Ralphie and Randy were standing in line to see Santa, and Ralphie was bombarded with distractions. He had the creepy “I like Santa” kid talking to him, the Wicked Witch of the West poking at him and contemplating how tasty he would be. This was a very high stress moment for the Parker boys. It was the last chance to get in with “the big guy”. It was Ralphie’s last resort in hopes of getting his hands on his prized Red Ryder.
“Don’t bother me. I’m thinking,” He snapped at the witch. This post was inspired by that moment.
With my 9-5 (well, let’s be honest, 7-3) filled with many other duties, and my office (The Web Cave) filled with other people and a lot of activity, I often try to do my blogging at home. I like to have that quiet time alone to write where I can really focus on the thoughts in my head. Things get especially hectic this time of year, there are cards to write, cookies to bake, gifts to be bought & wrapped, socializing to be done, preparation for the New Year to do and so on. And I did not have the time to write the posts for this week like I had intended. So I came in this morning to my desk with an empty page staring back up at me.
I also had another problem… I didn’t know what quote I wanted to write. I had all sorts of great post ideas from favorite quotes that just couldn’t work in a business blog. Things like “Randy’s gotta go!”— How to avoid lines at public restrooms or “You used up all the glue on purpose!” – A girls guide to being passive aggressive. I knew as much fun as those would be to write, they would not fly in this venue. So I had to stop and think, and bam! There it was; there was my quote. “Don’t bother me. I’m thinking.”
I would venture to guess your computer is set up is a lot like mine. If you are rocking the dual monitors, one screen is dedicated to the internet. I use the Rockmelt browser and Hootsuite dashboard, as you can imagine…there is a lot going on the screen at once. I also have regular email coming in, email alerts set up for client mentions on Twitter and Facebook as well as Google alerts that come in constantly as well. Many of these things also get pinged to my phone. Not to mention the Sykpe window open as well. There is a lot of visual noise going on. While normally, I am just ADD enough where I thrive on that chaos, but not when I am writing. It was rather refreshing to tell the screen to be quiet so I could focus on what I wanted to write. While I didn’t have to tell my coworkers the same, since I’m usually first one in, I have my quiet time.
How do you turn off the noise? How do you set aside quiet time for your mind when you need to write? (Or strategize, analyze, report etc)
