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(Full episode transcript below show notes)

Do you ever find it difficult to focus on your writing — even on a project you actually enjoy? Whether due to internal or external factors, distraction comes to us in many different forms, for many different reasons.

Maybe you’re home with the kids, or have work/relationship issues on your mind, or are simply exhausted from ALL THE THINGS. Maybe you have ADHD, anxiety, and/or depression. Maybe someone is cutting down a tree directly outside of your house, or the neighbor’s dog is barking, or you have the beginnings of a migraine. Maybe you’re facing all of the above in some kind of apocalyptic nightmare scenario — or maybe it just feels like it. Either way, it’s extremely frustrating — and extremely valid.

Now, there is no “cure” for distraction. The difficult truth is that we are human beings who live in an often noisy, distracting world, and we’re inevitably going to lose our focus every once in a while. But if you find that distraction is more of a habit than a happenstance, stick with me.

In this week’s episode, we’ll discuss different tools and strategies we can use to hone our focus and banish distraction (to the degree that it’s actually possible). We’ll also talk about what to do when the distraction feels hopelessly out of our control, and how to build habits that will keep the worst of it at bay.

 As always, I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences regarding focus and distraction. Let me know in the comments below!

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Full Episode Transcript:

(00:00):
This is the Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 161: Focus and Distraction.

(00:27):
Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps all writers — aspiring, professional, and otherwise — to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m your host, Sarah Werner, and today I want to talk about distraction.

(00:45):
For me, distraction means a lack of focus, or an inability to focus on the thing that I want to be doing, which for the purposes of this podcast is writing. Distraction can be caused by external factors, internal factors, and we’re going to talk about all of that in today’s episode. So hello, welcome. I’m glad you’re here. Let’s take a look at what it means to be focused on our work and what happens when we find ourselves distracted.

(01:17):
I want to start off by saying distraction is normal. This is not a podcast episode about how to never get distracted again ever, because that’s not going to happen. We are not robots, and our brains are not bug-free computers. The world may never be as silent or dark or bright enough for us to maintain a perfect focus at all times, and that’s okay. That just comes from being a person, a writer who lives in a physical world. But I think it is possible to hone your ability to focus, even if that’s not something you’ve been able to do before ever. And I speak from experience. I’ve been really reluctant to share this on the podcast, and it’s honestly part of the reason why I haven’t had as many episodes coming out lately (and by that I mean it’s November and I think this is my fourth episode of the year), and that is I was diagnosed with ADHD. Yes, as an adult, and as an adult woman. Nonetheless, part of the reason I’ve been reluctant to share this with you is because of the stigma I feel is attached to talking about ADHD.

(02:36):
I think immediately when I said those four letters, probably about 10% of you listeners just pushed stop on the podcast, and you’re no longer listening. So I don’t know why I’m talking to you. I’ve noticed in trying to talk about and be open about this diagnosis of what is actually a neurodevelopmental disorder that [people] shut down when I talk about it and they say, oh, Sarah, everybody has ADHD or ADHD isn’t real, or ADHD is all in your head, which… technically it scientifically it is — it’s in my brain. It’s basically a lack of dopamine, which causes all sorts of different behaviors. I found that when I told people, Hey, I just got diagnosed with ADHD and it’s explaining a lot about me, I felt myself getting a little bit defensive because the, quote, “symptoms” of ADHD (I don’t know why I put quotes around that) — the symptoms of ADHD are typically things that are not accepted by normal society. They are in fact things that we see as lazy, lacking in discipline. Overindulgent.

(03:54):
Growing up, if it was hard for me to pay attention in class, it was because I was lazy or because I was too easily distracted or because I wasn’t interested enough or because I was a bad student — and honestly, I wasn’t a bad student. I got good grades. I graduated summa *** laude from high school. I graduated *** laude from college, and I think I did pretty okay. I know things. I learned stuff in school. I just did it at my own pace or I did it through extreme procrastination, which again, can be easily interpreted as lazy. And lazy is so often seen as a moral failing. So in part, I feel like by saying, “Hey, I have an ADHD diagnosis,” what I’m saying is, “Here’s my heart. I’m opening it up to you and you can tell me whether or not you think I’m a moral failure.” I mean, I hope you don’t think I’m a moral failure, but again, that’s up to you and as I’ve learned, other people’s opinions of me are none of my business.

