Episode 22: How do you handle distractions?

This week, Crys and JP talk about writing distractions and their tips, tricks, and tactics to manage them.

Show Notes

Becca Syme’s Dear Writer, Are You In Burnout? https://amzn.to/3mJyIfC

The Social Dilemma https://www.netflix.com/title/81254224

Getting Things Done https://amzn.to/3rmvrXh

Zen to Done https://amzn.to/37J2v3S

The Motivation Myth https://amzn.to/37G8IgV

www.4thewords.com

https://writeordie.com

Atmosphere App https://peakpocketstudios.com

Brain.fm

Links provided may be affiliate links.

Transcript

JP: Hello, friends. This is episode 22 of the Write Away Podcast and it is December 22nd, 2020, as we are recording.

I’m JP Rindfleisch with my cohost, Crys Cain. How has your week been?

Crys: Aah! That’s what it’s been. Yeah. The main thing is I thought that I was handling everything with first year being broken up great, and then Christmas comes along. So there’s that.

Writing wise? Also not awesome. I say that, but I know that I got writing done last week, and I’m not going to actually say how I got writing done last week because that’s going to come in our talk.

But I did get a lot of not-writing things done. That’s kind of normal for the stage I’m at right now. With podcast, we had that bonus episode this month. We’ve got another one coming up soon. The Author Success Mastermind has been bumping and had a lot of stuff going on in it and that’s been lovely.

So how about you, sir?

JP: Good. I had, you know, a little bit of stress over the holidays, but nothing close to what I’ve heard from you. I feel for ya.

Writing-wise, everything has been pretty good these past two weeks since we’ve had an update.  I think last time I mentioned on the show, I was in revision land for like the two millionth time.

That, not short story, it’s a book, has been submitted.

Crys: And this is a developmental edit?

JP: Yes. Sent it off to the developmental editor and we are pending that review, and I’m moving forward with looking at the draft for book two. And this past week I worked on, with my co-writer, the outline for book three.

So things have been kind of moving along. And then on top of that, for our mastermind, the project I want to work on is completing a novel separate to the works that I’ve been working with my co-writer. So I’ve been in like a race to get an outline, and then I wanted to make it a series because I like to torment myself.

So that’s what I’ve been doing.

Crys: Yeah, I have not decided how I am going to participate this year the Mastermind’s going for a full year. We have a weekly streak challenge of writing words every week, not every day. And J’s put together different calendars of whether you want to write, what is it? Three blog posts a week, a short story a week, or a novel over the course of a year.  I need to figure out what my challenge will be.

 I really do want to push myself forward this year in scifi fantasy stuff that isn’t the romance stuff.

JP: Yeah I’ve also started reading a book which happens to be the book of the club or book of the club!

Crys: The book of the club! The club of the book!

JP: These words today are shit. Which happens to be the book club book. Do you want to introduce that book?

Crys: The book club book is Becca Symes Dear Writer, Are You In Burnout? Or Writer, You are in Burnout.

Either way. It’s the burnout book, which is particularly relevant to me, even though I’m coming out of burnout. I bought this book months ago and I read the first few paragraphs and was like, nope, too real, can’t deal. Drop.

Now I can handle shit. So we’re reading it. Book club will go live on the 21st of January. If anybody wants to read along with us and tell us what they think that would be fabulous. Yeah.

JP: And I’ve found that even like the first couple of chapters, I don’t relate to being in burnout, but I think it’s like a healthy warning.

Crys: There’s a lot of preventative information in there about managing your energy. I think that’s really important for everybody.

This week we are talking about, how do I manage distraction? Are you a very distractible person, JP?

JP: Oh my gosh. You have no idea.  I get distracted by every little thing. And I also just like grow into a panic and force myself to seclude in order to not be distracted. How about you?

Crys: Same. I was actually just watching a TikToK because TikTok is where I learn everything these days. What the person was talking about was that research has already shown that a significant portion of the population has higher vertical arousal, which means they tend to process information faster, but loud and hectic environments can be overwhelming. And we also know that dopamine doesn’t work the same for them, and social validation and shame aren’t good motivators for them.

