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Filling an empty page with compelling, coherent sentences means shutting out the rest of the world, at least temporarily. Linking disparate thoughts, saying something new in a way that doesn’t waste a reader’s time, requires an intense, prolonged focus. On top of that, the process of writing a magazine story-trying to make sense of the world in a way that might mean something to total strangers-can be lonely, exhausting, sometimes even physically painful. There’s always one more meme, one more video, one more Wikipedia rabbit hole. Sometimes I’ll close an app, then immediately re-open it without thinking. Sometimes I’ll catch my thumbs scrolling through Facebook or Twitter before my brain even realizes what’s happening. If you work from home, like I do, there’s always another chore you could do, always something else you could clean.Īnd obviously, there’s the ultimate distraction of our time: social media. There will always be one more phone call you could make, one more meeting you could schedule. If you check back often enough, there will always be another message somewhere waiting to be read and responded to. I decided that if I could manage a few regular hours of deep concentration and focus on this one thing, everything in life would improve.īut it wasn’t nearly that easy. Then, I told myself, with so many sources of work stress gone, I might be able to focus on being a better husband, a better friend, a better, happier person in general.
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And I’d certainly have more money and more freedom with the rest of my time. Maybe I’d finally have time to work on a book.
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I’d avoid the panic of a race to meet a deadline and the dread of those all-night, caffeine-fueled rewrites. If I could just sit in a chair and type for roughly 15 percent of my day, I’d get ahead of schedule on every writing project. If I could block off four hours a day to do nothing but write, nearly all of my problems would be solved. “The ability to stay focused will be the superpower of the 21st century.”