9 easy steps to actually focus on writing
You’ve this report to write and you just can’t get yourself to sit down and actually do it. Displacement activities—such as sorting your spice rack into sweet and savory or color coding your sock drawer—take over your focus.
What's to be done? Here are the steps you need to take.
Get a cup of coffee or green tea
Quit email
Quit skype
Put your phone on "do not disturb" (the moon symbol) and place it upside down or out of sight
Set an old fashioned kitchen timer to 25 minutes
Write (don't worry about quality; just write in whichever shape or form it comes out)
When the buzzer goes off, stop, put a checkmark on a piece of paper and take a five minute break (make sure you take the break)
Go back to step 5
Keep doing this until you have four checkmarks; now you can take a 15-30 minute break
This time management tool, the Pomodoro Method, was invented by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. Each checkmark is a Pomodoro, named after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer. Proponents of this method say to use a low tech timer, because they like the old fashioned feel of winding the timer and the ticking reminds them of the desire to complete the task.
I use the Control Center on my iPhone to access the timer and place the phone upside down again. To achieve that state, I use OmmWriter, a simple word processing program that has a full screen mode (preventing me from peaking at any other screen), hypnotic sounds including crashing waves and cool keyboard sounds including one that sounds like rain on a tin roof.
In Tim Ferris' book The Tools of Titans, high achievers put a single song on repeat for focus, which probably has the same effect as the tick of a timer or OmmWriter sounds. Writers I know swear by Bach and Mozart.
Experiment with 30 or 45-minute timer settings. After a burnout, I started with 10-minute blocks. After a few days, I found myself in such a state of flow, I kept writing. Funny enough, I felt I did my best writing when limited to 10 minutes.
