I just finished reading the book Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. Not going to lie, it made me feel a lot better about myself and my inability to concentrate on the one thing I claimed to actually WANT to do: writing my novel.
I mean, here we are, over two months into the year and I barely have anything to show for it. A couple thousand words. A first chapter that has been restarted at least 6 times by now. Random snippets of future chapters. Half an outline. And an extremely inconsistent writing schedule.
In the book Hari describes his own struggles with his inability to focus, and details several contributing reasons as to why all of us are rapidly losing this ability. Obviously, our smart phones contribute to this extensively, but I was surprised to learn that humanity’s ability to focus has been declining each decade since the 1870s, so you can’t blame everything on social media and the internet (although for myself, I admit it’s definitely been an ongoing addiction since I discovered Instant Messenger in the late ’90s). Hari even went so far at one point to spend a 3 month stint of digital deprivation in a beach house in Cape Cod, to great effect, although he slipped rapidly back shortly after returning.
Right about 3/4 of the way into this book, I began week 4 of the Artist’s Way. For those of you who don’t know about week 4 is reading deprivation week. No reading at all. Of any kind. Not only that, but no internet, social media, TV…basically anything that fuels distraction. The idea being that to hear your own inner words, you have to drastically cut down on the external input of other people’s words. Suddenly I was thrust into my own mini-Cape Cod experiment.
In short: it sucked.
I LOVE reading. Like LOVE IT. That was definitely the hardest part. I was surprised to find that depriving myself from social media (mostly instagram these days) was a lot easier than I thought it would be. But the reading…not being able to read made me want to crawl out of my own skin. I spent the first three days of the week vacillating between rage cleaning/decluttering and staring off into space. I was definitely showing signs of withdrawal. I threw tantrums at the smallest annoyance. I knew I was acting like a spoiled brat, but couldn’t stop myself. During one particularly bad tantrum directed towards (not at) my husband, I lamented having to spend time in my own head, declaring dramatically that I “don’t even like myself,” before bursting into tears.
Dramatic, yes. But certainly a revelation.
Thankfully, I made it through the first 72 hours, which from past experiences giving up other addictions like chocolate and cheese, usually is the worst part. This time was no different. But that outburst kind of stuck with me. I spent the next few days thinking about it, and while it may have only been a half truth in my dopamine depleted brain, I don’t want that statement to have ANY truth whatsoever.
So I’ve been thinking a lot about my goals and how I can achieve them. My best friend is all about consistency – doing very small things every single day that end up having massive results. Seems like a total no brainer. So why, then, could I not seem to do it?
Apparently I needed to start smaller. My original goal for this month was to write 2,000 words a day. That’s what Stephen King says to do in his memiour On Writing, and he’s my favourite author, so that’s what I did. I’ve never hit that goal. Not once. Okay fine. I cut that down to 1,000 words a day. Yet still, most days I wasn’t even writing at all. Very not cool of me.
So I went as small as I could think of. My goal would be to write one sentence of my novel every day. A laughable goal. But surely, even if that’s all I do, the novel will still get done faster than if I keep waiting around for my schedule to have large blocks of time to sit at my computer and tap tap tap away and get like 5,000 words done in a day. Never going to happen, right? Well happy to report that in the last three days I’ve written over 600 words a day. I do a few minutes immediately after my morning pages, and then stop when I get stuck or have to go get ready for work. And yeah okay it’s only been a few days but I feel like this is a goal I can actually accomplish. I am always telling my students to “rig the game so you can win,” so why am I not doing it for myself?
In other news, I’m now halfway through week 5 and I’ve managed to keep my phone usage under 2.5 hours each day. This is MASSIVELY down since the time prior to week 4 where I was spending upwards of 5 or 6 hours on my phone daily. It’s amazing the amount you can do when you’re not doom-scrolling on Instagram for 3 hours a day. Who would have thought?
So, we are coming along. Thanks for reading and see you at the next update!
T. Aldwyn Lee 