Easily Distracted

I realized tonight that it's been nearly a week since my last post. I was a little surprised to discover that. When I started this blog, I was all fired up and it seemed I had plenty to write about. I posted every other day for a while. And then a week went by.

In the grand scheme of things, I realize a week's not a big deal. Lots of things happen less frequently. But I found myself wondering why I waited so long after a strong start. (And I'm pretty sure I'm the only one judging that, but I tend to overanalyze pretty much everyThing I do.)

Looking back on this past week, I see that I worked a lot to get some project tasks completed on schedule -- part of trying to look good at the new job. I went to the Wincentennial show, had a dinner party with friends, saw a movie and spent a lot of time lounging with my wife (an important activity in its own right). I shoveled about a metric ton of snow and chopped about 100 cubic feet of ice off my driveway. All in all, it was a fairly active week.

But even in the midst of all that, it can't be that hard to find an hour every other day or so, can it? Of course it can't. The problem is that I tend to be, as the title says, easily distracted. Often, when I'm working on task A, I find myself thinking about task B or coming up with ideas for task C. When I'm writing code at work, I have ideas for my D&D campaign and want to write them up. When I get ready to sit down at home to write up those ideas, I decide instead to get caught up on a month's worth of web comics or spend hours catching up on recorded TV shows. And when I set out to watch TV, I find my mind wandering to the latest problem at work and what I'll do to solve it.

This doesn't happen all the time, obviously, or else I'd never get anything done. But it happens often enough that I've noticed the pattern. (In fact, I've written this post while watching TV with my wife, doing laundry, checking on the Superbowl score and eating dinner; it's taken a few hours to finish.) Maybe being more aware of it, I will spend less time being distracted and more time achieving focus on the task at hand. And who knows, maybe staying focused on one thing at a time will actually make it easier to get more done.