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Guest post: More on distractions, from Paul Ford
Paul Ford | Oct 24 2005
Last week, I enjoyed and linked to Paul Ford’s Ftrain post, “Followup/Distraction.” It led to us exchanging a few chatty emails, so I asked Paul to favor us with a deeper write-up on his idea of narrow vs. broad distractions. More specifically, I asked: “Is there such a thing as a good distraction?” Are there “good” distractions?by Paul Ford 
Gary Benchley, Rock Star
by Paul Ford I don’t want to differentiate between “good” distractions and “bad” distractions. I want to stick to the idea of “narrow” and “broad” distractions. Because sometimes a broad distraction—like, say, getting drunk and watching the movie Red Dawn—is exactly what you need. In fact, one of the best things I can do when I’m in a rut is go see some utter-crap movie that features CIA operatives and lots of gunfire. I like to goof off a whole lot. I think it’s insanity to try to justify that in any way. I struggle, though, because my PC can play a DVD of Red Dawn while I check my email and work on an essay. This sort of computing power is fine for strong-willed people, but for the weak-willed like myself it’s a hopeless situation. My work requires me to patiently work through things and come up with fresh ideas. And I can honestly say that since broadband Internet came to my home a year and a half ago my stock of new, fresh, fun ideas has grown very thin. It’s just too much. My mind can’t wander, because, with anything that interests me, I can look it up on Wikipedia to gain some context. Before I know it I’ve got thirty tabs open at once in Firefox. Then new email comes in. I loathe the way computers blink to demand your attention; the computer wants to tell me, for instance, that it can’t load a web page. On the Mac, my Firefox icon starts jumping up and down like an anxious toddler (I know I can probably turn this off, but there are always more pop-up windows). My computer constantly wants to share totally asinine, useless information like that with me. So I’ve started using an Alphasmart Neo to draft text, and WordPerfect for DOS to edit and revise. My average daily word count has doubled as a result, and my stock of fresh ideas seems to be replenishing. Talking about Harper’s WeeklyOne of my tasks at work is to write a weekly roundup of the world’s news called “the Harper’s Magazine Weekly Review.” It’s a free weekly compendium of despair and hopelessness. We send it out via email to tens of thousands of people and put it on the web. And I feel a real duty towards those readers to somehow summarize the week, to try to capture the world, and to entertain my audience as I do so. I’ve been writing it every week since February, 2005, when I took the Weekly over from the person who created it, Roger D. Hodge, after he became Deputy Editor at Harper’s Magazine and was too busy to write it every week. At first I thought that the only way I could write a summary of the week’s news was to be truly, broadly distracted. I followed as many links as I could. I set up an RSS reader with literally one thousand feeds—every possible news source I could find. But it didn’t work. An RSS reader seems like the perfect application if you’re trying to write a summary of the world, but it was worse than useless. I was including too many different events, and my Weekly Reviews were too long and ponderous. Looking back on them I can see myself struggling. So I went to Roger and asked him how he used to put the Weekly together each week without losing his mind. “I set up an RSS reader with literally one thousand feeds—every possible news source I could find. But it didn’t work. An RSS reader seems like the perfect application if you’re trying to write a summary of the world, but it was worse than useless.” Roger is an uncannily organized and diligent person, and I learn a great deal by watching him in action. What he used to do, he told me, is take the New York Times and read it over the week, then circle the stories that were interesting, tear them out, and put them in a pile. Most of the important details, he said—the most revealing quotes from politicians, the most obscure, ridiculous details—tended to be well into the story. He supplemented the things he learned from the Times with his other reading, with Google News searches, and so on. But there was a single source that he used as a starting point. So I canned my RSS reader and started using the Times as my base of operations, and began to read individual news articles with much more care. Immediately my prose was tighter because, by going slower, I became more informed about the subjects I was trying to summarize and was less overwhelmed. The number of subscriptions to the Weekly Review shot up right away and I got a great deal more positive feedback from readers. Readers could sense that I was more confident, I guess. I haven’t