It’s An Easy Distraction World
Here’s another short post.
Today I’ve been planning a bunch of long-form posts, and even writing some. I’ve been doing this using a Kindle Scribe, which I bought over the Christmas break.
I first tried an e-notebook a few months back when visiting a friend, who shall not be named. He’d recently bought a Remarkable, and was loving it.
I did a little research, and instead went with the Kindle Scribe; it’s similar to the Remarkable, and I’ll probably edit this post in the future to give a list of features that are similar/different, but ultimately, for me, the choice boiled down to Kindle integration; I can use it as an e-reader as well as a notebook.
As an e-reader, it’s a bit big, to be honest. I already have a Kindle, and I’ve found that I tend to use that more for reading.
However…
As a notebook, it’s incredible. I’ve used mine every single day I’ve had it; sometimes for hours a day.
Now, obviously, most people don’t write for hours a day, so different use cases for different folks apply; but it’s already a gamechanger, and mostly for one reason:
It takes away the distraction. I’m a writer who actually writes.
With a computer, it’s very easy to get sucked into other stuff. Just this morning, I was reading about apparent 8-10 foot aliens being hunted by police in Miami.
Now, I’ve always had a thing for weird stories, so I thought to myself, Jamie, you’re deep down the rabbit hole here…
However, I told my friends about it. They’d already read about this. Then, I spoke to my Mum. She too, already knew about the giant aliens invading Miami. In fact, it turns out that until today, I was probably the only person who didn’t know about the giant aliens invading Miami. And that proves one thing:
Everyone is easily distracted by the weird, wonderful and stupid.
The above isn’t a value judgement on anyone; I’m very prone to this. The world is endlessly interesting and the tech wizards and marketing misfits have made the process of distracting you very sophisticated and effective.
So any tool you have at your disposal to limit distractions should be deployed as a matter of course. Things I use:
- Leaving my phone in a different room
- Leechblock and alternatives to limit browsing to need-to-use sites
- Kindle e-reader (I send documents to it so that I don’t read at the PC)
- paper and pen
The Scribe fits into this perfectly; it has notebooks, folders and it’s cumbersome enough to switch between reading and writing enough that I don’t find myself reading when I should be writing.
Definitely a good tool in the arsenal. More notes to follow.