(05:02):
The other reaction that I hear is, oh, you weren’t diagnosed as a child, so therefore you don’t really have it. To that, I say, when I was growing up in the eighties, people legitimately did not think that girls could have ADHD because it presents differently in male and female children, and male and female adults. Growing up, we said, oh, that kid is ADHD, because it was usually a boy who sat in the back of the class who could not sit still. He was fidgeting into his seat. He wanted to go out to recess. He couldn’t pay attention. He was disruptive in class. That was the classic ADHD or ADD diagnosis that I grew up witnessing.

(05:46):
So when my friend Sean suggested as an adult in what was my mid-thirties, “Sarah, have you ever just looked at getting diagnosed for ADHD?” I said, no. Why would I do that? I’m not a boy sitting in the back of class having trouble sitting still, fidgeting, thinking about football, jumping out the window and whatever. I don’t have ADHD.

(06:12):
And then I started reading about the symptoms and how they present themselves in girls and in women. (I promise this whole podcast episode is not going to be about ADHD. This is simply something that I wanted to explore as we dive into today’s topic.) Finally, in my very late thirties, after doing a little bit of research and seeing some things that I struggled with on a daily basis reflected in ADHD symptom listings, I went in and I sat down for an ADHD assessment, which for me took about two hours. And what it does is it looks at not only what you’re dealing with in the present, but also historically through your childhood, what you and other people witnessed as specific behaviors. And for this segment of the assessment, I actually was able to dig up some notes from teachers. My mom generally throws away pretty much everything, but she did keep a file for me and each of my siblings that contained, I guess, important school documents. And so I was able to go through this folder, and I found documentation and it was a little bit surreal. One teacher wrote specifically that I had issues — I struggled with moving between tasks, so moving from science to math, moving from gym class to geography. Another noticed that I preferred to read books under my desk instead of paying attention to the lesson. Another noted that I seemed spacey, that I had trouble understanding the segments of the day, that if maybe I procrastinated less, I could live up to my true potential. I forgot things constantly. I left things at school. I left things at home. I forgot about projects entirely. I won’t go through the whole list with you here, but I was very quickly diagnosed as an adult with ADHD and more than anything else, certain behaviors that I struggled with began to make sense, and once they began to make sense, once I could identify and label them, I was able to not cure them, not become a “better new person”, but I was able to start dealing with them more intentionally.

(08:41):
And as I began to deal with some of these things more intentionally, I noticed that a lot of my Write Now Podcast episodes dealt with what I now understood to be ADHD issues: procrastination, motivation, getting lost in a hyperfocus, obsessing about strange, random little things, an inability to stay focused even when I deeply cared about the project I was working on.

(09:09):
And so I stopped podcasting for a little while because I was really in my own head about — this whole time, have I not been podcasting about writing so much as podcasting about having ADHD and not knowing it? Is my show actually helpful? Is my show actually even about writing?

(09:31):
Today was really the first day that I sat down and journaled my thoughts about all of this, and I realized, you know what? A lot of people struggle with focus and distraction. A lot of people struggle with procrastination. In fact, everybody probably does. It’s not just people who have ADHD. Everybody struggles with these things. So maybe these episodes are helpful to writers regardless.

(10:02):
So I am not a special snowflake. I am not unique in these struggles. At least I don’t think I am, and I’m not sure if that’s good news or bad news, but we’re just going to take it and move forward.