So mostly when you think about that, like when you’re in school, like the shame factor of not paying attention or getting approval for paying attention probably didn’t work a lot for us. I don’t know. I remember one time being in class and I was so bored because I already knew the stuff. And it was just an assistant teacher, baby teacher I was so bored because I already know this stuff. So I was reading at my desk as we terrible reader-writer humans do. And my teacher shamed me for not paying attention. And as an adult, I look back and I was like, well, she was trying to encourage the other teacher, but in doing so she shamed me. But that didn’t make me pay attention any better.

JP: Right.  On like a whole nerdy biology standpoint, we’re animals. We’re not trained to be focused on someone lecturing us. If we see something moving in the side of us, our lizard brain is going to look at that object and make sure that it’s not a threat to us.

We live in a world where we don’t encourage that sort of distraction, but that’s the very core essence of our being.

Crys:  With our world, we do need to focus to get shit done.

JP: And I think that that’s kind of the key here is recognizing the fact that we do have this wild lizard brain. And while you can’t necessarily train it, you can tame it and you can teach it how to pay attention when you need these kind of deep work.

Crys: Yeah, and there’s going to be a lot of different tips, tricks, tactics that we’re going to go over that will work for some people that won’t work for everyone.

One of the things that video went on to explain was that a lot of the people with the higher cortical arousal often tend to be diagnosed as ADHD, executive dysfunction, all that. And we are going to talk about some of those things, and some tips and tricks that work for those, because I am definitely somewhere in there. With executive dysfunction, possible ADHD, like at some point, I really want a diagnosis for myself or lack of diagnosis. Just so I know like what bucket explains me to myself. But since I have neither of those, I have a lot of fucking coping mechanisms to keep myself on track.

So, JP is super organized and has a giant list. So why don’t you start us off, sir?

JP: Sure. So I grabbed this from the Harvard Business Review.  They have four strategies for overcoming distraction. So the first one we’ve got: create a distraction free ritual.  When I read this, I immediately thought of the documentary The Social Dilemma on Netflix. For me, this means every notification, every ping that you get on your phone, every little noise, those are outside forces that are trying to grab your attention and pull you away from your work.

I think for all writers, our time and our attention is the most valuable commodity that we have. Without it, we can’t write. So we need to create these sort of distraction-free rituals.

Crys:  

Another way to phrase those and this is really good tip for people who have trouble separating work from home life, which is a lot of us who work from home, is that you have your entry and exit triggers.  I don’t remember who came up with this idea. The entry and exit triggers. I really like to think of them as rituals. I like magic, so that makes me happier than thinking of triggers. What that is, is a set of things you do when you start work.

There’s a couple benefits to this. One, it does set your space up, sets you up for success, whether it’s you get your coffee and your water and your food, and you manage all that before you sit down.

JP: My time that I know that I can have the most free-of-distraction time is in the morning, but before I do anything, I have to take care of my animals. Otherwise they show up in the middle of me trying to write, asking to go out, use the restroom. So I have to make sure that I set myself up for success. I need to take care of every variable before I can then jump into this distraction-free time.

Crys: Yeah. So that’s stage one of minimizing things that might come in from the outside to distract you.  Another thing is simply that when you have a routine, it switches your brain into that mode of that expectation that you were going to sit down and you’re going to do things and you’re not going to do other things. So that’s some internal distraction mitigation. I do not currently have a full routine, which is one of my problems.

 I’ve been having a hard time. I like things to be the exact same everyday, but because my life is not the exact same every day because of the kiddo’s schedule, it’s a challenge for me to figure out what my routine is. But what one of my routines used to be is that every day I would get my laptop out of its backpack, and I had a laptop stand and a keyboard and a mouse, and I would set everything up, and that was my entry trigger. So that was, I am going into work mode.

