Jeremiah Tolbert

Much like need­less words for a writer, dis­trac­tions must be elim­i­nated by free­lancers.  A dis­trac­tion is defined by me as “any­thing but what I am being paid to work on.”  I have the atten­tion span of a mar­mot on PCP, so I must be dou­bly vig­i­lant against the out­side world.

Except I have not been, tra­di­tion­ally (trans­la­tion: up until a few weeks ago).  When the work is as plen­ti­ful as attrac­tive women in low-​​cut blouses on a col­lege cam­pus in spring,  it’s much eas­ier to stay focused.  The con­stant men­tal sound of cash reg­is­ter “cha-ching”-ing also helps keep me focused on the tasks at hand.  If you have ten hours of work to do and only twelve hours to do them in, it’s not so hard. For me anyway.

But what if you have , say, four hours of planned work to do in an eight hour day?  That means—hold on a sec­ond, some­one just posted a really funny pic­ture to Reddit.

Where was I?

Right, so when you osten­si­bly have twice as much time as you have actual work to do, because busi­ness is slow and you suck at cold-​​emailing poten­tial clients, or you have neb­u­lous tasks with no time allo­ca­tion (some­thing I try to avoid, but I can’t seem to fig­ure out how long it will take to write a story until it’s done), it’s far too easy to relax.  “Oh, I have all day to get that done,” you say to your­self.  By you, I mean me, of course.

This would not be a prob­lem if I wasn’t the ambi­tious sort whose poten­tial projects list is longer than the Hawaiian trans­la­tion of the Bible (What?  Sarah Vowell would find that funny as hell.  Read her new book).   I’ve got more shit I want to do than I could pos­si­bly accom­plish in six lifetimes.  

That shit does not get done when I am read­ing your 12th Facebook sta­tus update of the day. Or writ­ing my seventy-​​third update and/​or com­ment. I’m just as inter­ested as you are in your petty office pol­i­tics and the funny stuff that comes out of your kids’ mouths—maybe even more, because I have no chil­dren and must live vic­ar­i­ously through you like some kind of par­a­sitic uncle.  No, wait, uncles are creepy, and call­ing them par­a­sites just makes them even more creepy.  Like a par­a­site what finds sto­ries about fam­i­lies suc­cu­lent and nour­ish­ing.  Uh. Moving on.

Simple solu­tion, you might say.  “Stop read­ing Facebook, Reddit, and what­ever else it is that you con­sider a dis­trac­tion.”  BUT!  Facebook is also a social oblig­a­tion.  Have you ever had a sit­u­a­tion where you’re talk­ing to a friend in per­son and they assume that you’ve read every sin­gle update about their lat­est adven­ture with anal fis­sures, and they sud­denly real­ize you have no idea what they are talk­ing about?  Because, you know, you’ve been get­ting shit done and you have too many Facebook friends, so even if you cared, you prob­a­bly missed it anyway?

They act like you just raped their dog. It’s not pretty.  My solu­tion is to spend as lit­tle time in face-​​to-​​face con­tact with meat-​​people as possible.  

Ten years ago, just about the only way I knew some­thing hap­pened in someone’s life was they either A) told me or B) I read it on their blog, but at least most blog­gers didn’t have the expec­ta­tion that you’d read their blog.  Now days, I’m sup­posed to be as much of an expert on their  own mun­dane bull­shit as I am on mine?  Look—I only have enough con­cern for one per­son here (maaaaaybe two), and if I start spread­ing out all my inter­est among every per­son who ever requested a friend­ing, then I’m going to wake up one day to learn I weigh 400 pounds and  my beard is home to an entire migra­tory flock of starlings.  

And I will blog or tweet every sec­ond of my pathetic exis­tence.   Like this:

You see Mandy’s update about hav­ing yoghurt for lunch? LOL. Oh god, the star­lings are eat­ing a hole in my neck!

See, it’s in everyone’s best inter­ests if I stay as self-​​centered as pos­si­ble, is what I’m say­ing.  But I’m get­ting far­ther off track here than Dale Earnhardt. Totally valid tweet, by the way.  I still had 17 char­ac­ters left.  Gotta leave room for the old school retweets, folks.  @jeremiahtolbert, in case you’re wondering.

My nat­ural incli­na­tion is to read every­thing that is put in front of me.  The inter­net puts EVERYTHING THAT EVER WAS AND EVER WILL BE in front of me.  It would be a moral fail­ing on my part NOT to read all of it!

So I can’t stop, any bet­ter than I can stop pick­ing at that scab on my elbow or mak­ing fun of fur­ries.   I have to take extreme measures.

I recently installed a Greasemonkey script in my browser of choice (Firefox), and I added a hand­ful of dis­tract­ing sites to it.  I can check them after 4 PM.  Until then, it says:

Bet you didn’t even know you tried to open this in a tab, you fuck­ing PCP-​​addled mar­mot.  Go back to work or go for a walk. Email some poten­tial clients and beg them for work.  If you really have noth­ing bet­ter to do, then read a god­damned book, jack ass.

It’s work­ing, mostly.  One prob­lem I have run into is that it detects any­thing remotely Facebook related, includ­ing all those “like this” but­tons I implant on every sin­gle page of every site I design.  So I have to fig­ure out a way to deal with that.

But oth­er­wise, it’s work­ing.  I haven’t read red­dit once this morn­ing (the above was a lie for comic effect, believe it or not).  Nor have I looked at my Google Reader, which as we speak is grow­ing new posts like a god­damned XML-​​based hydra.   By the time I sit down on the couch tonight, exhausted from all the cod­ing, design­ing, writ­ing, and gen­er­ally being awe­some that I am get­ting done by stay­ing away from pro­duc­tiv­ity vam­pire sites,  there will be enough unread posts to choke a porn­star.   And I’ll read a few, and the rest I will cut off with my sword,  “Mark All As Read.”  Markallasread would be an awe­some name for a band as well as an epic sword, by the way.

So, what about you?  How do you iden­tify and elim­i­nate the dis­trac­tions that are slowly eat­ing away at the lit­tle bit of time you have left on this earth?  Nobody is going to say, on their deathbed, “I… just wish… I had fol­lowed… Lady Gaga on Twitter. URGH.” BEEEEEEEEEPPPPPP. Cue sob­bing descendants.  

Or am I full of shit on that issue?

Postscript: I recently decided I should allow a lit­tle more of my per­sonal atti­tude and sense of humor to shine through in my blog­ging. Also, metaphors are fun. CAN YOU TELL?

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