An Aliventures reader, Shadab, wrote:
"I work as a receptionist in a noisy Indian hospital. Sometimes people come up to me every 2-5 minutes, and sometimes there’s a break of even 10 minutes. I do most of my writing (and reading) while responding to people.
Often when I reach the state of flow, I’m compelled to switch back. Cal
Newport, Josh Kaufman and several others say that switching projects back and forth damages our cognitive capabilities in the long run.
I obviously am scared for my concentration. but besides the hospital job, I don’t get that many chances for burnishing my writing skills."
Some jobs, like Shadab's, involve quite a bit of downtime: you need to be present, in case a patient or customer arrives ... but you're not constantly doing something. If you have young children, you've probably experienced plenty of similar moments: your kids might be playing happily for 5-10 minutes before needing your attention.
These little intervals of free time can be a great way to squeeze in some writing. But, as Shadab points out, this writing time will be subject to frequent and unpredictable interruptions: ones that require you to stop writing completely and give your full attention to something else.
It is very frustrating to get into flow only to get interrupted. However, I don't think that it's a danger to your long-term ability to focus.
My understanding is that distracting yourself (i.e. writing for 2 minutes, checking Facebook, writing for 2 minutes,
checking the headlines...) is more of a problem than being interrupted by something external. When you keep interrupting yourself, it becomes a habit, and it can be hard to break that habit to stay focused on writing.
So please do write if you can, despite external interruptions ... but don't let those become an excuse for not focusing well when
you do have uninterrupted time.
What I'd suggest to anyone in Shadab's situation is:
#1: Continue to seize opportunities to
write, even if they're not ideal. Ten minutes is fine. (Katharine Grubb has a whole book on this, Write a Novel in Ten Minutes a Day, detailing how she writes in 10 minute bursts around homeschooling her five children.) Even if you can only manage 2 - 5 minutes at a stretch, that's far better than nothing.
#2: Consider planning
your writing more than you normally would. If you're working on a non-fiction piece, you might not only break it into sections but also jot down all the key points you want to cover in each section. If you're working on fiction, you might write down key lines of dialogue and key events in a scene.
#3: Celebrate what you do achieve
(instead of looking at what you don't manage). It's easy to feel annoyed by interruptions, even anticipated ones. I try to be patient when a child asks for a snack for the umpteenth time ... but it can be a bit frustrating when I've got all of two sentences written. But by celebrating everything you do achieve, rather than thinking about what you could have managed with fewer interruptions, you'll hopefully feel more positive about your writing time.
#4: Get back to writing as soon as you can after an interruption. If you get interrupted then spend a few minutes scrolling Facebook or checking the news headlines, you might not manage any writing at all before the next interruption. Try to restart your writing straight away, as soon as the interruption is dealt with. I know this is a lot easier said than done:
don't worry if you only manage it some of the time.
#5: Where possible, try to work in some longer, uninterrupted writing sessions – perhaps once or twice a week. These don't have to be very long: if you can manage 30 minutes, that's great. If you've got an hour available, that's even better. These sessions could be a
great opportunity to tackle trickier bits of your writing that need more focus.
What if the frequent interruptions make it really hard for you to write? You could look for other writing-related activities that don't require so much focus. Reading is one example, as Shadab mentions. You might also do some pre-writing
activities, like coming up with ideas, jotting down an outline for a blog post, working out what should happen in the next scene of your novel-in-progress, and so on.
Obviously, the ideal situation is to have plenty of uninterrupted writing time ... but that's not the reality for most of us! Any extra writing you can do is worthwhile, so if you're
happy to (or need to) write around lots of interruptions, hopefully the ideas above will help you to do so successfully.
Happy writing,
Ali
P.S. Don't forget to fill out the survey this week:
https://forms.gle/V7pxPsQ5PZq5ACaQ7
Also, if you missed last week's blog post, you can find it here:
What is a Scene? Understanding and Using the Basic Unit of Story Structure