(10:16):
So… you sit down to write, and 30 minutes later you realize you still haven’t started writing. In fact, you’re not even thinking about writing. You’re not even looking at the page. You’re scrolling on your phone or you’re looking out of the window, or maybe you’re looking at the page, but you’re not thinking about your story. You’re thinking about THING — insert THING here, whatever that may be, that THING that is not the project that you currently want to be working on. You are distracted.

(10:52):
I feel like distraction looks different for everybody. Some people can’t sit still. Some people just find they’re having trouble focusing. Some people realize their brain is jumping all over the place. Some people feel an intense pressure to be doing literally anything else other than sitting down and writing. Some people find themselves responding to emails without even realizing they’ve opened up their web browser.

(11:17):
So my first question for you is, when you’re distracted, how long does it take before you realize that you are distracted, and what does that tend to look like for you? I realized that a lot of the time, I didn’t even know I was distracted or having difficulty focusing until I was 45 minutes in and realized I had not written a word, or I realized that I had been doing something that I had not intended to do — just pure muscle memory. I opened up my phone and I started scrolling through social media without intentionally wanting to do that.

(12:00):
It’s easy to get distracted from writing. Writing is a big, massive undertaking. Writing is hard. It is. It’s hard. I know we love to do it, but it also uses energy, and there are so many other things that can give us a quick fix, a quick jolt of dopamine. Like, sure, I could finish writing this scene, but I could also scroll the infinite scroll of Instagram. Both give me dopamine. It’s just that one is passive and one is active; one is easy and one is hard. And it’s not a moral failing, or a failing of any kind. If your brain sometimes just wants to scroll through Instagram, that is okay. We are not machines. We are not productivity engines. We cannot be productive 12 hours a day, 24 hours a day, whatever it is we think or we are told that we “should” be. We get distracted despite our best intentions.

(13:04):
And like I mentioned earlier, not all distraction is internal. Not all of it comes from our brains. Some of you may be familiar with the sound of screaming children, or construction work out in your street, or barking dogs, or people who constantly need your help. These are all distractions that can break the focus we need to truly dig into our writing and write.

(13:33):
Then there’s the odd time, and I don’t know if this has ever happened to you or if you’ve ever found yourself doing this, but every once in a while I will consciously realize that my brain is searching for distraction. I’ll find myself walking around the house saying, does this need to be cleaned? I haven’t watered my plants yet this week. Is there anything else that should go into the dishwasher? I will find myself actively searching for tasks that I normally do not want to do because my brain is looking for distraction from my writing project.

(14:13):
So there’s a lot going on here. There are a lot of things that can break or intrude upon our focus, and it’s really frustrating in most cases, at least for me, I’ve found that there’s still part of me, despite all this, that wants to write, even if I find myself looking for distractions. There’s still a pull toward, oh man, I should really be getting some words down. I should really, really make some progress today. I don’t want to be distracted, and it can get really frustrating.

(14:45):
I don’t know if you’ve ever read Deep Work by Cal Newport, but it was one of my favorite books, and I found that it applied to writing. It applies just to so many things, but in his book, Deep Work, Cal Newport talks about our need to have a large chunk of uninterrupted time in which we can sit down and generate and further develop big ideas. Now, I totally agree with this. It takes me a long time to really get into my work. It takes me a good 20 – 30 minutes to sort of get my brain back into a project first thing in the morning.

(15:26):
It makes sense that yes, if you have hundreds or thousands of dollars to rent a seaside cabin where you won’t be disturbed at all, where you can work on a book or a project for uninterrupted weeks at a time, yeah, that’s great for your writing. But the thing is, long stretches of uninterrupted time aren’t really available for everyone — parents, I’m looking at you, but I’m also looking at anyone else who has daily responsibilities or a difficult schedule or trouble sleeping, people who are maybe struggling with their relationships, people whose work life is chaotic.

(16:09):
Growing up, my dad was a pastor, and he had the opportunity to do something called a sabbatical, which meant time away from his work so that he could have that deep focus on something. I was really sad when I found out as an adult that, if you are working at a typical office job, so if you’re in marketing like I was, you don’t really get a sabbatical. At least here in the United States. You don’t really ever get more than a couple of days off at a time, and those days off are usually filled with all the things that you can’t usually do during the work week.

