Want a super-power? Concentrate*…

Man, that was HARD. I wrote recently about focusing on one thing at a time. I’d been listening to a podcast where Tim Ferris said he’d once heard someone say that being able to focus on one task at a time for up to two to five hours was the modern-day equivalent of a superpower.

If you write, you’ve turned procrastination into an art form. I have. My distractions include the cat. Oh, where are you wee Freddie, do you want a little cuddle? To be honest, most of the time, he probably wants to be left alone to sleep in peace.

Then, I run up and down stairs engaged in trivial tasks, such as putting my empty Diet Coke bottle in the recycling bin when it could quite happily wait until lunchtime. Or I check my emails and react to them, instead of doing what the professionals tell you and checking them, prioritising and replying to them once or twice a day.

I decided I would try to write for two hours straight without the distractions. I usually listen to the radio, so I turned that off. I closed Mailbird, so I didn’t see any notifications of new emails, and I highlighted things that I needed to look up, such as London tube station locations, so I didn’t surf the web while writing.

The discipline I needed! My first challenge was overhearing a conversation going on below me. Yes, I am that little old lady beloved of novelists who twitches the net curtains and peers out of the window at her neighbours. (Not so old though.) I desperately wanted to duck down beside the window ledge and see what was going on.

Then, I finished my Diet Coke and longed to take the empty bottle downstairs and out to the recycling bin. The bed in the spare room needed to be made (I’d left it earlier because the cat was sleeping on it) and while I was trying to find a way to describe a new male character, I itched to go next door and toss the duvet in the air.

But if you don’t count a toilet trip, I did it: two hours’ straight of writing and one whole chapter was the result.

To celebrate, I folded up all the socks that needed pairing. And now I’m off to make the bed in the spare room and annoy the cat.

Rock and roll, eh??

*Pic thanks to Maxipixel.