I have a terrible confession to make

Are there more distractions at home? Or more distractions out of the house?

In the confessional spirit of the thread, I'll admit to being distracted pretty easily everywhere.

 

Ooh, ooh, there's something shiny!

 

"my coffee shop"

Does Pearlman also say "we" when he talks about his favorite teams? Douche.

 

The connection one feels for their local coffee shop is very deep.

 

I get distracted, too. I have to really force myself to leave the Internet off when I'm writing, for instance. My table at the coffee shop is by itself, in a little front window, like a box. (A couple of people have joked that I look like I'm in a sound booth, because I wear headphones as well.) But what the coffee shop does for me, at least, is send a signal to my brain that says: You are here to work. Because my home is also for so many other things, like sleeping and watching TV, I think it's hard sometimes for me to associate it with work. But the coffee shop equals work. I go there to work.

It's effective for me, too. I didn't feel like writing at all yesterday. I'd reached a tough section of the book and was just... Not into it. But I forced myself to the coffee shop and wrote 750 words that I felt good about. If I'd stayed home, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have written a single word, and I would have woken up today feeling all shitty and stressed.

 

I finally broke down and bought a laptop on Black Friday. It's been used maybe three times for a total of 15 minutes. With my kids around, even if they're sleeping or quietly playing together (rare but it happens), I get too distracted by the potential of what could/likely will happen to use it. There's a thought that I will set up a mini-office in my room, but I'm a terrible procrastinator and the room is the worst place to be to keep track of the minions.

I actually had some work to do this morning so I came to the office because it's the only place I can tune everything out for any length of time.

 

I'm lucky enough to have a great home office. And I've often had to write in less than ideal circumstances - planes, trains, cars, boats, press boxes, garages, newsrooms.

Truth is, all distractions arise from the inside.

Lately I feel less able to tune myself in.

Not sure why.

 

At my brothers law firm, he restricted what his associates could access online form their office computers. Legal stuff, and whatnot is available.

But, he also put in a coffee bar, pool table, and sort of “Internet cafe” in a common area. So, folks are free to take breaks, and check their personal email, and whatnot, but have fewer distractions while at their desk.

I think it’s a little harsh, but probably also makes some sense.

 

It's funny, but the job is the biggest distraction from the job.

There's so much reading to do, and so much research, that I find myself days down the rabbit hole before I get back to the question where the research started. One thing leads to another and another and another and before you know it, you've got 15000 words of notes for a 2500-word story.

So the internet is only part of it.

Best job in the world, though.

 

I don't know ... I enjoy doing research and writing about it, and I am three or four sentences away from finishing a pretty nice paper.

I've been three or four sentences away for more than a week.

 

Brother, if only!

I've been a month away from finishing a story since last May. (I wrote a bunch of other stories in the meantime, but still.)

In part thanks to the worst example of my purposeless woolgathering: I keep researching stories that've already run.

Doing that now.

 

My closest academic friend, who was my dissertation chair (and prior to that the professor in a course that set me on this path), she and I worked together with another guy years ago who absolutely was horrendous about closing the deal. We'd be in that final push, trying to get something out the door and under review (often under a deadline as we were targeting journals' special issues) ... and he'd show up with another stack of Xeroxed articles we might want to work in. Dude! Enough!

We finally quit working with him because he was hopeless.