One Apple A Day #40
Ah, distractions. My worst enemy. I’ve always been so easy to distract.
This morning is a perfect example. As usual, I started my daily writing session reading something educational. Today I read this post. It provides an interesting solution to increase writing productivity. The author suggests keeping more documents open while writing. Some documents are like buckets on which we discard all the thoughts that can compromise our focus. Other are complementary tools for writing — like a list of preferred words to use. The more interesting one, to me, is the one on which I should dump all the “important but not relevant” thoughts into.
Anytime you have a distracting thought you write it down with a quick note. The note is important to reassure yourself you’ll be able to get back to it later. This way you can free up your mind for the moment and keep your focus on writing. Also having a list of words that I would like to use on my posts is a great idea.
I decided to give it them a try as part of my daily practice. I started with the creation of the documents. One for the bucket, one for the words. A few minutes later I realised that I was running through all my previous documents and notes. I was reading all the notes I wrote in the last months, reviewing them, discarding the obsolete, updating the others.
I get distracted doing an exercise to avoid distraction. How crazy is that? It’s like when I was a teenager and I had to clean my room. I often ended up spending the whole afternoon reading my all school diaries.
So I have this incredible skill. I define a goal and a plan to achieve it only to screw it as soon as some inspirations from anywhere trigger my mind. Most of the post I wrote lately are different from the original idea I had when I started to write them. My mind likes to jump sideways sometimes. If I try to resist I’d get nowhere feeling guilty. If I follow the inspiration and jump into the new flow the guilty feeling remains, but at least I get somewhere. Somewhere unexpected but at least I moved. This is what I did Today. I didn’t plan to write this post but it came out. I screwed my plan, I’m feeling a bit guilty but I’m also happy with the result.
A few days ago I read this quote from Dwight D. Eisenhower that looks like it can be the perfect conclusion of this post.
“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.“