Dealing With Distraction

Last week I wrote about how my new At-Least-One-Word-A-Day Rule has helped me keep writing despite plenty of distraction.

There are different kinds of distraction. For example, right now I have lots of stuff going on in my life that I don't really need to do much about but that keeps my mind very busy. There are LOTS of thoughts competing with the book I'm trying to write. So even when I have an entire day to myself, and I sit there in front of the computer, more often than not my thoughts stray away from the book and toward all the other stuff.

I fight that - and my One-Word Rule has helped. But I have been writing very slowly because of it.

There's another kind of distraction that most of us deal with: all the things that we can do instead of writing. Like surfing the internet. And eating. And checking our email. And surfing the internet. And checking Twitter. And eating some more. Maybe even do the laundry?

What helps best against that kind of distraction is some discipline. But when I am dealing with all those distracting thoughts as well, it becomes even harder to fight the urge to check my email for the five hundred and twenty-third time.

So today I did something a lot of writers do on a regular basis: I grabbed my netbook and went to write in a café. The reason I usually don't do that is yet another kind of distraction: noise and other people. But today I knew I was not going to get anything done if I had any chance of procrastination.

My netbook, for this very reason, is not set up to go on the internet, and all I have on it are writing programs and dictionaries. So once I had reached a big department store's fifth-floor café (which is relatively quiet and serves nice fresh fruit juices), all I could do was write.

The result?

On Friday, I wrote 116 words. On Saturday, I wrote 217 words. Yesterday, I wrote 27 words.

Today, I've written 1,041 words. So far. So maybe, just maybe, I should do this more often. ;-)

How do you handle distraction? Do you ever write in cafés?