You’re in a room with a fan blowing. It isn’t too noisy. Certainly not noisy enough to prevent you from working.
Or maybe there is some work been done in the street, and you hear the background noise of vehicles, generators and power tools from time to time.
But then, at some point, you turn off the fan, or the street noise stops.
What a difference. It’s only when the noise stops that you realize how it has been filling your head and distracting you. Turn off that background noise, and you feel relief.
The same kind of things happens when you spend your day with a background of constant emails and social media. It’s just a different kind of noise.
It doesn’t feel like a big thing. It certainly doesn’t feel like it is slowing your work down or spoiling your concentration. But it is.
Just like with the noise of the fan, or the street noise, it creates a level of tension that you are barely aware of until you “turn it off”.
For some kind of work, this may not be a problem, but for us writers it is. We do our best work when we get into an uninterrupted flow. It isn’t easy to get into the flow, and it’s easy to lose it when we become distracted.
It’s for this reason that I create some noise-free blocks of time each day. By that I mean I close my email and all social media windows for a block of two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon.
That gives me four hours a day to focus on what I actually do for a living…which is to write.
Am I damaging my business by not looking at email or social media for two hours in the morning and afternoon? Not at all.
The key here, if you want to do your best and most productive work as a writer, is to turn off the noise for a significant part of each day.
The world will get along just fine without you for a few hours each day, and you’ll get to do some much better work.
Related Resources:
My ebook – Affirmations for Freelancers
My coaching service for freelancers…
About the author: Nick Usborne is an online writer, copywriter, author and coach. Read more…