(16:47):
So what we really need to learn how to do is work within the restrictions that we’re given. Everybody has restrictions: time restrictions, health restrictions, focus restrictions. Everybody is working with-slash-against something. Maybe you don’t have eight hours a day to set aside for writing, but maybe you do have two hours in the morning before anyone else in the house wakes up, or an hour after everyone is in bed, or 45 minutes over your lunch break each day. It’s really difficult to remember when we look at our lack of giant eight-hour swaths of time that the little steps can still add up. Even writing a hundred words a day could get you a short novella by the end of the year. So don’t despair, because life will never live up to what we want it to be.

(17:45):
So once you’ve identified what distraction looks like for you, and it could be (and probably will be) multiple things, write them down, make a list, acknowledge them. I know I’m not a therapist or a mental health professional or anything like that, but I have found that at least for me, this was helpful. Some of the items on your list are things that we can work on. Some of the things on your list are just life. Some things are within your control, and probably many, many more things are outside of your control.

(18:25):
I remember, years ago, I was trying to focus on a project and it had some kind of crazy deadline that I was working against, and my neighbor started cutting down a tree. And it was so loud, it was shaking the windows. And I remember I was near tears and I said, I cannot work with this. And I remember I was near tears because of that helpless feeling. I couldn’t work, and I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t say, hi, can you please stop cutting down this tree?

(19:01):
So look at your list and identify what things are in your control and what things aren’t. This can be simultaneously deeply frustrating, but also a kind of liberating exercise. Once we realize that not everything in our world is within our control, we can stop blaming ourselves so much. We can relieve ourselves of at least some of that pressure. I have to be with the kids when they get home from school from 3:30 until they go to bed at 8:30 PM, and so there’s no use feeling guilty during those hours for not writing. And there’s freedom to just be with the kids. If you get migraines or disease flareups or any sort of pain — pain is very distracting, and usually outside of our control. Now, if there is something you can do to cut down on the pain, then I definitely encourage you to do that. But if you can’t write because you are in pain, don’t blame yourself. It’s not your fault. No one expects you to write and to produce good creative work when your body is rebelling against you.

(20:18):
But there are many types of distraction that are within our control, and that’s what I want to spend the rest of this episode talking about — is what do we do with this? What do we do about it?

(20:32):
(Side note, I just had to pause this recording because a whole bunch of airplanes just went over my house. So… distractions that we can’t help. Okay, back to distractions that we do maybe have some degree of control over.)

(20:47):
For me, it has been helpful to understand what it feels like to be distracted when I’m distracted, and what causes me to become distracted. So writing down that list earlier was a helpful step for me. So then you can identify — and again, in my case, it has been most helpful to take preventative measures. One of the easiest steps that I sort of trained myself to do was to put my phone on do not disturb (or focus mode as it’s often now called I think in some operating systems), or turn the phone off altogether. Now if you have kids, if you have people who might need to get in touch with you in an emergency, you might not be comfortable turning off your phone. I am not comfortable turning off my phone because I want to know if something happens to a loved one, so I’ll use focus or do not disturb mode while I’m writing. There are also programs that — if you find yourself, and a lot of the times it’s just habit, it’s just muscle memory. If you find yourself reaching toward your phone or if you look down and realize you are holding your phone in your hand and you are scrolling through Instagram and you have no idea how that happened, there are also preventative measures that you can take.

(22:02):
There are a lot of focus apps that will essentially brick your phone for a certain amount of time. I use Flora, which it lets you grow a little tree and if you use your phone for anything during the set amount of focus time, you kill the little tree, and it’s very sad and distressing. And so the stakes are low, but it still helps me to not use my phone.

