Advice for Bloggers Who Get Easily Distracted (like me)

Darren Rowse made another excellent point in a recent post entitled “Feeling Overwhelmed by Social Media and Web 2.0? Here Are 5 Tips For You“. The idea for the article came when Darren noticed a fellow blogger had stopped blogging and received the following response when he asked him why he had given up:

“I can’t keep up with the advances in technology. Every day there is a new tool, widget or social networking site to test out. I can’t keep up. I’m feeling overwhelmed by it. So I gave up.”

At the time of writing there has been 92 comments, with the majority agreeing that they are feeling overwhelmed by the plethora of tools and information currently available.

I have to admit that I am one of those people who feels as though there is just too much going on. There is no way any one person can keep up to date with everything and consequently there is little point in trying to do so.

Since I read the article I have tried my best to focus on the job in hand and not be distracted by my RSS feeds, emails, tweets, links, blog posts, new tools and gosh knows what else. Last night I even wasted twenty minutes of my time trying to find out what kicked off an argument on Twitter. I didn’t find out.

So, as it is not going very well at the moment I have come up with a plan.

It’s quite a simple plan.

I am going close all of the programs, tabs and applications that I don’t need and pick a task and perform that until completion.

This means no Twitter, no Outlook, no BigSpy, no Dreamweaver, no Photoshop, no FTP, no nothing – just Firefox and two tabs; one for this post and one for my point of reference (Darren’s post). The rest of the information I need for this task is stored in my head.

Doing this will mean I can completely focus on one task – to write an article. Any emails that arrive during this time will not be seen until I open Outlook and the same goes for any tweets that get sent – I can look at them later.

It is all to easy to follow a link in an email or on Twitter and end up in some unknown place looking at a new widget and wondering how to integrate it into WordPress. I know because I do it all the time. It has to stop.

One of the best things about closing everything down is that the taskbar at the bottom of my screen will only contain one open tab. This means I will not be tempted to click on another tab “just to see what’s happening”. The theory behind this process seems to working so far. Just having a clear taskbar makes me feel a whole lot better. I still have a lot of work to do, but I am not constantly reminded of it when I look at the screen.

There is another method that could be used if you would like to adopt this approach when blogging – hit F11 and go full screen. That way you will only be able to see the Firefox tab you are working on.

I am finding myself doing more and achieving less as each of the blogs I am currently developing needs more of my attention. This is the first step to bringing some kind of order into the proceedings.