Support sour focus is a strange kind of thinking but it’s a true need. Let’s dip into this concept. You need to have a support system for your focus outside of the writing. Your work is not just the result of your writing time. It is everything you do in your day. You bring all of it to the table when you sit down to write. If you want your A game when you sit down, you have to have an A game support system the rest of the day so that it can replenish your focus resources and build new reserves.
Be Active
One of the keys to keep your focus strong is getting the blood out of our feet and into our heads. We also need to build our capacity for work, aka our physical fitness. We need fitness for focus. For the writer this is available at two times during our day. One is found while writing and the second is found in the rest of the day.
The power break
Taking breaks at regular intervals while you are working maximizes our reserves, allowing us to maintain peak productivity. When we are writing these breaks can be as short as five minutes and as long as half an hour at the end of our twenty five or fifty minute work periods. Yes, the Pomodoro system is based on this concept. For the writer these breaks allow us to clear our minds and let the subconscious do its thing with the work while it allows the body to sustain longer work times.
Using your break times for surfing on line or similar online distractions do not yield much gain. These power breaks work best when we get some body movement in.
You do not have to put in a Tobata or some other short type of workout, though you could do that for a break during a longer series should you want to blend in a more vigorous approach. You do not have to be this aggressive though.
Most people will be happy to know we get excellent results just standing up and walking around at your normal walking pace so that you can circulate the blood. So get up walk, walk some stairs, go to the toilet, get out of the building for a minute or two and breathe deep, look out a window if you cannot go out, stretch a bit and again breathe deep. Movement refreshes the body and the mind while prepping you for the next round.
My take on supporting your focus
I have used these kinds of breaks for years. Even an hour of writing in the evening runs better when broken up by a five or ten minute moving break. When you remember that being too sedentary is a big problem these days, these simple breaks can be part of your cure along with better focus and higher quality production. Total win win.
They are not limited to your writing time either. The same technique can be spread throughout your day with either 25 minute or 50 minute work periods to maximize your energy and focus for the day.
The rest of your day
Aside from breaking up your day there are other things you can do regularly to support and improve your focus.
Fitness
Being fit has been proven to improve both focus and energy. You don’t have to be a marathon runner either to achieve the laser like focus that runners do. Though if you do happen to be an endurance athlete or aspire to be one there are plenty of writers like Haruki Murakami or Joyce Carol Oats, among others, to draw inspiration from. You can read a better line of thought from Oats in To Invigorate Literary Mind, Start Moving Literary Feet or Nick Ripatrazone’s Why Writers Run
You can skip the hard core, just going for a walk, swimming or adding other low impact workouts still reduce stress, improve health, and strengthens your focus for writing. Plus some exercise and fresh air does wonders for excellent sleep, which is so essential for all kinds of mental skills from hatching your plots, avoiding deus ex machina and of course focus.
Plan as you go
Keeping a note book or pad on hand to take notes when ideas come through out your day is a great way to improve your focus while writing. When we know what we are going to write about focus becomes more natural.
To support your focus practice focus
Focus is like any other skill. We get better when we do it more. Learning to stay focused does not happen overnight. You need to learn it and then practice.
Another common problem can be trouble keeping a schedule. You are fine. Experiment to find what works for you.
If you fail to write for weeks or years, how do you avoid discouragement long enough to start? Like Nike. Just Do It. Make yourself sit and write, even just ten minutes. You could use micro habits to build the practice and as a fall back for those days you are tempted to skip. Find the smallest part of your task you can do. Make it so small that you can not come up with a reason not to do it. Then place that micro habit at a point in your day where you cannot avoid it. The classic example of this is building the habit of daily flossing by starting with just one tooth every day for the first five days. Five days gives you the habit. Building off of it happens rapidly.
Writing is no different. Put down the equivalent of flossing just one tooth, like say write just five words and quit. No more no less for the first five days. Then let yourself build your habit from there. It also helps if the work is something you care about since our emotions do give us energy to do things we care about. You can use anything that works.
Make your schedule a habit
Having a schedule for our days builds a mental pattern for us to lock into so we can tap into our natural flow. It allows us to write when our focus is at its peak and custom build your schedule to meet your needs. Write when you want to. That can be before breakfast, a couple hours in the afternoon or an hour before bed. Even just seven hours on weekends. When does not matter. The only thing that matters is consistency and regularity over time.
When you first start, develop the habit to write first. The reason is till your writing is more of a habit, and even after to some degree, writing can take more time than you will expect from interruptions, illness and unforeseen technical problems. You will avoid much frustration if you work your projects without a schedule till you have enough experience to know how long a given amount of work will take.
So skip setting a dead line for finishing a novel by January 1 or writing a blog post every Monday. Avoid the overwhelm, the need to pull an all nighter or even just giving up on the project. Skip writing deadlines, along with deadlines for all the other writing tasks from research to edits on through to rereading, in favor of using chunks of time at regular intervals. You will give yourself a better chance for success.
Getting back to work
Schedules are often made just to fail. Life happens. Things need to get done.
It is not uncommon for issues from kids to selling the house come between you and your schedule. You are going to lose writing time at times.
What can you do?
Go with the flow and then get back into the schedule as soon as you get past dealing with life’s curve ball. Consider adapting your schedule that you loved to the new situation. Completely revise it if you need to. You can also use what I call habit keepers to ride things through, or bare bone minimums that you cannot skip. For instance you can peel back your writing to just five minutes instead of an hour but keep your normal start time.
The thing to remember is that your feelings and thoughts can fool you into thinking your work is not all that important. You wind up procrastinating. The longer you do that the harder it gets to jump back into the game. Don’t wait too long. Jump into the ice filled water.
Feelings and thoughts
One of the bigger false realities comes from what you feel or think. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, feel fear or dread or worry, or have that critic in your head going off on how your writing is not any good and that you can’t complete it. We can easily feel tired or think we are too distracted to write right now.
The reality is you are not your thoughts or your feelings. Thoughts are, as the monks say monkies chattering in your mind. They are nothing more than the habitual thoughts you have picked up from others. Your feelings are the emotional responses to your thoughts and conditioned responses. Become aware of them both, but let them pass through your head without attention. Don’t let them stop you from getting to your work. Make the choice to write, then act on it.
One practice is to free write for a chunk of time, say twenty minutes. As you fall into a groove the critic and feelings will fade away. It may take time but it will happen.
You can’t do it all
The fact is we all have things we like to do besides writing. We have desires to hit the beach, go skiing, hang with friends, almost anything that is fun and easy. Social media is a huge addictive distraction for many.
The only choice we have is to make cuts and simplify our lives in other areas so we can work on our writing. Ask yourself the hard questions “Are you going to write or not?” “Is your novel going to be ship ed?” Be choosy. Find what you really can live without then move some writing into that slot. Be sure to keep some healthy activities like eating right, staying active and spending time with family and friends.
The key for better focus really comes down to commitment and work. Make the commitment and do the work. Supporting your focus will give you gains. It is also very useful when you are in the belly of the beast.
Photo by Neil Thomas on Unsplash