opened an RSS reader in five months. I just peck away during the week, gathering news stories, a few each day. I use BBC News more than the Times, now, because I prefer to read online and the BBC News site is incredibly easy to navigate and has good coverage of world affairs. On Monday morning I edit and put it all together—I use a spreadsheet with one line per statement and source—and check my facts. Then three people edit it, one after another, which is a real privilege, because they invariably catch me doing something stupid. On “Amish Computing”When I tell other geeks about these processes (and God knows talking about process is something that we tend to do the point of exhaustion), I sometimes get accused of being a Luddite, which is nonsense. I love technology with a passion. I spend half of each day programming Java in Eclipse and use Subversion to manage files; I enjoy hacking around inside of Apache and Tomcat. I love Semantic Web technologies. But my personal goals are pretty specific: I want to be a good writer, and I want to have a full command of web technologies. This means that I must spend a lot of time writing and thinking, and working in my little corner of the web. I try to focus on these goals for between eight and twelve hours a day. And during those eight or twelve hours there are narrow distractions that help me become a better thinker—say, an interesting article about a new Java technique or a really interesting, well-edited galley that’s going around the office, which I’ll read and think about—and then there are disasters, like reading Slashdot threads, or meandering through Google News, or “researching” something on Wikipedia and following a chain of fifty links. “For most of my life people saw me doing the things I liked to do and said, ‘you have too much free time on your hands.’ I’ve decided that when you hear that it means you’re doing something right.” These last few months I’ve had real trouble getting things done(™), which has really bothered me because I really like programming and writing; those are two of my favorite things to do while sitting. When I’m not getting enough done I get unhappy and depressed and think about the billions of years I’ll be dead before the heat death of the universe erases everything. I want to feel like I did something during my brief life besides check my email. And lately I’ve been working hard to become more productive. I’ve started quit every application that isn’t relevant to the issue at hand and tried my damnedest only to allow the good distractions to come in the door, rather than to let the broad, wide world in at all times. I try not to multitask when I can help it. I think of this as “Amish Computing.” You push the worldly things away because they distract you from your goals. I’ve been programming and designing a new version of Harper’s website, one that can grow over the years to accommodate every page of the magazine since it began publishing in 1850. I think it’s a worthy task and I want to do a good job. It’s my responsibility to design the site, program the subscriber functions, and going forward, to see hundreds of thousands of page images scanned, corrected, and quality controlled. The Amish don’t drive cars. My “car,” with regards to programming the new Harper’s Magazine website, would be something like Ruby on Rails. When I see something like Ruby on Rails I get very excited and think, “Wow! I’ll be able to learn a whole new set of skills, and I’ll spend hours hacking away, creating new problems to solve. Come on AJAX! Come on dynamic database objects!” But I have this big set of problems I’m already trying to solve, and I have the skills to solve them, and a roadmap already written. A few months ago I spent several days dabbling with Ruby on Rails, wondering if I should ditch Java for the Rails framework, until I realized that it was just another broad distraction posing as a narrow distraction. Not to say it’s not a great advance, but in my life switching over to Rails would create more problems than it would solve. It would disrupt the close connection I feel with the Java code I’ve already written. I decided that I would lose more than I’d gain. Of course, the Amish have a high rate of dwarfism and genetic disease transmission because Amish communities interbreed over generations. This is bad. You need to let the big, broad world in, otherwise we’d all be writing FORTRAN and COBOL. But basically, if you have an Internet connection, you’re guaranteed access to the big wide world whenever you want it. The ideas will be there, for the taking, when you need to solve a problem. At a certain level I want to avoid creating new problems just so I can have the pleasure of solving them because then I end up starting projects and never finishing them. Because I’m a data glutton. When I’m in my most distractible place I don’t chew my thoughts properly. The most productive times in my