Last Tuesday my phone went nuts and there were 17 things blowing up my phone before I even had breakfast. There are the deadline for work, the group chat with my family, my friends wanting to make plans, the bills and the newsletter I signed up for in 2019 that needed my attention from Gmail and all this is urgent except the newsletters of course.
This pulling happens on smaller levels too. You hear about a new hobby that someone has and the next thing you know, you're up all night on the internet searching for pottery wheels. You see your neighbour renovating their kitchen and yours looks old and outdated, a colleague switches jobs, and you start to wonder if you've made the right decision about your career. Everything becomes this new possibility that you want to rush into.
So the things that actually matter to you get lost in this pile of all the things you could do or should be doing. Right now, for me, it's finishing the novel that I started 8 months ago and having uninterrupted time to be with my nephew before he becomes a teenager. It's incredibly simple, it's not complicated at all. And yet I forget all of this on a very regular basis. Just yesterday I spent 30 to 40 minutes researching whether or not I should learn to program in Python or JavaScript when I actually have no plans to be a programmer. Just got sucked into someone else's priority becoming mine.
Staying focused is like holding a pose in a yoga class when your leg is shaking. It's not comfortable at all. It takes a lot of effort to stay focused. You need to constantly take yourself back to the place that you were when you were clear on what was important to you.
I just have to accept that distractions will never end. They will just keep multiplying. And you will have to return to what you decided mattered to you when you were clear minded time and time again.
If you think this social media era is a distraction, it's getting more advanced and God knows what new software will enter the industry, become a big deal and take more of our time.
