How to Write While Deeply Distracted

(from an ADHDer to the rest of you)

I’m not saying I’m concentrating well right now—that would be psychotic. But I’m never focusing well, and over a lifetime of first masking and then, more recently, dealing with ADHD head-on, I’ve developed enough coping strategies that I can actually get stuff done. Including writing.

I’ve written before with advice for those with ADHD. But this is advice for the rest of you, advice for the recently-squirrely, with the caveat that I do not think this is the time to put your head in the sand and decide that you’re avoiding the news, unless it’s a matter of a mental health crisis. It’s the time to get your work done efficiently, carve out time for your art, and then devote a solid, isolated block of time to activism or protective measures.

Okay, So What Works?

Of course the great irony here is that people with ADHD find a fun new method or schedule or notebook and it works great for about three days, max, but then the shine is off and/or it gets emotionally tied up with any failures along the way, and you never want to try that thing again. That said, here are a few things that have consistently worked for me, with modifications for variety, over the long haul.

The 1-Hour Scheduled Sprint

Write down a bunch of things you’re pretty sure you could theoretically get done in the next hour. It should be challenging but not impossible. No worrying about your to-do list beyond that.

So a Pesky Task list might look like this:
- Put away laundry
- Email back: Jeffrey, Magda, Blake, dance studio
- Schedule dentist

When I’m writing, on the other hand, my list might look like this:
- Finish train scene
- Food details (research, fill in)
- Plan out next two scenes

Because I’m much more able to focus on my writing than on emails, I might make a list for a whole writing session, which could be a lot more than one hour. But one hour is all I can handle for a regular work sprint.

Then you set a timer, or flip an hourglass, and try to beat the clock. (If you actually have ADHD, it helps that most of us fare much better under pressure, and under a time constraint, even in normal circumstances.)

Don’t delete anything from the list! Strike through it as it’s finished—or if you use your Notes app for lists like I do, move them down to a “FINISHED!” heading. Feel proud. If you don’t finish everything in an hour, you can either give yourself an overtime or just carry the last things over to the next list.

And yes, I promise this works for writing, not just laundry. I'll never give myself so much that the writing itself will be rushed, but trying to move quickly actually gives me license to skip the boring parts (which I’d have to edit out later anyway) and think about concision.

And at least for me, having plot-point goals works much better than having word-count goals. It focuses the writing, and I don’t end up typing a bunch of nonsense just to hit my word goal.

You know what you haven’t thought about as you race toward your goals? The fact that FOX News hired Lara Trump to host a primetime program. Hooray!

The Sensory-Deprivation Tank* (*not really a tank)

Again, the key is the time limit. If an hour seems too long to shut out the world, try twenty minutes and work your way up. But pick a certain amount of time to go into deep concentration mode. And then try:

• AirPods or noise-canceling headphones (or, honestly, both, one over the other), playing a white noise app. “Rain on Tent” is my favorite soundtrack. Interviewers love to ask “What was your playlist while you were writing this novel?” and I want to be like “Man, have you heard Rain on Tent? They’re amazing. I love their debut, “Rain on Tent,” but then their later work, like “Rain on Tent,” is seriously groundbreaking.”

  

  This playlist is 🔥

• As empty a space as you can get. This might involve a beanbag chair on a closet floor, or it might involve taking your laptop into bed (i.e., away from your desk), or it might involve getting yourself to a library or coffee shop and not asking for the wifi password.

• Whenever possible: wifi off on the computer, phone out of reach. I’m sure using a plain old notebook is great for this too, but personally I have no patience for writing by hand.
  

Move!

If you’ve been sitting at your desk doing one thing for a while, you’re going to get antsy. And either your brain is going to wander, or your body is. Let it be your body.

Exercise, walk the dog, circle your apartment, do some yoga. But do it without listening to something that will take your mind off what you were doing. The times when I’m moving but still thinking about my book are often when breakthroughs happen. They will not happen if I’m weeping along to Pod Save America.

(For a long time, I thought there was something magical about this one Starbucks bathroom because I kept having major revelations about my work as I washed my hands. I eventually realized it had nothing to do with the bathroom and everything to do with the fact that I had walked across the Starbucks to get there.)

The Magic Combo

Train rides and plane flights tend to work incredibly well because they combine movement, in a way (you’re hurtling forward in space), sensory deprivation (you’re stuck in your seat and there’s often spotty wifi), and there’s a time limit (how much can you get done before this plane lands?)…

I am writing this on a train right now, and will try to finish this paragraph before we pull into Penn Station. Aaaaand I did it!