And then my exit trigger was I would put all those things away. I am putting away work mode. And so then I would be able to more fully enjoy not being in work mode, which I know a lot of us have problems with. So there’s the two distractions: getting distracted from work, getting distracted by work. But we’re just going to focus on getting distracted from work.

JP: For my day job, I work up here. This is the attic of my house. And I make sure that all of my day job activities are performed up here.  I will occasionally work downstairs, but downstairs is my family home life. Now for writing, it doesn’t matter because I’m able to create those bubbles, those little spaces and those work for me, but explicitly for work, this is my workspace and that’s just where I will do work.

And I think creating those barriers and those boundaries, especially within a home is just beyond important because otherwise it’s going to bleed over.

Crys: Absolutely. And it’s going to bleed over at times. No, one’s perfect. And then you just reset, you forgive yourself and you reset

JP: I think that’s the key, is always focusing on the fact that you can reset. If you screw up once, that’s fine. If you screw up ten times, that’s fine. Just reset.

I think we get too discouraged by the fact that we failed once and we just let it all fall down. But that’s not okay. Like, we know that’s not okay. And we know that it is okay to fail. That’s part of life. And we learn from it, and the learning experience is the key.

Crys: Absolutely. Another often touted trip that absolutely fucking works is to turn off your notifications. Put your phone on do not disturb mode.  Put your phone in another room if you can. What I do is, my phone is on do not disturb 99% of the time. The only time I take it off do not disturb is if I am actively waiting for a call, almost never.

I did run into a problem with that, where I have a bit of time blindness. And so I would be like, oh, I’m going to do this very short, not intense thing for five minutes before I have this meeting. 30 minutes later, I look up. And so I do have an exception now, Google calendar is the only thing that can send me alerts on my phone. That has helped tremendously. I already look at my phone 5 million times a day. I don’t need it prompting me to look at it more for any kind of social anything.

JP: I have a self-proclaimed social media problem.  This spawned off when I first downloaded TikTok and realized I was spending more hours than I want to say on air a day on TikTok and I immediately deleted it. And then shortly after, I came to the realization that I was doing the same with Facebook. So I deleted that off my phone, and now I look at it maybe once or twice a week, but I’m not missing out on anything.

I used to be so in the mindset, like I’m going to miss out on something if I’m not a part of this crazy social media lattice. But my family still reaches out to me. They still talk to me. I’m not like alone in a Hobbit hole.

I’m still working through what social media things I can remove from my life, but the fact that I’m able to remove them and realize that that’s so helpful for finding this time to write.

Crys: This is probably a whole nother podcast on itself, so let’s not going too into detail, but I’m really curious… do your Slack groups… do they have that same kind of addiction connection as far as how much time you spend on them or is that a completely different level of connection for you?

JP: Yes.  I think that I tried to remove the notifications, but I do notice myself checking it a lot. It is nowhere near the same level of social media addiction I had on Facebook and TikTok because those were people I didn’t know, or stories that I needed to hear about, I don’t know, crazy news or something like that.

Whereas this is short comments that I can read and then discard.  I do notice that now I’ve set up these barriers of time to write, and I don’t even look at my phone and I don’t think I had that ability before.

Crys:  I definitely think we need to have a full episode on social things. I dunno how we’re going to phrase it, but that’s a big old bucket of worms that we’re gonna dig into at some point. 

JP: Next on the four strategies is to set three daily intentions. When I was reading this article, it stated that every day you create what your intention is, what your goal is for that day. I don’t do this.

I’m not a list person.  But I do think that something along these lines of having an intent or having a task does make a difference in your productivity. Now for me, what I do instead is I have on my phone a Google task. I have two of them. That remind me to do Pomodoros, because of the day job I have to figure out when I can do those.

Those are set at six and six-thirty in the morning.  As long as I’m capable of checking off those little tasks, this, I think fulfills that three daily intention kind of concept because the whole idea is you’re setting something up for you to then say that I accomplished this.