(22:28):
Another thing that I have found is helpful is for me — sound is extremely distracting, and so I invested in a pair of noise canceling headphones… and usually that is not even enough for me. My brain is like a magnet for distraction, and it’s a magnet for sounds especially. It searches out, it’s got a radar that’s looking for sounds to distract me and pull me out of my writing. So even with the noise canceling headphones on, I also have to run an app that has constant white noise or rain noises to really just fully drown everything out for me. That has been extremely helpful, and I encourage you to experiment with white noise, with ambient noise, with rain noises, with lyric-free music — that sounds weird… music without lyrics — if that’s helpful to you, so that you can give yourself a better chance at maintaining your focus when you need to.

(23:27):
I also have the ability to shut the door. I used to work out at the dining room table in our house, which… I loved working out there because there were windows and I could snuggle with Cyrus (my cat) while I wrote, but I realized that there was no door that I could shut. And sometimes a shut door is a very useful tool in keeping yourself from being distracted when, if you have other people in the house, keeping other people maybe gently outside of your writing space, visibly closing off any distractions of people or pets walking by, or maybe even keeping pets out. I love animals. I love our pets, but I often need to gently remove them from my writing space and keep them out so that I can focus.

(24:20):
You may also find sometimes that you are distracted because you are too tired to focus. Maybe you are missing out on some sleep, maybe you are burned out. Maybe you have a lot going on in life and you are emotionally drained. There are a lot of different things, believe it or not, in this world that will make you extremely tired. And sometimes it comes down to the choice of: do I need to push myself to focus more, or do I need to let my brain rest? Do I simply need to set a timer for 25 minutes and to take a nap? A lot of this you don’t know until you experiment with it a little bit. That’s something that I have found for me personally. I know for a lot of people, a quick power nap will help restore their energy and refresh their focus. For me, if I take a nap, no matter if I set an alarm or a number of alarms, I will be out for the next three to four hours. I am, for whatever reason, incapable of taking a short nap. And so for me, naps are simply not on the menu. But if you find this is something that works for you and does help restore and refresh your focus, I encourage you to give it a try.

(25:36):
Similarly, I often find myself feeling jittery and restless, and my body is twitching and I’m moving my shoulders and I’m swaying back and forth in my seat, and I realize I need to go for a walk. And so I will go. We live on a graveyard as many of you know, and one lap around the graveyard is, very fortunately, one mile. So I will go out and I will do one lap around the graveyard. So about 15 to 20 minutes is a mile (because I’m a slow walker), and usually that and then maybe another smaller lap or another full lap will be enough so that I’ve let my body get its restless energy out, and then I can come inside and I can finally focus. Plus, if I’ve been sitting in the chair and staring at my screen or my page and trying to force myself to focus, a change of scenery really and truly can help restore your focus. It can refresh your mind. I know for me, even just looking at trees, as silly as that sounds, going outside and looking at trees is often enough to refresh me. And after a 20 minute walk, I can come back in and I can write.

(26:51):
If you find you are distracted because you have a list of to-dos and “shoulds” burning in your mind or burning on a list right next to you, it’s time for another decision. Do you want to knock out one or two or more of the tasks on that list and get them over with so that you can focus, or have you set aside this time to focus and you need to get that list out of sight and know that when your writing time is over in 30 minutes, in an hour, whenever it is, know that you will get to those tasks at that time and not before? This is kind of a hard boundary to set with yourself and it’s something that I very much struggle with. It’s very hard for me to focus when I know that there’s dishes getting crusty in the sink or, darn it, I have an appointment in 30 minutes, aaah, I’ve got to get ready for it, even though it won’t take me 30 minutes to get ready for it, et cetera. So do you do one or two of the items on the to-do list? Will that alleviate the pressure and allow you to focus?

(27:55):
Again, this is probably not something that you will know and understand right away. You might have to experiment and after a few days say, you know what? I’ve noticed that when I go to my to-do list, I just stay on the to-do list. I never come back to my writing. That does not work for me. I need to save my to-do list for after my writing session, and I need to put my to-do list in a place where it cannot weigh on my soul, where it cannot judge me from afar. I need to get it out of sight, out of mind. So again, whatever works best for you — I encourage you to experiment and find out how you can be least distracted, if this is something that you struggle with.

