Distraction Evils

Sometimes distractions can be a good thing. Sometimes you need a good distraction to clear your head and to be able to step away from a manuscript for break. But, lots of times, distractions are bad, evil things that keep you from being productive.

Recognize any of these???

Oh sure, Twitter, Facebook--Words with Friends, anyone?--blogging, Tumblr, email, Gchat, Pinterest can be fun. And certainly they can be entertaining and even sometimes necessary, but they're also huge time suckers that before you even know it, can zap up all that time you had set aside for writing.

Photo found at Italian English Blog

It happens to me and it probably happens to you. You're just sitting down to write, but then you remember you forgot to respond to an email.

BAM. You lose ten minutes.

You write three sentences, then decide you'd like to just "peek" at Twitter. BAM. You've lost another seventeen minutes.

You write for thirty minutes, and check-in on Facebook. There goes another twenty six minutes.

And don't even get me started on Pinterest. I lose like thirty five thousand six hundred million minutes every time I log on.

DON'T DO IT.

Like I said, distractions can be good. But, they can also be really, really bad. Try setting aside time to write where you unplug from the internet for a while, and if you have to, hide your cell phone downstairs while you do it. It will be hard at first. You might even have some awful side effects like twitching and uncontrollable reaching for things that are no longer in your reach, but you'll be happy you did it. When you've written that 1K  or 2K for the day, you can reward yourself for taking the distractions away for a while.