Even if you fail at it a couple of times, eventually that dopamine hit that you’re going to have of succeeding as long as you’re able to repeat that over and over again, you’re going to feel more positive throughout the day and throughout the week that you continue to do this. So for me, I’m able to complete that through completing the tasks on my phone.

Crys:  If you want a bit more guideline on how to create a personal system with a top three things, most people that’s fine. Top three things. They can run with it if you want. Two books that I really recommend are Getting Things Done and Zen To Done. I actually like Zen to Done a little bit more. It’s more flexible than Getting Things Done, and it’s based on Getting Things Done.

I am a list person and I have evolved my process a lot this year. And I am now a Notion ho. Notion is a note taking productivity app. The closest thing that most people will be familiar with is Evernote, but for some reason I hate Evernote. I cannot deal with their interface. And I love Notion.

I have a weekly page in Notion and it has two lists in it. It has ‘”today'” and it has ‘”to be scheduled.'” And ‘to be scheduled’ is a lot of long running things will sit there- – I need to do this at some point, but I don’t know when I’m going to schedule it.

If it is a bigger thing that needs to end up being scheduled or it won’t get done, it then goes on my Google calendar, and I set aside a time block that I’m going to work on that thing during that time. If it’s just, Hey, here are these little things that I need to do throughout the day, it gets moved over to my ‘today’ list. And then this is the thing that’s been most useful for me out of all of this is.

I create an archive bucket for each week. And after I’ve completed a day’s worth of tasks, that next morning I go through and I take all those tasks and I move them into the archive. So then the next week, when I’m like, what did I do last week? Oh, I didn’t get anything done, I’ll go and look at my list and say, “bitch, you got 50 things done, you just don’t remember them. “

That’s been very helpful for me as a list person. Because of the archive and because of my tendency to think I did nothing when I’ve been insanely busy. And then I’m like, why am I so tired? Why do I feel exhausted? Why can’t I work right now? I can show myself it’s because I worked myself into a slump and that’s fine. I just need to recognize cause and effect.

JP: The important part for keeping these sorts of tasks and for having these time blocks is the ability to reflect on them. You need to get that sense of accomplishment because otherwise, if you just keep moving forward and you just keep looking forward, you don’t really see what you did to build yourself up.

So when you have these moments of overwhelm, you’re missing out on the fact that you built so much in the past and you can reflect on that and it’s okay to reflect on that. It’s not selfish, it’s not cruel. You’re not hurting anyone’s feelings by looking at the past. And so I think it’s important for us to just have that time to reflect.

Crys: We’re both fans of The Motivation Myth, but really all you need from that book –though it’s a wonderful book– is the idea that you don’t motivate yourself and then get stuff done, you get motivated by completing things.

A lot of times when we feel especially spastic it’s because we haven’t completed anything.

I will complete a task, and if it was not on my to-do list, I will go back, put it on my to-do list and check it off so that I have that continual motivation creation machine and be like, Hey, you completed something. Cool. Now let’s see how many more things you can complete.

JP: I really liked The Motivation Myth. That was one of the few books that I started reading on my to-do list of nonfiction.  It was motivating in and of itself, because it proves the point that, you know, stop waiting for this muse to show up. That doesn’t exist. That’s not a thing.

It was useful for me to hear that because it just gave me permission to continue pushing on, continue having these daily things that I do. It doesn’t matter if I’m not motivated. That’s just an idea. It’s more important to just be there and be present.

Crys: Now, for writing-time distraction. This is where Becca Syme’s classes really come in useful. Or even if you just take the CliftonStrengths top five and then use her YouTube to learn about your top five. If you have high Input or high Intellection, there will be times when you cannot write.

And that is often because you have either not input enough material for you to riff off of in your head or you haven’t had enough time to think about it. You have a level of uncertainty that makes it unable for your personality type to write because some people need a lot of certainty before they can put words on paper and that’s not a failing.

That’s just a different type of personality and writing style. So things you can do: you can make a plan. I’m clearly having trouble writing right now. What is it? Am I uncertain? Can I see the scene ahead of me? If not, do I need to think about it? Do I need to sit down and journal about it? Do I need to do some character interviews?

