Staying focused isn’t always the easiest thing to do, especially if you are one of the many journalists or associate producers who are grouped together in a series of VFPs.
We stop and start. Throw out drafts. Get frustrated. And wish we could just lock ourselves in a dark room for a half-hour with no distractions and… just… write. Well, life isn’t fair, but I did find a great little article called How to Concentrate on Writing that has some good tips. Among the suggestions:
- Switch off email. Or… disable all the notifications that tell me I have new mail.
- Isolate myself. I use Bose noise-cancelling headphones but don’t plug them into anything. The silence really is golden.
- Get up early. 6am is the most productive time of day for writing. No distractions. It also feels more virtuous than staying up late with work.
- Chunking. Setting a timer or alarm clock for 15, 20, 30, 50 minutes and doing nothing but writing until it goes off and then taking a break seems like a good way to make progress.
- S**tty first draft. Splitting the work into distinct writing and editing phases breaks the job down nicely and it takes off some of the pressure to ‘get it right first time’.
Personally, I know I’d work a hell of a lot harder if the CBC were to install these in all our workstations. Click. Yum. Click. Yum.
|
Email This Post |
| Freelancing, News & Journalism |
Thanks for linking to my blog post on ‘how to concentrate on writing’. It’s certainly easier to concentrate for me here, working from home, than for anyone who has to work in an office. I get very distracted by people talking and I’m not sure I would be very productive in a busy environment. I’d be fascinated to find out how people cope with this and buy themselves some privacy.
There’s a flip side to working at home …
Unless you’re very focussed and extremely self-disciplined, at home things like unwatered plants, uncuddled pets and unlimited candy are *very* distracting and counter-productive.
Not to mention unrenovated patios.
LONG story.