How to go from staring at your screen aimlessly to closing a draft without deleting your phone

A tactical field guide for the perennially distracted from the perennially distracted

Look at this water lily I once found in a pond.

Focusing briefly on images like this one is shown to heighten short-term concentration. I’m not going to proclaim myself a self-improvement shaman; I am, however, incentivised to have you be zoned in on this essay.

Here’s the most effective technique I have learnt to go from scrolling through garbage on my laptop / smartphone to completing a draft essay / doc / presentation without bricking my phone. (I still recommend everyone brick theirs phones for a month.)

1. Block out all external noise / sound. Turn on Do Not Disturb mode on your phone.

2. Play non-lyrical music. If it’s music you actually like as opposed to an arbitrary hip-hop beats channels off of YouTube, Spotify or the like, that’s a lot more effective.

   1. If your head’s feeling noisy and you need to replace the noise in it with something more inert, try Brian Eno’s Music for Airports.

   2. If your head’s feeling anxious, nervous, uneasy, uncertain, needs something to match its intensity to stop it in its tracks, try Russian Circles’ Youngblood, Mogwai’s Young Team.

   3. If your head’s dull, a doozy, needs picking up, try the hard bop stylings of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers on Moanin’.

   4. If you’re feeling emotional, wistful maybe, your mind’s wandering to some far away daydream, try Mandolin by U Srinivas.

   5. If what your experiencing is a version of determination, a can-do attitude with a side of you-can-do-it, then maybe consider Animals as Leaders’ self-titled.

Needless to say, I can think of tonnes of other albums to recommend. Hit me up, how about that?

3. Start your writing on paper or on something that is close to paper. I for one love notebooks. Anything worth committing to a document or (shudder) a slide deck goes through the following journey –