For some people, this is procrastination. For some people, it is productive work. Either way, you need to be gentle with yourself and not hold yourself to other people’s standards, because the point is, how do I get the words down? How do I get back to doing the work I want to do? And sometimes accepting that part of doing the work you want to do is taking a while to get to it, if that makes sense.

JP: This is like a therapy session, because I have those two strengths in my top five. And I allow myself to have that writing time to include research because for me, if I’m at a stop gap where I can’t write, but I need to connect the dots, I still count that as writing time, and I will either input media or I will read up things or I will look for synopses of other things to create a web in my head.

And all of that is a lot more mental work than just sitting there and watching Netflix, which it may look like, but I’m definitely taking notes and contemplating. I consider that writing time because that’s how you create those sorts of connections.

Crys: Absolutely. And I will use Intellection and Activator to compare two different styles of how this might play out for writers.

Intellection needs a high level of certainty before they act. This can get you into a loop of where you’re waiting for absolute certainty. So that’s a negative. On a scale of one to five, Intellections want to be a five, 100% certain. We need to train ourselves to be okay with a four. We need to train ourselves to be okay with, I’m 80% certain so I’m going to move forward. I’ve got enough information. I’m going to move forward.

Activators are kind of the opposite end of that spectrum. And I have that in my top ten so they play off each other and mitigate each other. The activators are like, Hey, I had an idea. Boom, let’s go. I’m 1% certain, I’m going to try it. I’ll see if it works.

Activators might be more inclined to the writing into the dark style of writing because they don’t need to be certain. They don’t want to be certain. They just want to see. While Intellection types might be more inclined to having a full plot and a full outline.

That’s not a hundred percent. There’s a lot of other factors that might come into play there, but that’s one of those ways that those elements might play out.

JP: Number three is work on hard stuff and do more of it.

So I think for me, for writing is the hard stuff. And so I kind of put that at a pedestal sometimes, and it’s kind of like the daunting thing to complete, but after having done it, that’s always the best feeling that you can have. And I think if we continue to focus on the fact that having done it will always lead to a positive outcome, it will always make you feel more complete , or it will make you feel like you’ve had that dopamine hit, then, you know, Find the time to do the writing. Writing is the most important thing that is your ability or commodity as a writer. Find the time to write.

For me, I find that if I sit down between 30 minutes to two hours to get the writing done, I feel more achieved that day.

So that’s why I do it in the morning. With consistent practice and persistence, that little voice inside your head that says that this is a daunting task or you’re not good enough, that just starts to silence itself because you’re proving it wrong by doing it.

Crys: I will say that once you have a few books out, the admin stuff becomes more important. I had to do a lot of work to retrain my brain to accept that was also valid work. So that’s just something to be aware of.

Especially early on in your career, words are the most important, because you don’t have anything to sell until you do the words.  This is a challenge that most people will have to go through as they go from 100% words to 75% words or 55% words in there things I need to get done in the day , and then you get distracted cause you’re like, I want to be writing , and that’s where to-do lists really come in and key for me.

This next section will not work for everyone, but it can be a really good one for other people, and that is to set artificial deadlines. Deadlines work for me sometimes. They are not working for me this month.

I have a book that is supposed to go out. It is supposed to go live January 7th. It is not going to go live January 7th. I am going to have to push the pre-order back one month and that’s okay. I’m totally fine with that.

But that deadline hasn’t been working. It’s been looming, but I’ve had so many other things that I put as priority before finishing this book. I also haven’t had the intellecting time I’ve needed for this book. and so that hasn’t worked, but this next deadline isn’t arbitrary.

Well, I mean, it was arbitrary in me setting it. But it will not be arbitrary once it is set, because if I don’t upload my book, then I lose my pre-order privileges. I will get the book done by that deadline and I may get a little stressed, but because I have an extra month, I am going to make sure I don’t get stressed and I will get things done ahead of time.

