Distractions and focusing on your daily writing goal

Distractions. You know what I mean. Writing is difficult enough and you add in distractions, it all seems to slip away.

You set aside some time to write and you start and a few minutes into it, your mind starts to drift and eager to pick up on any distraction, like email, facebook, twitter, laundry, dishes, clipping your finger nails.

Reading Cory Doctorow's 2009 article, locusmag.com/Features/2009/01/cory-doctorow-writing-in-age-of.html, provided some great insight and ways to tackle that distraction.

Here are my notes:

Short, regular work schedule
- set an obtainable goal and meet it
- focus on nothing else for that 20 minutes
- you can always find a block of 20 minutes in a day
- but, do it every day
- try to think in advance about sensory detail to include in the next day's writing to start you going the next time you sit down to write

Leave yourself a rough edge
- stop writing after you hit your daily word-goal, even if you're in the middle of a sentence.

Kill your word-processor
- fancy wordprocessors can be a distraction on their own
- to take advantage of that 20 minutes, just use a text editor

Okay, I've stepped away from my writing long enough now that I should let this distraction go and get back to writing!