The battle of the distracted mind

“I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”
 — Bilbo Baggins

Bilbo loved the Ring, but it ruled him. It guided his choices, it bound him to it. He was addicted to it. Would never leave it behind.

Much like our phones. 
It’s always in our pocket or our hand, we guard it, look at it for hours and search restlessly for it if we misplace it. We go to bed with it next to us, wake up beside it. It’s there, in every empty space of our day.

Do you recognize the feeling of being stretched?

Like your mind isn’t quite able to keep up, fit it all inside? Stressed and anxious? Your head a clutter at the end of the day?

Our minds are designed to react to the new, to learn and to keep searching. With the whole world in our pocket, the possibilities are endless.

But our focus is not endless. We can’t focus on multiple things at the same time, no matter how much we try to train ourselves with 15 apps running, flipping impatiently between feeds. We don’t really keep up with ourselves.

Our minds are smart enough to understand that we can’t get everything. It has to rationalize. 
But how?

Get as much different things as possible. 
Not a very good principle. Article too long? NEXT. The beginning a little slow? NEXT. Did I have to think to understand? NEXT.

We end up jumping, skipping, skimming and scanning. Our focus is lost in the attempt to have it all.

But worse? It doesn’t only affect our behaviour online, it affects our whole lives. 
Go for a run? Naah, better to check Twitter for the gazillionth time. 
Write on my book? Juuust after these cute cat videos on Youtube.

Thanks brain. You are actively destroying my dreams, one scroll at a time.

Everyone who’s tried to get their asses to do something valuable that has even the tiniest threshold knows the feeling. Ugh, in a moment. Just a few more minutes. And so the day passes. We get tired. We’ll do it tomorrow. Next week. When the new year starts.

… never?

Our own minds are capable of crushing even the strongest of dreams if we let it.

If you’re battling fear, this effect is even stronger. We are experts at making up excuses and reasons for not doing the work that makes us uncomfortable. The reasons will never end. You’ll never arrive at a place where you feel like you’re out of excuses. Believe me, I know first hand. In those cases, our brains are infinitely creative.

But we can take control.
Bilbo managed to leave the ring behind. And when he finally did, he felt free.

I’m not saying you should ditch your phone completely. I’m not crazy. The phone is actually not the underlying problem, it’s that our mind prioritizes all of the shiny before stepping over the threshold towards your big dreams. And there’s a lot of shiny in our world, especially in that phone of yours.

You need to take control over your haphazard, shine-loving and distracted mind.
It’s not impossible. Hard. But not impossible. 
It takes choice, routines, structure.

As a messy creative, routines might not be the sexiest idea. But if you want to get beyond a few scribbled lines after reading an especially inspiring article, then you need to make a plan.

Me, I hate to actively write in my calendar exact times for when to do creative stuff. So I don’t write it down. It’s okay, a calendar isn’t the only way. What’s more important is how you structure your everyday life.

I’ve started to get up early to write. Horrible, since I’m a dedicated night owl, but I’ve made the choice. If I wait until the evening to write, my mind will be cluttered and tired from a whole day of that scattered focus. To bring a mind like that to a creative place is hard. Sometimes it’ll work, but not every day. And I’ll feel guilty every time it don’t. It’s not a very pleasant way to live.

Just planning it won’t be enough.

You need to plan it in a way that’ll work. New Year’s resolutions are often based on the notion that if I promise, I’ll do it. If you can hold yourself accountable to your own word, then go ahead, but I know I don’t. I can always make the new promise of “I’ll do it tomorrow”. Instead, I need to make a plan that helps me follow that promise.

Yeah, I hate to get up early. But it turns out, it’s easier to get myself out of bed and sit down to write than it is to gather a tired and overwhelmed mind. Focus comes natural in the morning. The mind has forgotten about all those shiny things, it’s rested. It’s ready to focus on something. And if the first thing you present it with is what you want to work on, it’ll choose that.

I encourage you to try it. I didn’t believe it would work for me. Think in the morning? Unthinkable. But I decided to give it a try and it’s way easier than I thought. Maybe it’ll work for you too. You won’t know until you give it a real try.

As a serious procrastinator, this is revolutionary. If there is something with a creative threshold that I want done, I usually wait until I have some really nasty thoughts about myself for not doing anything and I get so uncomfortable pushing it ahead of me, I’ll sit down and fucking do it. I thought this was the normal way. Maybe it is, but it’s definitely not the good way. Even better, with a routine the threshold gets a little bit lower every time.

Starting with the important work, what I love, my why — I wake up inspired, even if it’s pitch dark outside and the clock shows the indecent time of 05:45. I go to work with a feeling that I’ve already won the day. I had energy to create. I chose my passion, before everything else.

Don’t spread yourself too thin. Choose your breakfast, before the world takes over and starts throwing bread at you. (Maybe even add a second breakfast?) Afterwards you can keep scrolling and surfing on the waves of millions of other minds, with the satisfaction of knowing that your own mind did something great today. It focused on what’s important. What you love.