Hold Yourself Personally Accountable

It works great to do a writing sprint with a friend, partly because seeing someone else work makes you want to work, but also so you can say, “Scream in my face if you see me looking at exploding cybertruck memes.”

At StoryStudio Chicago (where I’m Artistic Director) we came up with a pretty intense week-by-week accountability mentorship with a small cohort, so someone can kind of “make” you work for six months (the same way I need to go to yoga class so they make me do yoga). We did an info session on it here, if you want to learn about it and also see, in the background, my poster for unpleasant Hungarian liquor.

Hold Yourself Publicly Accountable

Or you can use social media for this; post on Bluesky (not owned by Nazis!) that you’re going to do x and x and x in the next hour, and say you’ll report back for accountability. Then log the hell off and do that. Last year, before I quit Twitter, I posted on there about my journey to try to get my inbox down from around 700 to 0; every time I sorted or responded to a batch, I reported the new total. People were cheering me on, or—if I didn’t report for a day or two—asking if I was still at it. I did not ever get to zero (someday!), but I’ve kept it at around 100-150 for quite a while now, which is a decent win for me.

What you don’t see here is Fozzie holding the gun to make him write.

Predetermine Your Distractions

If you don’t have your distractions planned out, you know what they’ll end up being: You spending eighty-five minutes on Facebook, screaming at some lady who seems to know your aunt and believes chem trails cause feminism. So this is a little like putting healthy snacks at kids’ eye level in the pantry; have your healthy breaks set to reach for when you’re bored or stuck.

You can try…

Fidgets: It’s good to have something fiddly close at hand so you can reach for that rather than your phone. I have a lot of magnets to play with. (Fidgets are also essential for the Zoom meetings when you don’t want to be looking down at your hands as you crochet.)

A physical task: If you’ve made a list of random things that need to get done around the house (chop onions for dinner! fix the shelf!), you can turn to that instead of CNN. And then you can take out all your aggression by hammering something into the wall.*

Research: The same goes for a running list of things to research for your project. I do have a hard time when this involves the internet, because then I’m off down rabbit holes and I completely forget what I came there to do. But—see below (Beeping Thing) for a possible cure.

A dance break: I do not actually do this, but maybe you’re cooler than me. You can put on one (1) upbeat song and dance to it, and then sit back down and get to work.

*Preferably the shelf and not the onion, but whatever works.

This Beeping Thing:

Here’s where I go full Just use this one weird hack that doctors don’t want you to know about!

This is a YoutTube video that does nothing but count down in five minute intervals and play a beep every 5 minutes. (Riveting!) Put this on (or I’m sure there’s an app for it) when you start a task online. Every time it beeps, that’s your reminder to stay on task. It beeps and you’re still researching 1960s toasters for your book? Great, good for you. It beeps and ooooops, are you reading about Pete Hegseth telling Ukraine to just concede a bunch of land? Nope, you can do that later. Get back to the toasters.

Try the Extreme:

I am not saying you should hire someone to stand there and slap you if you look at Facebook, I’m just saying that someone did it once.

Remind Yourself of the Stakes:

If you’re mad about politics (and I’m going to assume you are), print out a photo of the most punchable politician and put it where you can see it, and remind yourself how much this person would want you to feel defeated, and not write, and how if you do finish a book he’d probably like to ban it. Then keep writing, right under his stupid face.

Remind yourself why you started the project. What was the fire that made you want to dive into this world in the first place? Is it still burning?

Ask yourself how you’ll feel in ten years if you haven’t finished this thing.

Remind yourself that life is short, sometimes unpredictably short. When I get close to the end of a project, I think (probably way too much) about mortality. There’s this point when it’s good enough to publish in case I’m not here tomorrow; I’ll send the manuscript to my agent and tell her not to read it unless I’m gone. Yes, this is horribly morbid. It’s also a weirdly lovely point of arrival with any novel. And it’s also the ultimate time constraint/ticking clock. It’s one you don’t have to set for yourself. It’s real.

I wrote this piece, “The World Is On Fire; Can We Still Talk About Books?” back in 2018. If you need a pep talk about why it still matters to make art at a time like this, that link is for you.

And then…

Take an hour or two hours or some other boundaried chunk of your life in which you’re going to read the news, call your senators, apply for citizenship in Malta, plan a protest, spread information online, fight book bans, donate to protect trans rights, slap an ACLU bumper sticker on your weird neighbor’s Tesla, or handcuff yourself to the town hall fence. Saying “9 am to 12 pm is panicking-and-activism time” is at least a way to keep the oligarchs and bigots from stealing all the joy and energy in our lives.

I’m not quite there yet on setting those boundaries, except when I’m lost in my work. Thank God for the work.