Studio Blog

If you're anything like me (and I know I may be just setting myself up here), you have a love/hate relationship with writing. In one respect, you love it because there is just something about laying down words in an engaging and almost lyrical way that just flows effortlessly from word to word, sentence to sentence, and paragraph to paragraph that, ultimately, communicates an organic concept from writer to reader. For me, that's a quite a thrill. But at the same time, getting to that point can be one of the most painful, tormenting, hair-pulling, excruciating experiences ever. And sometimes that's just trying to decide on whether to use a gerund or an infinitive. I tell you, Abu Ghraib is nothing compared to being stuck between two relative clauses. And then you hit it. The wall where nothing is coming out of you. And you're just staring at that dreaded, hypnotic blinking cursor, actually counting how many times it blinks in one minute. So, naturally, you take a break. Just for a moment at least. But then that moment soon stretches into hours and suddenly you're not quite sure why you're about to order a Snuggie at three o'clock in the morning.

Often times, I tend to lose focus when I actually focus too much on my overall goal. A journey of a thousand miles may begin with one step, but I'm always thinking about the thousand miles and how I don't seem to be getting any closer to it. So to help myself overcome this hurdle, I break up longer writing sessions and goals into smaller ones. To me, it's kind of like chunking--the psychological term where you break up longer strings of information into smaller digestible units. Like 23801967 is harder to take in than 23, 80, 1967. If your goal is two pages an hour, that's much less intimidating than 10 for the day or 300 pages total. And between every small goal, I make sure I reward myself for accomplishing it. It's OK to have that cookie now. It's fine to browse ESPN or TMZ for a bit. The reward provides closure for me and makes me feel comfortable about moving onto the next goal because I can see the units of progress I'm making.

So my question to everyone is what do you do to help yourself stay focused, on course and productive?