One of the things that does work really well for me on a day to day basis is a form of time-blocking. I set: I schedule when I’m doing life things. So whether that is, meeting with a friend, picking up my kid, grocery shopping, whatever it is I need to do, I scheduled that on my calendar, so that it’s very clear to me what time I have available to get my work done. And when I see that that time is not all day, sometimes I’m able to bring my focus back because when I can see that my time is not unlimited. I’m much more able to focus.

JP: What I do like is verbalized deadlines, which is weird. So take, for example, NaNoWriMo. It’s such an artificial deadline to have a novel completed by the end of November after starting it in the beginning of November.

But the fact that it exists, that you can sign up for it, that your name is associated with it, and that you have a tracking system that’s already built pre-built for you. I’m able to complete those, because I have to  say to the world that I am completing this deadline. If I just impose a deadline on myself and I’m like, yeah, I’ll get this done next week, I won’t, because that’s just my own personal deadline. So I almost have to tell others my deadlines in order to hold myself accountable for them.

Crys: This is really interesting though, another science-y thing that be fun to dig into, sometimes stating that you’re going to do something to the world actually fulfills the emotional need.  You feel like you’ve already done it just because you’ve told people.

The way that I think NaNoWriMo works is that other people are doing the same thing at the same time. And so if they actually complete it and you don’t actually complete it, even though you’ve said you’re going to do it, you don’t get the same emotional hit. So maybe a group tasking.

One thing that we don’t have on this list, as tools and tactics is co-working, hopping on a zoom, working with other people saying, okay, we’re going to do Pomodoros. We’re going to work for 20 minutes and then we’ll have a 10 minute break where you can run to the bathroom, grab a snack or talk.

Most of the time, it being writers and like sub socialized We just want to talk at other writers during that ten minutes and we’re jibber-jabbers and then we’re forced to go back to writing. I find that coworking on Zoom is phenomenal for me.

JP: I started last week in the accountability partners channel on Slack for the Author Success Mastermind group.  We have a Zoom meeting  My time it’s 5:00 AM to seven , and I show up there and  I’ve been able to expand my two Pomodoros to almost an hour and a half of writing time because I’m on a Zoom call and it’s almost like you have that responsibility that like we’re all in this together.

So if I’m just sitting here not participating, that’s just not the same mindset. That’s not what I am as a person. And so, I really liked those. That’s something I’ll definitely keep doing.

This last one for me, for distractions, I get distracted by things and I don’t complete other projects. I think that an important thing is to always see a project through to the end.

New opportunities and ideas will always hit you, they will always be there. For me, the most important thing to do is to determine how much time I’m willing to dedicate to my primary project. So let’s say 70% on my coauthor writing project. And then I have about 30% of playtime for ideas, for maybe a side project or different revenue income stream.

So for example, the episode with Alicia, where she discussed that one Pomodoro a week, she works on our merchandising. That’s because she’s determined how much percentage she’s able to accumulate for her merchandising business, as opposed to her overall writing business.

I think it’s important to determine the importance of your projects and give them time so that you are allowed to finish the project that you’re working on before moving on to another one.

She also has other methods that I want to absorb and steal where she just basically keeps a digital junk drawer where she puts down all of her ideas and she gives them their space to have their breath of air, and then she closes it, and she works on her other projects.  I think if we focus on allowing ourselves to have that space, but then not have it be your primary time, then we’ll be able to focus more on our primary projects. If that makes sense.

Crys: Absolutely. I know that there’s the school of thought that says, “an idea isn’t worth it if you don’t remember it later.  If it’s worth it, it’ll come back to you.”

As a person who remembers absolutely nothing, that is not my school of thought. I think it’s very important to have an idea-capturing system. I’m going to link in the show notes a really cool YouTube I found on how to develop a second brain.

It’s the idea of using a capturing system as the storage facility for your brain, rather than trying to hold everything in your brain and process everything in your brain. And that’s actually the video that got me started using Notion to capture my to-do list and everything else I do.

