Jan
30
For most of us, time is a precious commodity. There just doesn’t seem to be enough of it to go around. It takes a great deal of self-discipline to get through all of the things on my to-do list. I don’t have a lot of time time to squeeze it all in, so I have to be careful not to let distractions pull me away from the tasks at hand.
In some ways, I would imagine the problem is even worse for those who write full time either as freelancers or bloggers. Because I work full time, I come home in the evening knowing that I don’t have much time. It serves as a motivation to settle in and get into my writing. As a stay at home writer, there is more time available to get caught up in following rabbit trails. It takes a lot of self control to stay focused.
We all have different things that pull at us when we know we should be writing. Here are my biggest distractions.
Television
This is a biggie for me. Television is an addiction, and I am a TV junkie. Although it may sound funny, research has shown that television can have addictive qualities, just like video games. While you are sitting there mindlessly taking in your favorite show, the images are affecting areas of your brain that stimulate pleasure centers, and can cause an increase in your adrenalin levels. What that means is, if you are in the room with the television turned on, your mind is drawn to whatever is happening on the screen.
I have tried taking my laptop with me when I am watching TV, and there are some things that I can accomplish, but writing isn’t one of those things.
Here’s another of those well known, but largely ignored tidbits of fact: humans do not multi-task well. We work best when we focus on one thing at a time. Working in front of the TV distracts me. I work slower, I don’t think through things as well, and the quality of my work suffers.
Here is another sad little truth in my life; there is nothing going on in my little world that requires me to check my email accounts as often as I do. There just isn’t anything that is all that pressing that I need to respond within minutes of getting a new email. This is especially true when you look at the makeup of most of the emails I get. I am not going to check out Tiffanie’s hot new web cam, and I’m not going to send my manuscript to a publisher who feels the need to spam for new business.
Most time management gurus suggest that you should schedule set times to check and respond to emails. I’ve read that Tim Ferriss of “Four Hour Work Week” fame suggests that you should only check emails twice a day. I’m not willing to go that far, but I do need to cut back. Constantly checking my email is a distraction. It breaks my train of thought, and pulls me away from whatever it is I am working on. For some people, the same can be true for the telephone, but for me, it’s email.
Internet “Research”
This is a great way to lose an afternoon. In a lot of ways, the information superhighway is a collection of rabbit trails waiting to be explored. While life as a writer does require a fair amount of research, especially when you are coming up with new material, or are writing about an unfamiliar topic, you have to each a point where enough is enough. It’s not a good use of my time to spend two hours reading material for a 500 word article that will not pay enough to cover the research time.
Researchers have discovered at least two problems that come from having too much information: “Information Overload”, and “Analysis Paralysis.” Both of these problems are a result of having so much information to deal with, that you become mired down in all of the stuff you have to wade through. Information overload leaves you feeling like you don’t know where to begin, or what parts to put in or leave out of the piece your working on. Analysis paralysis comes from always having more research to do. You never get started, because you never finish your research.
Set a time limit on how long you will spend reading. Depending on how in-depth the project is, you can make the time longer or shorter, but make sure it is appropriate for the scope of the project.
RSS Feeds
It is so easy to add RSS feeds to my reader that I end up with far more feeds than I can possibly keep up with. I’m sorry, but some of you are getting the axe. While it is a great way to keep up with new trends and innovations, you reach a point of diminishing returns, and quite frankly, many of the blogs in my reader are not all that innovative. Other peoples blogs can be a good source of new ideas if you do it right (check out what Steve Snell wrote about this on Monday), but I do have to limit the amount of time I spend on it. Quite frankly, I don’t need the guilt of opening my reader and seeing a couple hundred unread posts.
Limit your feeds to the blogs you actually read, and that you can get real value from reading.
I can easily Twitter the time away. Like email, it can be a big distraction. I know it is all the rage right now, but I don’t have the time for it. I don’t want to shoot myself in the foot. I do use Twitter, and I’m really just getting into how it can help me from a marketing/SEO stand point.
Twitter does have a purpose, but I predict that it will soon lose the freshness and the hype will begin to fade. I have enough on my plate with my busy life that I can’t spend the time following what everyone else is doing every minute of every day. So in my ongoing effort to keep my schedule under control, I will need to limit the amount of time I spend checking out what other people are Twittering about.
Falling back on the old “I don’t have enough time” excuse for not getting your work done just doesn’t cut it. We all have the same amount of time. It’s how you use your time that is important.
What are your time wasters?
Lol, Jim, this is a post I planned to write myself but never got around to. Email is both a time saver and a time sink. I also agree about the RSS feeds. I subscribe to everything that I want to check out, then forget to delete them; which means I have hundreds to look at. Time for some pruning, I think.
It seems like adding things to my list is a whole lot easier than taking them off. It’s like cleaning the garage; I can always find an excuse to hang on to something for just a little bit longer (then I never use it and end up throwing it out anyway).