life are the ones where I’m just doing my own thing, focused, and trying to solve some problem that I find interesting—when I’m narrowly distracted. I’ve met people who are very into model trains, or knitting, or coding games for the Commodore 64, and I feel a real kinship because they find the same pleasure in their activity that I do from writing and programming. I’m very paranoid about any metric of productivity. One person’s wasted time is another person’s productivity. For most of my life people saw me doing the things I liked to do and said, “you have too much free time on your hands.” I’ve decided that when you hear that, it means you’re doing something right. I hear it a lot less now that I’ve got a novel out and work at Harper’s Magazine, which is a job that carries some prestige. But that doesn’t make sense, because I’m doing the same things I did before anyone else took interest. External metrics are pretty useless. I like to think about Allen Ginsberg, when he confessed to his shrink that all he wanted to was write poetry, and his shrink said “well, why don’t you?” If you measured life by productivity, who would pick up a guitar? Besides, I’m happiest when I’m narrowly distracted—when I’m working on a task and I find it interesting enough that the rest of the world goes pale and I can really focus and explore. And luckily I find “boring” things, like programming and revising text, to be very exciting. I just want to spend more time doing those things and less time flipping between windows waiting for some new signal to come over the wire. It’s a struggle, because the easiest thing to do is just swim in the ocean of data. I can spend hours browsing the web without coming up for air. But ultimately that leaves me far more bored than doing the mundane, repetitive tasks that constitute “working.” About the Author
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Paul, Thank you for this article....
Paul,
Thank you for this article. I particularly liked the Too Much Time => Doing Something Right comment. We’ll see how my boss responds to that one today…
I have a Neo also; I tend to get a lot of questions and some weird looks from people when I explain that it’s just a keyboard that stores what you type. Do you?
While some companies (like Apple, AlphaSmart, 37signals) seem to get simpler can be better, the message isn’t mainstream (yet?).
Tait
I, also, am very, very...
I, also, am very, very prone to distractions.
The Neo seems like a good way to force myself to work only on one thing. Question: Has anyone tried a voice recorder, which can then be plugged directly into a computer for voice recognition conversion to text? I’ve heard from people that this technology works pretty well, but I’m not sure that I’d be able to “write” by speaking as opposed to by typing, which is what I’ve done all my life.
Reading Paul's thoughts on dealing...
Reading Paul’s thoughts on dealing with distraction reminded me that using a non-Internet connected PC and WordPerfect for DOS years ago, I wrote my first novel manuscript of 150K words in four months. That’s more productive than I am now, where it’s taking me nine months to write 100K words (granted, they may be better words, but still…). There is a huge power in getting those idea-driven first drafts done more quickly and with a minimum of interruptions. And writing on a computer that is a combined TV set/news feed/encyclopedia/bookstore is an exercise in vicious (and often easily justifiable) temptations NOT to write or to focus on activities peripheral to writing (research, email) as opposed to the writing itself.
I think my own addiction to narrow distractions while writing is a hard wire left from my days in advertising; if you aren’t coming up with an idea, you check email to see what other crisis looms. I have found this a terrible and difficult habit to break.
Paul’s embrace of the Amish computing approach is one I’m taking: my Internet connection is getting moved out of my office to another room in the house that won’t encourage distractionary, endless surfing or email checking when stuck on a plot point or doing prelim research—but will be there when I need it, not as an impediment. Email will be checked once a day. I’m strongly considering an Alphasmart Neo (other author friends rave about them) and first drafts will be edited/printed on a Mac with NO internet connection. (And if I had a computer that would run WordPerfect for DOS, I’d be sorely tempted to use it for first drafts.) If I sound primitive: Elmore Leonard writes his novels in longhand and John Irving uses a Selectric typewriter. I’m not a Luddite but sometimes simpler is better for particular contexts, especially creative ones.
I haven't finished reading this...
I haven’t finished reading this post yet but I just had to say I have the Red Dawn DVD which I got off the bargain bin because it is a modern classic.
"I can spend hours browsing...
