Distractions

During my last spring term at BYU before graduating with my master's, I decided to take voice lessons, something I had wanted to do for a long time but had always been scared of trying. I signed up, and at first it was just as terrifying as I'd imagined. But my instructor was very easygoing and I soon felt more or less at ease singing in front of someone whose only job in that moment was to listen to my voice. In fact, most of the time I didn't actually sing until halfway through our half hour lesson. During the first fifteen minutes or so he would tell me stories, ask about my thesis, ask if I had ever watched the show Numbers, talk about podcasts he'd listened to that mentioned mathematics, or, most frequently, give me advice for graduate school.

I don't remember most of his advice, but one story really stood out to me. He told me about a fellow student in his own PhD program, a young woman who managed to finish the degree in a ridiculously short amount of time. "She didn't spend all her time on school, either," he told me. "She would leave campus and leave her schoolwork behind, and then live the rest of her life." Her trick was that when she came to school, she was 100% focused. Not 75%, or even 95%. When she was doing her schoolwork, that was all she was doing. And then she could go home at a reasonable hour with a free conscience and the satisfaction of being on track.

HIs main point was that, most of the time, we really are not 100% focused. We'll try to be on task, but we're almost always letting our attention wander, usually unintentionally, and so we don't actually make the most of that time on task. I could relate to this then, and I can relate to it now. I may be writing or reading or theorizing, but my thoughts are also jumping back and forth, touching on errands I need to run, or conversations I've had with friends and family, or where I'm going to go on my next long run, or what I might write in my next blog post... And these little minute-by-minute distractions eat away at my time almost imperceptibly.

And then there's the big distractor. One of my problems is that I really, really like the internet. Getting my very own wireless internet connection in my apartment this year was one of the happiest experiences of my life. There are a million things to do online - check email or blogs or Facebook, read the New York Times, check the weather report, google random information, keep tabs on the 100 Hour Board where I first became an expert at googling random information, look up recipes, read book reviews on Amazon, explore Wikipedia, check the weather report again (because you never know if it's changed since five minutes ago), write on my own blog, and on and on and on. I can't actually spend extremely long periods of time on the internet or I'll get bored. But I absolutely don't get bored with five minutes here, twenty minuntes there. And it's so easy to do. As a grad student, I spend my whole life on my laptop or with my laptop in close proximity, and if Safari is just one click away, it means almost anything I might want to access is just two or three clicks away. This quick-clicking is deceptive because just looking to see if, say, any blogs in my RSS feed have been updated takes only a matter of seconds. But if I allow myself to do it, I may find that suddenly half an hour has passed and my paper is sitting neglected on my desktop.

So lately I've been trying to disconnect a little. I set aside specific blocks of time during the week in which I remove distractions. This endeavor began a few weeks ago with two hour chunks of time in the morning, right after I got to campus and my mind was fresh. I now try to check my email and get that all out of my system, and then close the door to my office so that I have personal space and no background noise from other project members. I turn off my Gmail notifier so I won't feel compelled to check my email if a message happens to come in, and for two hours I restrict my internet usage to only academic purposes (like looking up references). On Tuesday this past week I even turned off the wireless internet altogether, which was a major step for me. My goal for those two hours is 100% focus, and my hope is to extend the 100% focus into other parts of my day as I go along.

Getting rid of distractions and focusing 100% is harder than I thought it would be. Especially the internet thing. On Tuesday, the moment the internet was off it was all I could think about. In fact, not being able to follow through on my impulses to just check my email (or blogs, or the NY Times, or Amazon), really quickly, made me realize just how often I really think about it. I personally belive the internet is a wonderful, fascinating, and very useful thing, and I don't know what I would do without it. I believe in embracing technology for the good it offers. But it's a little scary to discover how tied we can become to it.

Someday soon, maybe even this week, I'm going to declare an internet-free workday for myself (or at least I will only use internet for school purposes). Maybe I'll even go internet free for an entire day, waking to sleeping. Or a whole weekend. Scary. When we went to Hawaii back in May, I made the conscious decision to leave my laptop back in California. It was the longest I'd been without my laptop since my logic board incident a couple years ago, and I did just fine. Didn't miss it at all. But then, I had Hawaii to distract me. In normal life, I'm not sure I could give up use of my laptop entirely for a day. Not even a non-school day.

Which actually might be a sign that I ought to try...