it’s about how the bombardment of information we get overwhelms us and the distraction that social media is. I’m not too far into yet, but it’s definitely interesting and is motivating me to make some changes in my life.
When I started doing my morning writing first thing in the morning, I was travelling and would do it in the kitchen of the long term Air BnB that I was staying at. As my travels became more hotel based or I was home more often, I did it at my desk with my computer nearby. Just having the laptop next to me, meant I tended to look up things more often, which isn’t a bad thing, until you realize that sometimes end up on searching for things or visiting websites that aren’t necessary to the task at hand.
I did some searching and found a chrome browser extension called Pause. What it does is you have a list of websites that it pauses before you can access them. You can edit the list of websites and the length of the pause. When you go to the website you get a green page that won’t let you access the website you’re trying to get to for 5 seconds (or whatever you set it at). I find this really helpful to keep me on task. Once I see the screen, I realize I’m mindless clicking or trying to mindlessly scroll around.
Adding the Pause browser extension and going back to doing my morning writing at the kitchen table really have gotten my creative productivity back on track!
-Louie