Sometimes it seems like I spend most of my working day just trying to avoid… oh, drat, give me a second. New email. It might be important, but the icon’s not going to vanish until I… Oh. Just spam. Where was I again? Oh, yes, distractions.
For the last month, I’ve been working from home instead of in the office, and by far the hardest part – ignoring the constant mental struggle not to move the fridge upstairs and spend the day shovelling anything over 200 calories directly into my face – has been mastering the art of getting stuff done. Or trying to, at least. Really, I’m more of an anti-distraction novice at best, since I’ve easily spent more time tweaking and fiddling with things to ensure a clean, distraction-free world than I’d ever have lost by simply checking my e-mails and taking a couple of seconds to close Twitter.
How bad am I? Yesterday, I spent an hour tracking down the sound of rainstorms in the misguided belief that a bit of light pitter-patter would be the perfect accompaniment to a quiet evening at the keyboard. I didn’t want to go to www.rainymood.com, as wonderful as it is, because I’m paranoid about getting reliant on something like that, only to have it snatched away by the cruel whims of fate.
I ended up with an app for my Android phone called Relax and Sleep that doesn’t simply offer rain, but lets you mix and match sounds like a campfire and the purring of a kitten. Cue an hour or two of mixing until the audio landscape was just right, then I got bored and played music instead. Atmosphere sorted and day mostly gone, I decided to write it off and devote the rest of my time to sorting out a distraction-free working environment. There are plenty of apps that help you do this on Mac, but very few on PC. The most popular for the Mac, WriteRoom, costs £15. That’s £15 for a program that simply sticks a plain text editor in the middle of your screen and blanks out everything else.
After an hour of giggling about that and searching for a free alternative, I started thinking £15 didn’t sound so bad… even factoring in the £600 or so for a Mac Mini to run it on. Being far too tight-fisted for that though, I resolved to just go back to Word and ensure my default fonts and margins were perfect so I’d be extra productive tomorrow. Cue hollow laughter. This fiddling is the second worst kind of distraction in my book – a sloshy cocktail of success and guilt, since deep down you know you’re not even fooling yourself. By the time you’ve miserably stooged to the local shop for a much-needed compensation donut, you’re back to square 0.01. All your news feeds have refreshed, there’s new mail in your inbox and there’s a one-sided conversation via IM going, “Hello? Hello?”
It’s not like this would be difficult to stop. Move the cursor to the little internet icon. Click it. Disconnect. But these days, that’s like saying you can get rid of an itchy armpit by amputating your torso – it’s true, but you’re still going to want to try constructing a scratching device from bamboo and sandpaper before going to such lengths. In the case of the net, we simply tell ourselves that we need the distractions, knowing full well that they’re just an excuse to procrastinate.
Except, what if it’s true – if distraction can be harnessed for good? I’m reminded of an Orson Scott Card story set in Asimov’s Foundation universe, which gave library researchers special holodeck-style cubicles designed to keep them constantly off balance. The idea was that every time they got distracted, their brains would spark off a new idea when they looked back at the documents they were working on. This concept appealed to me when I first read it.
Remembering it, how could I not reach for a piece of paper and start sketching out ideas for something I will never build? It could be a Kinect project for dual-monitor systems. Every time you glance over, it would display something at random – a picture, a word, a quote, whatever. What better way to send your imagination racing down new paths? Surely that would compensate for the wasted hours thinking, “I’ll get back to work as soon as it shows a truck/stanza of iambic pentameter/ red beach ball”.
If you think it sounds silly, consider yourself Testimonial-ed, because even thinking of it made me more productive. True, only because I spent so long that I needed a new distraction, and the only thing that distracts from a distraction is legitimate work, but that’s not the point! Claiming that all this wasted time helped means that it wasn’t really wasted at all. It’s a lie, but a lie I’m happy to keep telling myself – especially when I load Wikipedia or TV Tropes.