RSS Feeds kill me. I’m so far behind that I will never catch up. Google Reader just says that I have 1000+ unread but I just added them up and the total is 5583 unread posts. That’s ridiculous… I may need therapy…
Don’t forget blogging, sometimes you get that muse that stimulates an idea for a great article and you just have to write it right then. I have done that a few times at work and had to rush to get a project done that I set aside.
Blogging isn’t quite as bad for me. If I can at least get an idea jotted down to work on later, I can usually control the urge to blog.
I know from reading other bloggers that this would rank pretty high on their list.
He recommends starting at two times per day and moving to once per day as soon as you can and eventually once per week. I think his approach would be feasible for some people but I could never get away with that for my “real” job.
Nor could I. I have turned off the taskbar reminder, though, because it made me check too often. I’ve cut down. I probably only check once an hour ;0
I completely agree—TV and twitter being the most useless.
Only two of yours, research and email, are two of mine, but I am sure I have many more. I think the involvement with Social Marketing has to be the one that takes so much time. If I am not careful, every time an email comes to Digg a site, I would be Digging all day long.
Prioritizing my day, by making a list of priorities helps me to focus and also serves to pull me back to those important tasks…speaking of which, better get back to it.
The biggest thing is to be aware enough to identify what it is that wastes your time. It starts be admitting you have a problem.
I’m with you there - I could spend all day doing social networking / bookmarking if I didn’t reign myself in!
Other things that always get me:
- Phone calls. I almost never answer my phone but give me a project that I don’t want to do and suddenly I need to call the aunt I haven’t talked to in five years to see how her day is going.
- IM. Another form of communication that is all too easy to get wrapped up in while you’re online. I leave Trillian off now because otherwise I don’t get work done.
- Errands. Sometimes I decide I need to get out of the office four or five times a day.
- Snacks. The kitchen is the biggest time-waster for me when I try to work from home!
Of course, with any of these things, it’s all about self-discipline. I think it was a great point in this post that if you actually don’t have that much time (like when you work full time in addition to blogging) you get more done because you’re more focused.
I think checking stats and online income can be a time waster too.
For sure. Most newbie bloggers go stat crazy! In fact, a lot of successful bloggers confess that they were stat crazy in the beginning. A great way to deal with this a waste less time is to schedule times in the day where you check your stats, and follow them “religiously”.
Jim,
Like you, I have to write with the television off, because if I have it on, the quality of my work is poor, too. I can’t even think when the TV’s on.
I use to leave my e-mail up while writing, and every time it would ring to let me know I had a new message, I stopped what I was doing — mid sentence — to check it.
NEVER again! I now make myself close my e-mail when I’m writing so I’m not tempted to check it every time it notifies me of a new message. 
I have over 100 blogs on my feeder (this one included), and the thing I’ve discovered that works best for me is writing “blog reading” into my daily writing schedule. Of course, it’s the last thing on my list for the day, because of the time it takes to read the blogs, but all the blogs are great and I just can’t bring myself to ditch them.
I suppose my time wasters are pretty much the same as yours, but I’ve left a few tips on how I handle two of them. Maybe those tips will benefit you as well as others.
One of the few things that annoys me more than people who ostentatiously multi-task to prove how busy they are is when I fall into this trap myself.
My problem here is that my girlfriend, who’s also working from home right now, is also a TV addict, and likes to have the TV on as “background noise.” ARGH.
All I had to do to know what you meant was see those quotation marks. “Hey, I’m writing about this topic, so I should read its Wikipedia entry! And while I’m here, why not read about every episode of The X-Files? It’s sure to come in handy someday!”
You are right on! In the 80s and 90s we were all told that the longer we worked and the more things we worked on the more “productive” we would be. SO NOT TRUE! There has now been significant research that shows that most multi-tasking does not work.
There are a few things you can do and still multi-task, but you have to think about how you learn and think. For example, I can have a load of laundry going, and the dishwasher going and write at the same time. Only one of those 3 things requires my brain power.
Once the dishes are done and the laundry is dry, I cannot write and fold or put away… Hmm. How can I multi-task those activities. I know! I fold my laundry when listening to teleconferences. If I need to take a note, I put the towel down, jot my note and go back to folding. Now, folding is a “brainless” activity for me. I go on autopilot. That is why I can multi-task it with something else.
Could I listen to a teleconference and blog at the same time? Not likely! Too much of the same types of thinking.
Check out http://www.productiveandorganized.net/2008/01/getting-things.html for a video of guru David Allen as he talked with staff at Google. I like him because he is very realistic about Getting Things Done.
To your success!
Stephanie
Constantly checking traffic and/or income stats can eat up a lot of time, as well as excessive forum use. It’s good to post in forums but my #1 priority needs to be writing content for my blog. I can find so many other things to do besides that, but it sounds like I’m not alone.