Full disclosure: this blog post started out as a list that I made for myself in my written journal. Maybe I’m suffering from a big of a seasonal slump (not enough exposure to sunlight? poor diet? dehydration? the overwhelming desire (but complete logistical inability) to go dancing wearing a short sleeveless dress and sandals? who knows, man?)… or maybe I need to overhaul my workspace… or maybe I’m discovering that I really don’t work well at home and in order to Get Things Done, I have to leave the house.

(Or, maybe Mercury is in retrograde and it’s making me crazy. I’m not a huge believer in astrology, but it’s certainly wreaking havoc on enough of my friends to give me pause.)

At ay rate, I’m having motivation problems in a big way, and they’re getting in the way of everything I want to do. So I delivered myself a very stern lecture-in-writing about not getting distracted while I’m trying to work. And it worked. In fact, it worked so well that I revised the lecture-in-writing to make this listicle that I’m posing here for all your pleasure.

So, here you go: this is how I stopped getting distracted and started Getting Things Done.

  1. Keep your stuff relatively neat. A mess around you will breed disorder and distraction when you’re trying to work. Get in the habit of putting your stuff away when you’re done with it—and if you don’t have a place for everything, make one, or purge some of your stuff!
  2. Keep your work space clean always. Maybe you’re not naturally neat, and that’s okay. But a messy workspace is distraction waiting to happen. I can think of no way to accurately describe this other than to say that if I’ve got too much junk on my desk to actually open my notebook, I won’t get any blogging done for the day, and if my kitchen table is strewn with bills and knitting projects and the random doggie toy on the night before I’m supposed to bring cake to a party, that cake won’t get made. So clean up your work spaces, y’all.
  3. Schedule time to complete the things that distract you before allowing yourself to be distraction by them. Keep track of what your biggest time sucks actually are. Then finish them before you sit down to be productive. For instance, if you can’t study when your sink is full of dirty dishes, finish them before you crack your textbooks. For me, the distractions are digital—I subscribe to about a million RSS feeds as well as following a ton of people on Twitter. To remedy this, I check my RSS and my Twitter before I start drafting a blog post…and I don’t check them again until I’m done with a draft.
  4. Physically bar yourself from engaging in the things that distract you. If your self-distracting habits are so hard that you feel like you have no willpower, the above step might not work for you at all. So, you have to go a little further and block out the distractions completely. If, for instance, you get caught up in Facebook while you’re trying to balance your budget, turn off your modem until the task is done. If you’re trying to work legitimately on a paper, but you really feel like getting into bed and reading, pile some heavy boxes on the bed. If your phone keeps buzzing with texts from your friends asking you when you’re going to stop writing for the night and come meet them at the pub, turn the damn thing off.
  5. Make a trigger that encourages you to work. Leo Babauta writes a lot about the power of a trigger to change and reinforce habits on his blog Zen Habits. Basically, a trigger is something that, after you are exposed to it, you immediately respond in a certain way. In Pavlov’s dog experiment, the behavior was the dogs’ salivation, and the trigger was the sound of the bell. For me, I like brewing a cup of tea and straightening my desk before sitting down to work. I also used to have a specific playlist of amped-up music that encouraged me to get to work right away—when I’m really dragging or having a problem getting started, putting this playlist on helps me a lot. Some people have clothing as their trigger—when they sit down to work, they wear a particular hat or scarf or, in one case I once read about, a pair of fingerless gloves. Do whatever works for you, but stick with it—the more reinforcement you have for your trigger, the better your work habits will be.
  6. Don’t multitask. I know that it’s tempting to try to work on several things at once—manage a Netflix queue while reading the tweets our friends have posted over the past hour, keeping a vague eye on the pot of rice boiling in the background, and singing along to that classic rock anthem you just can’t seem to get out of your head. But by focusing little bits of your attention on each of these things, you’re really just stunting your information processing ability and your memory. In other words, you might end up adding a bunch of really crappy movies to your queue, just because you were busy reading what your friends have done all day—which you won’t even remember, by the way, because in the middle of your reading, your pot of rice has exploded and you have burned brown gunk sticking to your kitchen ceiling. And you didn’t even get the Jefferson Starship lyrics right. Seriously, guys? Stop doing this now. At worst, it makes catastrophic things happen…and at best, it merely wastes a lot of time.
  7. Try coworking. When you’re coworking, you’re working on your own individual projects, but surrounded by other people working on theirs. It’s almost like the library study sessions I used to have with the other members of my sorority. You and your coworkers can integrate discussion, collaboration, or mutual help—whatever works for you. I personally work well when I’m around other people who are working. Keep in mind, though, that depending on your own working style and the people you choose to cowork with, this might backfire horribly. There are certain people that I can’t work with, ever…they’re fine people, people whom I love very much, but when we get together, we chatter. Or we share links. Or we call up ten more friends to join us, and then we send someone to the store for beer, and then the coworking session becomes a party. Don’t let this happen to you. Be mindful of your own work habits and needs.
  8. Figure out which temporary time-wasters you can complete and eliminate totally…and then do it. If you’re trying to finish a project, particularly one that has a deadline, it’s easy to let this take time away from your long-term goals and projects. So, figure out what distracting tasks you can finish once and for all, and finish them. For me, I’m in the process of setting up a work space for sewing and patternmaking in the corner of my room, and if I’m not hyper-vigilant, I’ll stop writing and start drawing out my ideas for it, looking at personal storage solutions from Ikea, and even get up from my desk and start organizing the things I’m going to store in the new work area. It’s really a huge suck on my time, so I’m hoping to have it all sorted out and completed by the end of the week, so I can blog in peace, damn it!

What are you guys’ biggest distractions? Tell me your best ways of Getting Things Done when distractions are present!

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