You’re probably not hearing this for the first time…

A tendency to get distracted can be a real impediment to progress. Staying on task is hard stuff, especially if you’re self-employed. Over the past several months this factoid has made itself very apparent.  So here’s a list of a few things that I’m doing to try to overcome my tendency towards distraction.

1. Clear space to work

I’ve mentioned before that I seem to have inherrited a bad case of ADD. Perhaps it’s environmental. Perhaps it’s genetic. More than likely, it’s a combination of the two.

The bottom line is:  without a clean place to work  it’s tremendously difficult to get up the activation energy to do anything. That’s not to suggest that my office is clutter free. Quite the opposite, in fact. Rather than distracting myself with cleaning my entire workspace, I’ve made a bunch of piles of things to manage later.

2. Music

If years of procrastination has taught me anything, it’s that I’m highly succeptible to distraction. Some people can work with a television in the background. That’s a solution that is completely ineffective in my case. Ask anybody who knows me and they’ll tell you I can’t be in the same room as a television without watching it. Maybe it’s a result of spending my childhood in front of tv’s, maybe it’s something else.

Can’t remember where I learned the trick, but I once heard that music can be a good method to tone down the ADD in kids. As a high-school student I tried classical music… once. The end result was me and Aaron banging our pencils on the desk and humming Flight of the Bumblebee as loud as we possibly could.  Needless to say, we didn’t get a lot done. Ergo, classical music wasn’t a very good way to keep me focused.

Since classical music didn’t work for me, I started listening to something with a bit more verve. I’ve found that faster paced music helps tone down my tendency to get up and wander around the house looking for something more enjoyable.

3. Easy to use tools

As I’ve mentioned in the past, all the tools that I use are free, primarily open-source, software. Since the tools are free, it’s easy to get caught up trying to find the ‘perfect’ solution to my needs. Whether I’m writing posts or trying to consolidate my thoughts, I’ve found that using simple writing tools are typically the most conducive to productivity.

Using a simple writing tool like Tomboy Notes allows me to stay focused on getting thoughts out of my head, rather than becoming distracted by all the bells-and-whistles of a more complicated writing tool. Also, Tomboy’s search and notebook organization tools have made a nice augmentation to my methods. The search feature lets me search through everything I’ve written for specific terms.

4. Keeping track of my time

Time management has never been my strongsuit. As such, maintaining a schedule has always scared the hell out of me. I know that in order to be successful I’ll eventually need to set myself a schedule and take the necessary steps to stick to it. In the meantime though, I’ve started keeping track of how my time gets spent. Rather than setting my schedule in advance, I simply write down each thing that I do on a notebook that I keep on my desk.

Each day, I start a new page and list the events of the day as they happen. Yesterday for instance, my day started with “1140 — Head to Coffee”, followed by “1300 — Install Freemind mindmapping software”. It’s easy for me to look back and see what I accomplished (or didn’t accomplish in some cases) throughout the day. On each page, I’ve also got a column that I write tasks which come to mind.

Writing my ‘Todo’ column allows me to stay focused on the task i’m doing, without feeling like I’ll forget whatever thought popped into my head to distract me in the first place. For instance, I just wrote down “Todo Column Explanation” in my notebook. This little note will remind me that I can write about how the Todo Column works in a different post, but I don’t have to write that post now. My goodness, what an effective method for staying on task!!!

5. Self discipline

Perhaps it goes without saying, but in order to stay on task it’s terrifically important for me to recognize the longterm benefits of doing actual “work”. Without some amount of self discipline it’s just not possible to get anything meaningful accomplished. The constant battle to focus on the task at hand is never helped by my wandering mind. In order to stay focused, I constantly remind myself why I’m doing whatever it is that I’m doing. Whether it’s writing this post or researching other topics to write about, if I don’t keep my goals in mind I’ll end up wasting the most productive part of a caffeine buzz on wikipedia or Google News.

Going back to my fourth point, remembering to write down each thing that I focus my attention on helps to remind me when I get off task. It seems simple enough to keep track of my time, but when I fall off the wagon it’s really easy for me to burn through four or five productive hours of a day. Just the small amount of self discipline required to log my day is enough to make a big difference in my productivity. Self discipline in other areas of my life doesn’t seem to hurt either.

What tools do you use to maintain focus at work or at home? If you’d like to share them, I’d be excited to learn about how they help you.

My mother told me that she’d had me tested for Attention Deficit Disorder when I was younger, that the doctor said I didn’t exhibit symptoms. I’ve read that sometimes the symptoms of ADD don’t show up until you get older, perhaps that’s true.

Either way, I’m interested in the prospect of “Getting Things Done”. I guess there’s some irony in the reality that I have owned this book for 5 months… but I’ve only made it about 20 pages into the book. Before I set out to begin longbars, I worked with an awesome company in Gilbert, AZ.  Back then while I was plotting my escape and such, I expected that as an entrepreneur I might need the book… so I bought it at the airport on the way to Quebec City.

Now that i’m actually self-employed, I probably need to read it even more than I did before. Today I spent several hours trying to cull some of the data that’s been ‘clouding my mind,’ as David Allen might say in the book.  I went thru two of the four notebooks that have been the daily record of my thoughts over the last 18 months.  That long ago, somebody showed me a Moleskine notebook… which got me intrigued, and then online to find out more.  Turns out there are a lot of folks using the Moleskine notebooks as part of their daily lifehack.  One thing lead to another, and I found myself reading about David Allen & his GTD program.

To be fair, he says that he put the process together of a course of 20 years.  That’s about as far as I’ve gotten in the book so far though… go figure.  I’ll let you know how things progress.