Having a Hard Time Staying Focused?
Worry-Free Focus With These 3 Tips
I used to have about a million and one tabs open at all times. Well, not literally millions but so many that the little tabs were squished together across the top of my screen so tightly I couldn’t even tell what they were!
Have you been there too?
As a writer we not only write, we have jobs, bills to pay, emails to check, articles to read and most often the open tab issue is due to our incessant need to research something for our writing right away. As the thought crosses our minds mid-sentence, we tap it out onto the page then open a tab to look something up, it will only take minute right? An hour later we are down a rabbit hole so deep we have a hard time crawling out of it to finish whatever it was we were working on in the first place.
These three tips will help you close all the tabs, stay focused, and see your writing projects and other tasks through to completion.
1. Close the tabs, all of them.
Yes, all of them. Your Thesaurus, your search engine, definitely all social media, messaging, emails, keyword search sites — every single tab. The only thing that should be open on your screen is whatever you are using to actually write.
Understandably some projects require pre-research, so you may need to have that handy but try to have it saved outside of an active open tab.
Active open tabs create a temptation even worse than multi-tasking, they push us into task-switching a fierce distraction difficult for our human brains to ignore.
Dr Daria Kuss, the course leader of Cyberpsychology at Nottingham Trent University, tells Metro.co.uk: ‘Having lots of tabs open can potentially result in information overload — whereby multitasking is requested, which may be difficult to handle by the human brain, and rather than creating efficiency, switching frequently between tasks may lead to short attention spans and a lack of depth in the ongoing tasks.’
If you need to have your research handy while writing, try to have it or any information you are using in your project saved in ways that do not require an open internet tab while you are actually writing.
Removing the distraction of open tabs and sticking to it forces you to dig in and get your words, your thoughts, your creativity onto the screen. Before you know it you’ll have a completed draft.
2. Do your first edit with no tabs open.
Read through your draft without any other tabs open and do your first edits. Your creativity will continue to flow. Your writing is going to amaze you! You will amaze you!
With no distractions you will tweak, correct, add to, and be on your way to quality work completing your first edit with no tabs open. Using a built-in tool such as Grammarly will help you as you edit and works without an open tab.
After this initial read-through and first edit start adding in your links, specific quotes, research, keyword tweaks, or whatever you need to complete your project.
3. Plan how you will promote your post with no open tabs.
Whatever you are posting — an article on Medium, a new blog post on your blog, a guest post for someone else, a piece you are writing for work — you will want to promote it. Especially, if you are building your writing audience, like me. I am not sure what it feels like to set it and forget it (yet), I have to set it and promote it if anyone is going to read it.
I know how excited I am when I hit “publish” or know my work will be published somewhere.
What often happens is I hit publish then the rest of my day is interrupted with a sporadic promotion here and there. Sending links via text, email, messenger, randomly posting here or there. Making it impossible for me to get into a workflow on any other projects.
Having a planned system for promoting your published pieces will make you more time-efficient and allow you to focus on other things throughout your day.
The idea is this, make a list of all the social media platforms or any other methods you will use to promote your published work. My list looks something like this:
- Facebook Pages
- Facebook Groups
- Email List
- Group text
Keep this list handy. After you hit publish, share your post across socials, send out your messages then move on! Go create something else to share and check back later to see all those claps, likes, and comments.
Avoiding the temptation to task-switch by closing all the tabs takes some mindful discipline. Completing projects and hitting publish is worth the effort every time.
It’s hard to stay focused, especially as a writer. With a little discipline and removing temptation (all those open tabs!), it is possible!
“Anyone who says writing is easy isn’t doing it right.” — Amy Joy, Author
I couldn’t agree more. As I grow more disciplined and serious in my own writing pursuits, learning strategies like this help me complete more posts and projects in a shorter amount of time than I ever thought possible.
Keep writing, friends. The world needs your words.