I wrote this article a few (well, many) months ago as a guest post for another blog…that didn’t end up getting picked up :-( Rather than relegate it to a folder on my hard drive I decided to share it here. While the app I mention in the opening paragraphs is old news, whether you eliminate distractions through internal or external means is an important question to consider when taking back more of your time.
A while back I read about an app designed to improve focus for writers. Cleverly named The Most Dangerous Writing App, it serves as your word processing program and monitors how long since you’ve actually pressed the keys to write. After five minutes of inactivity the app will assume you’ve gotten distracted and your writing will start to fade; go for much longer and it disappears completely. How’s that for incentive to stay focused?
In one respect The Most Dangerous Writing App is a manufactured solution to a problem that didn’t exist thirty years ago. It’s the writer’s curse that the device nearly all of us use for writing also places us a few clicks away from the barrage of crippling distractions that is Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, and the rest, from which I too have been known to emerge forty-five minutes later, fatigued, dazed, and unsure—what was it exactly I was writing about? How many of us have pulled up Google while writing to look up a tricky word, a state capital, or the number of barrels in a hogshead, only to fall into that same pit of clicking and scrolling?
While distractions clearly existed in the pre-internet age (such as the uncontrollable urge to clean your gutters, do your taxes, and vacuum every room in the house during writing time) there’s no doubt that the internet and social media have increased the quantity, proximity, and ease of these distractions immeasurably.
By providing writers a very real incentive to avoid distractions, The Most Dangerous Writing App serves as external motivation for writers who can’t stay focused on their own. In this respect it resembles apps like LeechBlock or Cold Turkey where users set limits on their use of social media or other websites, placing unbreakable restrictions on the user (who literally can’t visit the website in question) rather than tackling the writer’s innate tendency to get distracted. Just like the smoker who quits by switching to nicotine lozenges, productivity apps that limit what we do online help us avoid distractions not because we’re freely choosing to, but because we’re physically unable to. We’re Adam and Eve who haven’t yet eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, working in a childlike world where our choices are dictated by other people’s apps rather than our own willpower.
This raises an important question: How can we as writers learn to avoid distractions—particularly online ones—through our own sense of internal control?
Eliminating Internet by Necessity
When I was in grad school I rented a three-room efficiency apartment in a crumbling brownstone with chipped tiled floors and a bannister that wobbled when you leaned on it. While living there I once stumbled upon a homeless man sleeping in our laundry room, and someone once dropped a pair of boxer briefs outside my door that sat there for nearly six weeks before vanishing one Saturday night under unclear circumstances.
Because I had very little money as a grad student and dumpster diving was my main source of furniture, I stuck to the basics. Internet in 2013 was clearly a must, but since I didn’t yet own a smartphone I decided I didn’t need a wi-fi router for such a small apartment and instead ran an ethernet cable from the internet hookup at the back of the bedroom to a steamer trunk. I threw a few pillows on the floor, and voila—my trunk now doubled as a low computer table.
The problem with this setup was that my bedroom didn’t get a lot of light during the day when I liked to write—and I grew cramped after sitting on the floor for more than an hour. After several frustrating weeks I tried writing in my kitchen instead, placing my laptop by the window on the same rickety card table where I ate my meals. Writing in the kitchen provided more light and comfort than sitting on the floor, so unplugging my laptop and physically carrying it to the next room became a part of my writing routine.
The tradeoff was that my ethernet cable didn’t reach the kitchen, and I wasn’t about to spend money on a longer one. This meant that while writing I was physically disconnected from the internet (remember that I didn’t yet own a smartphone), and the only way to check something online was to physically stand up, carry my laptop to the bedroom, and plug in the cable.
While the walk from the kitchen to the internet couldn’t have been more than eight steps, the physical separation of writing and internet provided a clear contrast between the two. If I checked something online during writing time, I had to move to a different room with different surroundings, different lighting, and less comfortable seating, a constant reminder that I wasn’t doing the thing I really wanted to do and never seemed to have enough time for: writing.
I still got up from my writing to check things online, but I found myself doing it less often and more quickly, avoiding the Wikipedia binges that had overcome me in earlier times. Eventually, instead of moving to the bedroom I started typing bracketed notes in my manuscripts to check things later—a habit I continue to this day, where the third paragraph of this post originally contained the note [find 2 apps that limit your social media use]. By compiling lists of things to look up later, research and fact-checking became a defined activity separate from writing.
I don’t live in that three-room apartment anymore, and I now have access to both wi-fi and a smart phone that I leave muted and tossed on my bed while I’m working. Neither serves as much of a distraction because the habits I developed while writing in the kitchen stuck around long after I upgraded the living conditions that inspired them. I’ve trained myself to write both without distractions and without outside apps, like a smoker who’s quit without the lozenges.
How to Shut Off Your Internet If You’re Not Dirt Poor
I fully endorse cutting off the internet as a training tool for writers who want to avoid distractions. If you work from a hard-wired desktop, this could be as easy as reaching behind the tower and unplugging your ethernet cable. (This works best if unplugging the cable requires you to stand up and physically move, though not in a way that’s so difficult that you won’t want to do it at the start of a writing session.)
If you use wi-fi, physically unplug your router or modem and put your smartphone in another room on silent where you can’t get at it. Reaching both will require physical movements that will help you separate the act of writing from the act of looking something up: once you’ve stepped away to go online you’ll be in lookup mode and will know you’ve stepped out of writing mode.
If you share internet with people who need it during your writing time, a less effective solution is to manually shut off your computer’s wi-fi, which you can do by switching to Airplane Mode. I recommend this as a last resort because turning Airplane Mode off doesn’t require you to move anywhere and can be done in a few clicks, without the physical reminder that you’ve crossed the line from writing to research. This makes it easier to fall back on distractions, so I’d shoot for a solution that involves physical movement if you can.
Productive writing involves developing productive habits, and eliminating distractions is a big part of that. Shutting off your internet can train you to view the act of writing as distinct from other things you use your computer for, and once you’ve developed this habit over months or years you should be able to start leaving your internet on without succumbing to distractions. After reaching this level you’ll have become a master of your own focus—conducted on your own terms, through your own willpower, and not through apps that do the policing for you.
Or, you know—you could always switch to handwriting…