“I can spend hours browsing the web without coming up for air. But ultimately that leaves me far more bored than doing the mundane, repetitive tasks that constitute ‘working.’”
Yes. I think there is a little seesaw or scale in our brains, and it measures the balance between “producing” and “consuming”. When I’ve spent a day just noodling around on the web (“getting ideas”, looking for appealing crochet patterns, or ways to do the job better, etc.) I come home feeling mentally and physically dissatisfied with the day. The more I manage to actually DO things or MAKE things during the day, the better I feel, both mentally and physically, at the end of it.
Consumption is still very much a contemporary “wasting disease”.
The Neo seems like overkill...
The Neo seems like overkill to me. I get the same effect by just making sure to grab my laptop, and retire to a comfy chair or local library and then turn off my wireless connection.
Aside from word processing, a computer without a network connection is about as useful as a brick, so when I have a writing deadline, I unplug from the virtual wire and write undisturbed.
internet librarian 05: expert panel...
internet librarian 05: expert panel on searching
This is a two-part session, so it will go for nearly two hours. We’ll see how long I last. But I feel some sense of obligation to go to the search-related sessions so that I can go back and ask MSR or MSN to reimburse me for the extra day here th…
What a great piece. ...
What a great piece. My favorite line (and there were at least three to choose from: ” If you measured life by productivity, who would pick up a guitar?”
Live a life of narrow distractions.
[...] Guest post: More on...
[…] Guest post: More on distractions, from Paul Ford | 43 Folders At first I thought that the only way I could write a summary of the week’s news was to be truly, broadly distracted. I followed as many links as I could. I set up an RSS reader with literally one thousand feeds–every possible news source I could find. But it didn’t work. An RSS reader seems like the perfect application if you’re trying to write a summary of the world, but it was worse than useless. I was including too many different events, and my Weekly Reviews were too long and ponderous. Looking back on them I can see myself struggling. So I went to Roger and asked him how he used to put the Weekly together each week without losing his mind. […]
I've been struggling with an...
I’ve been struggling with an immense feeling of life slipping through my fingers, and that I’m missing something out there on the interweb. Your article has helped frame this problem, and provided some points that I can employ to battle the distraction.
As a computer programmer distraction at peak periods can be devastating (missing deadlines, bugs, chaos). I find breaks and distraction to be good when taken in balance, but often times I let those links tab-up until I completely forget my task — and another day disappears.
Thanks for this article.
Eric
[...] Another great Paul Ford...
[…] Another great Paul Ford article which deals with essentially what I see as the greatest blight of the 21st Century–too much information. He like me has become a high tech luddite–someone who embraces technology and the potential it offers but prefers not to use a sledge hammer to slice a lemon and prefers simpler solutions when they’ll make life, well, simpler. Guest post: More on distractions, from Paul Ford | 43 Folders […]
Thank you for this article,...
Thank you for this article, Paul. The disconnected computer plus Wordperfect is a fantastic idea. Matt Haughey has a good point too; I think most of us could improve our productivity with just the first part of the equation. Without the internet, the average computer comes with few distractions. Minesweeper doesn’t cut it for long ;-)
Zak - I’ve never tried the voice recognition part, but I did try using a voice recorder in college to record my understanding of lectures while the ideas were fresh in my head. However, I couldn’t use it to record first drafts. I’m a visual person, and if my words need to fit a formal format, e.g an essay or paper, I personally need to see them laid out on a page. Using the recorder, I tended to get stuck for words, and lose the overall structure of the piece. That said, it’s worth trying at least once.
Oh, dear- a neo and...
Oh, dear- a neo and wordperfect make you a Luddite? I must be on the dark side of the moon with my- gasp- fountain pen. Which I refill, myself, from—hold on now- an inkwell.
I had to do it- I type too fast, I’m very verbal, and I was emitting 80 page blabby drafts that edited to only 20 usable pages. I now compose all my longer pieces on paper.
