You may have heard it said before that men's brains are like waffles and women's are like a plate of spaghetti. Stereotypically, men are better at compartmentalizing home and work life, while women's brains are following one stringy noodle down a path just long enough to touch another, then another all day long. Our thoughts are everywhere at once.
Writer's Brain
Now that I've been writing more regularly, I find that not only am I thinking about menus, relationships, the to-do list and the general stuff of life, but now I have to contend with Writer's Brain trying to infiltrate every single corner of my life as well. And I haven't figured out where the "off" switch is yet.
I wish I had that waffle brain so I could put my life in neat boxes and concentrate on just one thing for a while.
Smartphones
One item that certainly hasn't helped is my lovely, sometimes overly-eager-to-be-helpful companion and side-kick, my smartphone (SP). If I had any hope of compartmentalization in my day, my SP reminds me about some other aspect of life that my brain had forgotten about momentarily. While I've tried to turn off notifications, they still sneak by, alerting me the second I receive an email or a friend tags me in a photo from high school.
And as a blogger, the thing is constantly communicating one of two messages to me. Either "people love your work--you're a success!" or "you're such a failure, no one even commented or 'liked' that post you spent three hours preparing." Thanks a lot, SP.
Thinking in Boxes
So in the past few weeks, I've been trying to take what my college culture classes would have called a very "western approach" to my time, and think of it literally in terms of boxes, where unwanted thoughts and devices are forbidden to enter.
Mornings are chaotic, so that's more of a "free space" box where anything goes, but around 9 am to 11 am, I've sketched "kids" into the imaginary box and the goal is to be with them like it's my job (oh wait, it IS my job...). This can also include all those domestic duties I ho hum about, but the goal is to turn off Writer's Brain and my SP and just focus on my children, friends we may meet up with and my home. I've been trying to literally shut down the computer and put my phone on power saving mode so that all I can do is use it to text and make calls.
Lunch time is another "free space," but then the kids' nap time can be filled with any of these: write, do bloggy social media stuff, sleep, read or a mix of those. Then 3:30 to 5 pm is shaded in as a "kid" time again.
In my spoiled life, my husband who records in our basement "comes home" at 5 pm and that time is shaded the color of daddy playtime, while mommy listens to podcasts/music and experiences food prep therapy in the kitchen time.
Dinner and bedtime falls into kid structured routine time (therefore already very waffle brain-esqe) and then evenings are all more free spaces for my husband and I to fill in with our activity of choice.
The Effect on Writing
As I've started this discipline of attempting to focus on one person, event or task at a time instead of just trying to be better at multi-tasking, I've noticed that there is a greater likelihood that more seeds have been added to the writer's storage room, ready to be taken out and sown on the page during designated "writing box times."
There have been moments of simply sitting on my couch with a cup of tea watching my children play, reading books to my son in the backyard or completing a single task of cleaning an entire bathroom instead of leaving the floor for "later." And I've been surprised to find that those are the moments that have given me enough breath to write with life again.
I'm slowly learning the wisdom of poet Luci Shaw as she said, "Whether
we are poets or parents or teachers or artists or gardeners, we must start
where we are and use what we have. In the process of creation and relationship,
what seems mundane and trivial may show itself to be a holy, precious part of a
pattern."
As we shave off the excess, we are left with the essence. How have you found ways to compartmentalize in such a way as to give more of yourself to each task or person without so many distractions? How does this affect your writing?
Have you put any rules relating to technology in place for yourself that have helped to keep you grounded in reality?
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Happy writing!
Labels: Thursday Thoughts for Writers, time management, writing