(28:36):
Now, what do you do when your brain is distracting itself? I don’t know about you, but my brain will often fixate or lock onto something, and I try to redirect it back to my writing project and it’s like, no, Sarah, you need to research 19th century alchemical practices right now. And when that happens, my brain becomes a sort of runaway train chugging single-mindedly toward that weird offshoot — not what I want to be working on, but something that it is fixated on for whatever reason. The good news is that, if you do stay on that particular train track, often at least I’ve discovered that the things my brain decides it wants to research randomly will actually end up having a place in the story that I’m writing, the story that I’m telling. So often I do relieve the itch to research something, but I have to remain very aware of the time that I’m giving it. I don’t want to go down a Wikipedia rabbit hole for four hours and not get any writing done.

(29:48):
And sometimes your brain’s going to do what your brain’s going to do, and sometimes even though it’s your brain, sometimes it’s not 100% within your sphere of control, which… again, very frustrating, but also part of life.

(30:03):
I have not even begun to scratch the surface, probably, with the plentiful things in this world that can distract us from our writing, that can take away from our focus on our work. But I hope that in this discussion I’ve given you a couple things. First, the ability to name and label and identify and understand what it is that distracts your focus, what it is that distracts you from the work that you feel you are called to do. What is taking that away from you?

(30:38):
B… or two… I guess we didn’t really number or letter the first one, so I’ll just say — I also… I hope that you take a look at that list and really understand which of these are within my control. I cannot stop the city from working on the pipes outside of my house — I mean, not without taking some very drastic and possibly illegal measures. I can’t keep my neighbor from cutting down that tree. I can’t control that there are people in my life that need help right now. And when you come across these inevitable frustrating things, I hope you take a moment to realize this is not in my control. This is not a failure of me to write. This is not a moral failing. And I hope that you give yourself some grace, and give the people and loved ones (and maybe less-than loved ones) in your life some grace and forgiveness. And for the things that you can control or at least influence, I encourage you to take those often preventative steps. If you know you have a tendency to scroll through social media and lose two hours of your day, put your phone on airplane mode, turn it off, put it out of reach, put it in focus mode. Understand that that’s a distraction for you, and start building the habit around doing something about it.

(32:07):
Shut your door. Unwire your doorbell, soundproof your windows. Kindly ask your neighbor to turn their radio down. Take a walk, take a shower, take a nap. Take care of one of those items on your to-do list that is burning into your brain, or put your to-do list out of sight and out of mind until your writing session is over. Use your noise canceling headphones. Use that Spotify subscription. Use a white noise machine. Use the time in your life, in your living space, when no one else can interrupt you.

(32:46):
But most of all, remember: we’re not robots and our brains are not bug-free computers. They simply are not. And we will face distraction and lack of focus from time to time. Build habits for the things that are within your control. Take care of the things that you can influence, and give yourself grace for the things that you can’t.

(33:11):
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Write Now podcast. Special thanks go to the people who support me via Patreon and other platforms, especially: Laurie, Regina Calabrese, Amber Fratesi, Charmaine Ferreira, Kim, Mike Teftt, Poppy Brown, Summer, Tiffany Joyner, and Whitney McGruder. Seriously, thank you so much for your financial contributions. You helped me keep this show hosted and ad free, and I truly appreciate it.

(33:47):
If you would like to support the show, there is a link in the show notes for this episode where you can do so. If you want to use Patreon, you can. If you want to use something else, I do have other options. So yeah, see what works best for you. If you want to give $1 per episode, if you want to give $2 per episode, or more, you can totally do that, and I am very appreciative. So thank you.

(34:12):
And with that, this has been episode 161 of the Write Now Podcast, the podcast that helps all writers — aspiring, professional, and otherwise — to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m Sarah Werner, and I’m going to go try and focus on something.