Lo-tech slows my thinking down and the result was a great improvement in my writing. Less BS, more content. The second and subsequent drafts go onto the computer. Also I consider writing on paper a hedge against carpal tunnel syndrome. Not to mention how sensual it is—try it sometime with Waterman ink and a really good rag paper…mmmm…! I’m not against technology- I’m for appropriate technology.
Are there “good” distractions? by Paul...
Are there “good” distractions? by Paul Ford Sweet! Not to mention inspirational even to this old, old, author. Thanks, pal.
ok, here's a question that...
ok, here’s a question that I’ve been searching for an answer for. I can’t afford a Neo and I have a perfectly good Thinkpad X20. I would like to disable Internet access but keep LAN access as I store my work files on a network drive. Anyone know of a way to do this?
PS. my router can’t help, my firewall has a block everything button but it blocks LAN traffic too and yes this is a windows question, even though I would be interested in solutions for a Mac as I once had an iBook and the same problem
Ian - does anyone...
Ian - does anyone else on your LAN need to access the internet while you work on your Thinkpad?
If not, you could unplug the router from the internet - i.e. remove the cable that runs from your cable or DSL modem to the router. If you have a dial-up connection, unplug the router from the phone outlet. Leave your computers still connected to the router. This should preserve your internal LAN.
Revolution of the High-Tech Luddites I've...
Revolution of the High-Tech Luddites
I’ve been a dork all my life, but I’m still just barely a geek. I love the toys (DVR, nano, anything from Adobe); I fear the code. My boyfriend, a.k.a. The BF, who has about 20 extra computing years on
Quotation of the Day: "Reason...
Quotation of the Day: “Reason #1067 why advertising sucks” Edition
I think my own addiction to narrow distractions while writing is a hard wire left from my days in advertising; if you aren’t coming up with an idea, you check email to see what other crisis looms. I have found
[...] Guest post: More on...
[…] Guest post: More on distractions, from Paul Ford | 43 Folders—Good lord, this is a great piece of writing […]
Rebecca, thanks for the suggestion, I...
Rebecca, thanks for the suggestion, I never thought of that but unfortunately yes other people still need the connection. :o (
Ian - if you use...
Ian - if you use Windows, then a firewall program like ZoneAlarm might help. I remember it having an Internet Lock feature that would temporarily block all Internet traffic, but allow traffic on the LAN. This only affected the computer ZA was installed on.
I haven’t used ZA in a while, but this may still work!
[...] Two Paul Ford references...
[…] Two Paul Ford references in as many days. Sorry about that, but this one’s a great read: Are There “Good” Distractions?. I read it and thought “I really should follow up on that info-diet idea.” But instead I followed a bunch of links off that page, read a bunch of random stuff, then wandered back into an IDE to debug a C# implementation of the ATOM interface. Heartless Bastards playing on iTunes. Spam piling up in my inbox. IM windows left dangling mid-chat. I thought about all my personal projects- the code and music and quasi-art I have laying around half-finished because I got distracted by something else. I feel like I don’t get anything done any more. […]
[...] When I’m not getting...
[…] When I’m not getting enough done I get unhappy and depressed and think about the billions of years I’ll be dead before the heat death of the universe erases everything. # […]
I got to this article...
I got to this article by clicking on a link inside a blog I was reading in an RSS reader. So did I disprove the article’s thesis, prove the article’s thesis, or both?
My next comment will focus less on paradox and more on argument, though I do prefer paradox.
And yes, I recognize that the article has more than one “thesis,” if it has one at all.
Thanks.
[...] Guest post: More on...
[…] Guest post: More on distractions, from Paul Ford | 43 Folders the difference between a useful distraction and an unuseful one (tags: articles life) […]
I also arrived at the...
I also arrived at the article through an rss feed, but I still think it’s an excellent article. Narrow vs Wide distractions is a useful idea - I think it’s to do with how far you stray from what you’re meant to be doing.
Guest post: More on distractions,...
Guest post: More on distractions, from Paul Ford
Guest post: More on di…