Tips and tricks of what I do to get myself back on track when I’m distracted: if I noticed that I’m getting distracted a lot, sometimes I’ll just simply walk away from the computer and move my body.  That will release some really good hormones in your body that often calms your brain down and allows you to get back to focus when you sit down.

Eating, making sure you sleep, the normal things. 

I use 4TheWords.com. I have used a lot in the past. I’ve just started using it this week. That’s how I got words done this week. It is gamifying writing. You explore a world, you beat monsters, you have to write so many words in so many minutes and they’re not terrible.

Some of them are challenges like write 2000 words in, I dunno, they give you a long time, like six hours. They even have time-based monsters where write for three minutes, write for five minutes, write for fifteen minutes.  Just like any game, you get items and you complete quests and you level up and you get wardrobes.

If you’re the kind of person who is really motivated by tiny little rewards, like I am, it’s a great option.

Another great option. If you are motivated by stress is Write Or Die. 

JP’s like, fuck that.

Write or Die is a website–at one point he had a downloadable app, but I don’t know if he still does, I need to check that out- – Write Or Die lets you set kind of the level of stress that you want when you’re writing. So there’s a level that’s very simple or it’s like the screen, if you stop writing, the screen will slowly turn red. You can add rewards. If you write every hundred words a kitten will appear on your page.

There’s a lot of different things. The worst mode is kamikaze mode, where if you stop writing for more than XYZ seconds, it will start deleting your words. So if you’re a masochist, great option. Probably one of the most useful options is Hemingway mode, which several apps have. And it doesn’t allow you to delete. Some people that will not work for at all. They need to cycle over.

It’s definitely worth a try if you haven’t tried something like that.

The moment when you get distracted, what’s your number one tip for pulling yourself back to whatever you’re trying to focus on?

JP: Headphones.

Crys: Oh yeah! We didn’t even talk about binaural tools. I fucking love brain.fm.

JP: Yes. That’s exactly what I do. I’m like a huge binaural nerd,  I don’t even care if it works or if it’s pseudoscience or whatever, but I just love  the tone because I can’t listen to vocals at all, period, when I’m writing, and if a piano has any familiar tune, which sucks because I really like pianos and instrumental music, I will immediately get pulled out.

So binaural beats, which is just a tone, and then sometimes it has like weird synthy music and meditative, whatever, that as opposed to whatever’s around me can pull me back into focus mode.  I’m not one to get too distracted by having just a standard computer and knowing that I have connection to the internet, because if I have like Word open, I’m focused on that and I’m not switching between tabs.

So for me, it’s binaural beats will pull me back into writing.

Crys: Yeah. I don’t know what it is, if it’s just the placebo or it actually works, but sometimes I feel more than if I’ve had three cups of coffee, and I actually have to stop using the binaural beats because I’m like, I am vibrating.

Some options for that, brain.fm is really good. On Android, I also have another app called Atmosphere that I use, but you can just go on YouTube and search binaural beats.

JP:  When I had a Spotify account, they had playlists, binaural beats playlists for whatever you wanted, because different tones do different things. So you look for the one for focus and whatnot. YouTube sort of has it. It’s not as great as the Spotify playlist, but you can get like three-hour long binaural beats that you can listen to. They’re just very, very useful.

Crys: My top is doing a brain dump. A lot of times when I’m getting distracted, it is my internal brain rather than external circumstances, that the external circumstances will disrupt my internal ability to focus and I will do a brain dump. What are all the things that I’m worried about forgetting that keep distracting me? Put them on a paper or on my notion so that I will not forget to do those things because they are recorded or they are scheduled.

 I just take a few minutes to handle that. And then I say, okay, what are the things I need to get done right now? Generally that’s writing. And that’s often when I get the most distracted. And so then once I have handled those things, they are recorded. I will not forget them. Then I’m able to focus because I’m like, okay, cool. Everything else is outside of my space now and I can focus for whatever amount of time I have available.

So our question for the listeners is how do you manage distractions?