One of my New Year resolutions was to write something everyday. This shouldn’t be hard, I told myself. After all, writing is something I love to do. Yet, it hasn’t turned out to be all that easy either.
Why is it difficult to do something that we love, everyday?
The answer, I think, lies in this one word: Distractions. There is always something, or the other, that keeps us from doing what we want.
Our world today continues to have 24 hours in a day, but the number of things – useful as well as not so useful – we can do in these 24 hours has increased exponentially. Some of these things can be avoided easily, but some others seem absolutely necessary for our survival.
The way to avoid distractions, therefore, consists of three steps:
a) Identifying things that we should not be doing at all.
The first step in avoiding distractions is to identify what these distractions really are. Watching too much TV, chatting with friends, spending too much time online could be some of the things that are distracting you. Not only are these activities distracting, but they also suck valuable time from your day. You could add more time to your day by simply avoiding these activities.
I am sure if you pay close attention to the things you do everyday, you will easily be able to identify the things that you can easily avoid. These are typically things that you do just for the sake of doing them. You could add more time to your day by simply avoiding these activities.
b) Identifying things that are useful, and optimizing the way we do them.
There are many things that we do on any given day that are useful to us, but the way we do them ends up taking more time than it should. Thus we end up reducing the number of hours we have in our day.
For example, if I have to write a report on something, I would do it best if I do it when I am totally focused. If I am not focused, or I am multitasking, I may end up taking more time in completing the report than I ideally should have. Using Twitter and Facebook are two activities that most blogger and writers cannot avoid these days. These can, however, end up taking up huge amount of your time – time that you don’t have. So, we need to find the right tools that can help us in optimising the way we spend time on these sites.
c) Focusing on the absolutely essential.
The last step in avoiding distractions is to focus on the activities that we want to do, and that we need to do in order to make the most of the time that is available to us. Most of the time we go about living our day without paying deliberate attention to the things we are doing. This needs to be changed.
We need to pay attention to the things that we need to do so that we are able to do them without a miss. If we are not focused, it is quite probable that we are going to miss doing what we want to do most.
How do you avoid distractions?
Distractions are the bane of a writer’s life. I put on headphones to block outside interference, and try not to surf the Internet until I have written at least four paragraphs of work. It works some days and others I find something new and interesting to while away a few hours!