be less distracted

My game plan for being less distracted involves re-training myself to focus on one thing at a time. My goal isn’t to restrict any of the interests, responsibilities, or eccentricities that make me up as a person. My goal is to feel more at ease with the thing I’m doing while I’m doing it, without that nagging feeling that I should be doing something else.

For me, being less distracted means being in tune with life as I’m living it. Whether I’m choosing the direction of each moment wisely or simply accepting what’s happening moment to moment, I want to truly BE THERE for it all. I know my capacity for fully being in the moment will undoubtedly shift along a larger spectrum of awareness. I’m making a conscious decision to accept this and work with whatever level of awareness I have available to me each day.

Very, very simply though, I need to gently remind myself over and over to BE WITH one thing at a time. It could be an idea, a person, a project, a meal, a sunset, a conversation, a book, or a cup of tea. It’s not important what it is or whether I’m spending two minutes on any one thing at a time. The important thing is to give each moment my fullest available attention. When I shift from one area to another I need a clean slate. My goal is to ring a little bell in my heart when I shift my attention from one experience to the next and to bring a fresh perspective and renewed energy to everything and everyone I engage with.

The best thing about choosing “be less distracted” as one of your missions: you can keep the page in a browser tab that will say “be less distracted,” warning you to actually be less distracted.

OK: So my web development jobs are disappointingly boring, but I have to stick with it and not quit so I don’t burn the workplace / my clients (and in a karmic truism) on the deliverables. Still: it’s effing boring. Any job that’s been sucked into sitting in front of a computer all day is particularly terrible for checking Facebook, Twitter and stretching the work out into twice the time it takes.

Lack of focus is related to procrastination, because part of this stems from a terror of the web work taking over my life and shutting down a part of my brain I would constantly like to be exercising: excessive sociality, humour, wit, discussion, connecting ideas, and writing. But I’m speaking here specifically of a lack of attentiveness that makes me feel as if I’ve taken Tylenol 3, even if I haven’t: the aspect of my experience where every few minutes, I seem to be saying: wait – what – where was I?

Anyway — no more of this! It’s ballooning work to an unacceptably large space in my life and decreasing chances for success in a lot of ways: with the job, with deadlines, with fun and of course other goals not related to survival.

Being less distracted and staying more focussed is basically an exercise in deferring gratification. It has to be held back, or there’s no sense of a shift to “after work time,” where I would like to experience much immediate gratification. Speaking of immediate gratification, have you read about the marshmallow experiment? You should.

generally speaking, i like the “the motivator” section in “real simple” magazine. i like the piece in the april 2008 issue in particular. it has to do with addressing, “completing,” your past and totally talks to me and my hang-ups. she identifies three steps to close the unfinished chapters:

1) taken an inventory of your “incompletions.” essentially make a list of all your woulda/shoulda/couldas
2) assign completion dates. she says categorize goals by n for now, l for later, c complete, or ntl for not in this lifetime. (personally, i wonder if this technique would actually work as it doesn’t seem specific enough, but it’s better than “someday,” “later,” or “tomorrow”.)
3) start crossing things off, i.e., get crackin’.

this could be a very good technique for me. i like lists. i like feeling like i’m going to tackle things one at a time. when i’m focused and on a roll, there’s no end to the things i can accomplish. i’m going to start working on my list – now.

there is the be less distracted part which is not let my mind wander and go tangential when i’m in the middle of a task (this is a major problem for me at work) and then there is the overwhelming need i feel to get everything i want done right now, leaving me lost and torn and not able to accomplish any of them (hence my ‘message’ after my name). i think i’m going to start with these things:

1) staying within our budget and paying off the credit cards
2) finding a job i actually like and want to do
3) getting in shape

there may be one or two more that move to the top of the list, literally. i’ll try to remember to add them later.

The fact that I’m sitting here writing entries on 43things isn’t really helping….

This is so not going so good.

But I’ve been doing okay with this. It really helps to ask David. He tells me the same thing (pretty much) that he told me last time, but I tend to forget when I’m annoyed about things I don’t want to do. I don’t think I’m as easily distracted as I used to be anyways. It will be nice when I graduate, as I seem to have picked the worst classes for my last semester. They’re not particularly difficult, just bad. At least I have fewer classes than other semesters. It’s additionally harder to do the work because I know that this won’t really make a difference even a month from now. Hrmm…

I really do think I’m less distractable than I used to be, but this class is pushing me. It’s not hard, it’s just annoying. I have done a lot of stuff I’m pleased with instead of studying, but these were not especially time critical. My midterm is tomorrow. I go back to studying periodically, but I haven’t been able to concentrate on it…

I recently got into Grey’s Anatomy, and I really like some of the things they say in it. I really like this quotation, which doesn’t exactly fit this goal, but it’s close enough. :-)

Dr. Meredith Grey: A couple of hundred years ago, Benjamin Franklin shared with the world the secret of his success. Never leave that till tomorrow, he said, which you can do today. This is the man who discovered electricity. You think more people would listen to what he had to say. I don’t know why we put things off, but if I had to guess, I’d have to say it has a lot to do with fear. Fear of failure, fear of rejection, sometimes the fear is just of making a decision, because what if you’re wrong? What if you’re making a mistake you can’t undo? The early bird catches the worm. A stitch in time saves nine. He who hesitates is lost. We can’t pretend we hadn’t been told. We’ve all heard the proverbs, heard the philosophers, heard our grandparents warning us about wasted time, heard the damn poets urging us to seize the day. Still sometimes we have to see for ourselves. We have to make our own mistakes. We have to learn our own lessons. We have to sweep today’s possibility under tomorrow’s rug until we can’t anymore. Until we finally understand for ourselves what Benjamin Franklin really meant. That knowing is better than wondering, that waking is better than sleeping, and even the biggest failure, even the worst, beats the hell out of never trying.

I managed to study a lot better for this final than the other one, and I think it paid off. Hopefully over break I can get a bunch done on Daily Joys. I am so glad the semester’s over!