October 1, 2016

Immersion

Daily Writing Blog, General Thoughts

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Topic For The Day: Immersion

My best days come from when I immerse myself fully in writing. Nearly everyone has had an experience in which they get so engrossed in an activity that they forget the outside world for a large period of time and concentrate solely on one thing.

Of course, if you’re a writer, that’s exactly what you want to happen in your daily life.

I have a big problem with spending loads of time browsing the internet. There’s always more useful information out there, and there are always new sites to design, new books to write and new people to learn from.

What that means is that I’ll get days where productivity drops hugely. It’s only when I can’t sleep at night for knowing I was lazy that it really hits me.

In another post, I talked about The Willpower Instinct, a great book about replacing habits. That’s the topic for this post, in a round about way.

We want to replace the non-productive, time-wasting habit with the feeling of absorption into our writing.

The major book about this is called Flow: The Psychology of Optimum Human Experience.

It’s an ok book, and it might fit your reading style, but I didn’t overly enjoy reading it in the way I enjoyed The Willpower Instinct.

So I set about creating my own set of rules for attaining immersion.

Before I tell you what those key things are, there is one useful takeaway from the book Flow that you have to bear in mind: If you are new to a skill, it will take a while for the flow experience to kick in. While you still have to do things mechanically, you can’t really let your subconscious take over.

So with writing, the first thing you need to do is get comfortable with your vocabulary and grammar. Unless you’re writing academic work, it’s probably better that you just take your conversational language and put it into writing. That way, you don’t have to worry about this.

So, to summarise:write naturally. Don’t worry about creating James Joyce-style passages of beauty and complexity.

With that said, let’s assume you write on a regular basis, but you find yourself not-writing more than you write. You want to write more, obviously, and have the technical ability to do it.

Tip One: Start Early

My productivity sky-rocketed when I realised a single habit changed my productivity massively.

That single habit was writing some basic information every single morning, first thing.

At first, I had a pen and paper, and would jot down what happened in my dreams, and then a to-do list for the day.

Over time, this extended to writing bullets for the copywriting I had to do for the day, writing basic how-to information, and then later even chapters of books, full articles and now it’s mostly the “topic of the day” articles you can read on this site and on other sites I write for.

This gets your brain into a productive mood early on. It’s the mental equivalent of stretching when you get out of bed:once you have done it, your body won’t want to go back to being slumped. You have set a status-quo for the day.

Tip Two: Scheduled Down Time

A big mistake I used to make was to schedule up-time. Sitting down and saying, “This is when I’m going to work” meant that my default was to not work.

So, if I had four hours of writing for clients, I’d often do that four hours and then watch tv, browse the internet or otherwise do not a lot for the rest of the day.

Instead, you should do it the other way around; ten minutes to check emails at eleven, five minutes to browse facebook at five p.m.. etc.

That way, you are in control of those time wasting habits. Also, you can extend this to research time.

Finally, doing this will give you permission to slack off at times. Nobody can write at one hundred percent all day without breaks. You’ll get fatigued. If you know you’re ” allowed” to go on Youtube after you’ve finished writing, you are less likely to find an excuse to do it before then.

Tip Three: Let It Flow

We don’t really have a single personality.

We have several personalities, and whilst that seems a bit esoteric for an article about writing, it’s important.

When people think about writing or any hobby, it’s a different part of their self to the part that actually does the hobby.

When I tell you about my writing process, I’m accessing the logical part of my brain that allows me to recall what I do and transfer that information.

When I’m actually writing, especially fiction, I’m accessing more creative parts of my brain. Even when I’m writing copy, which is a more logical writing form, I am not criticising my own work.

Essentially, if you want to get into the flow state when writing, you need to switch off the critic. You need to switch off the editor. You need to switch off the proofreader.

Fourth Tip: Treat That Mental State Like An Addict Treats a High

When I write a lot of my articles, I think I give the impression that writing is mechanical, that productivity and being prolific is paramount and that the process itself is a means to an end.

That is the critical voice talking.

Our brains are pleasure seeking devices. They draw us away from pain and they draw us towards pleasure. That’s the basic biological fact, the reptilian part of our existence.

We can hack this though.

Essentially, if you imagine sitting down and loving working, your brain will start to see it as such.

I can’t really prescribe an exercise as such, but whenever you feel like writing (or whatever your job/hobby is) is a chore/less fun than procrastinating, visualise yourself really enjoying every minute of it.

Tell yourself you crave sitting there and doing it.

You’ll find that’s the quickest way to get into a flow state. Visualise getting into that state for the sake of it, and it’ll follow.

Signing off now, because I’m feeling like I’m getting a little hippy, trippy.

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