The importance of a clean mind
Image by Karolina Grabowska from Pixabay
One of the most important lessons I have learned from my weekly writing is the importance of a clean mind before writing. The first hundred posts or so, I wrote first thing in the morning. And the past few months it has usually been the final activity before bed. That implies a very high probability that I have recently used my smart phone just before writing. Or watched something on YouTube or read something… whatever. It doesn’t matter because the effect is the same. It feels almost impossible to come up with something original topic when you have saturated your mind with someone else’s thoughts.
By abstaining from phone or internet use a considerable time before a writing session, the work becomes a lot easier. I suppose the lowest hanging fruit could be to simply start to write early mornings again and see what happens. Another danger with nighttime writing is that you don’t have a clear deadline for when you have to decide you are done. You can mess about into the middle of the night if you are a perfectionist. Not good. On the contrary, if you write in the morning before the rest of the family wakes up, you are in a competition against the clock. You must finish before the others wake up. That induces a kind of healthy stress that kills any perfectionism. Done is always better than perfect, and I know myself all to well by now that I need a healthy dose of external pressure to constrain myself. Sometimes a problem can become easier to solve if you increase the difficulty and make it harder. A higher difficulty level in general, will eliminate many options and only keep the ones that have a reasonable chance of success.
I have also noted the importance of internet celibacy in the morning hours. There’s probably tons of research on this topic but I think my gut feeling is enough here. The first thing you do in the morning will determine the quality of your day. That’s why there’s a viral speech with that military guy about how making your bed is a critical piece of a successful life. If you do something productive and valuable directly in the morning, it is easier to keep doing valuable things. But if you begin your day with something useless, it is not a far stretch to do something else useless, and voila; you are in a downward spiral. There is also the factor that during the night your brain has been at work with learning and figuring stuff out. To upload the results from these brain calculations from working memory to long term storage, the brain needs freedom and focus. I.e. the exact opposite to picking up a device first thing.
The internet has become a very frustrating place to be. There are ads and notifications everywhere. Nowadays, even the operating system (windows) is filled with ads and flashing notifications everywhere. If you are working with a productive intent, the last thing you need is a big splash screen with breaking news when you click the start button or open a browser. And you definitely do not need a sound alert and visual alert every time you get an email. That is completely crazy to me. If I want to read email I do it when I decide to do it and just open Outlook every now and then. But notifications and ads that steal your attention, that can certainly wreak havoc on your productivity.
Another thing that bugs me is those internet sites that are so full of ads that when you try to read an article on your phone, you only get like 33% of the total screen size with actual content. The rest is just ads. And let’s finish this rant with the idiocy of sponsored links. Google has become almost unusable. It is very common that I search for a very specific product, and then the first five hits can be sponsored links to similar products from other manufacturers. I have almost given up on Google now and strongly consider to start using something else. When you have to scroll down to hit number six to find the exact thing that you put in the search window, that does not induce any confidence and trust with me.