Distraction and Focus

[I wrote a pretty long post about how I can get myself to focus on things etcetera, and was so very proud of it, and it appears blogger, being the mfking poc it is, ate it up. If anyone's reading it, please 
get google to fix their blogger app. Anyway, quick summary etcetera because I still want the 'knowledge' to stay around, and need to get caught up on the posts]

I've noticed that a low-level distraction helps me keep better focus. Let me explain.

When I'm working, I need a certain something happening in the background. A podcast playing, maybe music, people talking, even a tv show that I like or a youtube video. I will change my focus to the background task, but switch to the main task quickly because 1) I don't care about the background task enough and 2) auditory tasks that are not extremely urgent can be filtered out. So it's like a safety blanket of randomness that keeps me sane.

For the last month or so, I haven't had a good pair of earbuds. As a result, I haven't been able to 'distract' myself properly. Consequently my consumption of other attention-demanding distractions has gone up significantly. I've been reading a lot more news, twitter, the orange site, etcetera since I lost my headphones in late August. That's made me a lot more unproductive.

More on that. It's not just the background auditory distraction that appears to help me focus. The days that I write more of my journal and fiction stuff also appear to be the same days I get more work done. It's unclear to me if there's a causation, or if there's a hidden variable affecting both, regardless, I can almost always say that regardless of my mood otherwise, if I get a lot of writing done by just powering through, I also get more motivation to get my real work done on time. As a result, non-work-related distracting activities that are not addictive such as news or social media are actually good for me.

Final point. Such distractions help me not just with focus, but also with confidence and determination. As an example, the few times I've successfully asked people out have always been those when the outcome was the least important to me because there many other fires I was tending to. It appears that if I have something serious and big to focus on, which I cannot push away and must commit to completely, it helps force me make significant decisions that I would otherwise procrastinate away. So if I made myself do things that take a lot of commitment and energy and deadlines, perhaps I'd get better at everything entirely. That's a theory very much worth testing. Writing could be one of my such commitments. If I set out hard deadlines and requirements for my writing projects, worked on them seriously, and then put forward the rest of my life as a subsidiary of that, it could help me get into interesting situations and do exciting things -- things that might be worth writing about. Perhaps this could be intertwined with me writing in public places under pressure and talking to people just to procrastinate from my writing exercises, resulting in more quality content for me to write.

Something to mull over.