I’m writing the first half this post on campus at UQ. It’s approximately 7:03 in the morning, and the cleaner is working their way through the offices. I’m here early because I teach a class at 8:00 AM, because it’s the first week and I still don’t know exactly how to find the room, and because I like to get on campus an hour early for classes.
That’s my buffer, should there be traffic problems or train delays, and on the days when there are no such problems, it leaves me with approximately 47 minutes of time to fill once I arrive.
Occasionally I have a plan for this time: going to the library, for example. Catching up with friends before class. Today — and for most of the coming semester — my plan is this:
Instead, I’m making a conscious decisions about the way you’ll use the little slices of time to advance the writing projects that matter to me.
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I often think of the period between 2005 and 2009 as my most productive years as a writer. Part of that is invariably hindsight being golden, ignoring the set-backs and indolences of the period. Part of it is thinking of all the setbacks that hit right after that period, and my slow shift into regular work after years of sessional teaching and freelancing. Part of it is running through two periods where my process was energised by early successes — first as a writer of RPG stuff, then as a writer of fiction.
Part of it, I fear, is the amount of attention that was colonised by social media after that period.
I joined Facebook in 2007, courtesy of a day-job gig where the boss was enamoured of the platform and did more business comms there than I was comfortable with. Still, Facebook, in its early days, wasn’t much of a distraction. It seemed an inferior option for catching up with people compared to blogs, or Yahoo messenger chats, or messing about on Livejournal. And all of those were distractions were location dependent–I needed to sit at my desk, in front of the desktop, still tethered to my modem by a chord instead of wifi. Distracting enough, given the state of the internet, but something I could walk away from.
Then I got my first smartphone, and twenty-four seven access to the internet. I got a Facebook app, and ready access to distraction any time I had a few spare moments. Then Twitter, which grabbed my attention even better: a stream of content presented at a size suited to a smartphone screen; a conversation with interesting people any time I felt like it.
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I’ve been thinking about my social media use for the last few years, trying to find ways to curtail it and build more time for writing into my day. I’ve been a little more hard-ass about it recently, courtesy of reading Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism, which offers practical advice for going on an online fast and coming back with mindset of only using the things that provide you with real value.
This isn’t new terrain for Newport, whose covered the topics in previous books, but it is the first time it’s felt like he isn’t talking out of his arse when he addresses it because he’s finally engaging with other people’s habits (including social media pros) instead of talking about his own habits in exhaustive detail. There is less of Newport as an example in this book than anything else he’s done, and it’s vastly improved by shift.
One of the things Newport looks at is the speed and efficiency with which social media has started to colonise our attention, and the cost-to-benefit ratio of how they monetise that attention when compared to what we get in return. His argument was probably helped by the fact that I was taking courses on Facebook advertising at about the same point I was reading, getting faced with the stark reality of what the data social media gathers really means and how effectively it can be deployed.
Seeing it laid in stark terms was useful, because it reminded me of three important things:
This last point was particularly true when it came to short bursts of time — waiting for busses and killing time before lectures. The minutes between waking up and getting out of bed. Reaching for the phone and scrolling had become the default activity whenever I had a free moment. It was, in short, my default response and I wasn’t happy about it.
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It’s not the idea of reaching the phone that bothered me. One of the reasons I struggled with Cal Newports ideology, especially in the books prior to the Digital Minimalism, is the sheer fact that I could see a lot of potential value in social media.
I have friends—good friends—who only achieved that state because I had access to their facebook feed and we discovered commonalities that weren’t apparent in the social sphere where we usually encountered one-another. I have a book, Horn, which came out around the time I first started connecting to old friends on Facebook back in 2007 and 2008 — it definitely benefited from the feeling that people wanted to see how that writing lark was going for me.
Even in recent years, social media has sold tickets to conferences I ran, and landed me jobs I wouldn’t have landed without some form of presence. I like social media and having a presence upon it, although I see to be doing Facebook in a way that baffles the algorithms and largely check Twitter once a day to get my regular cuteness hit from the BunnyArchive.
What bothered me wasn’t that I reached for the phone. What bothered me is the sequence of behaviours that reach seemed to trigger, and the behaviours that fell by the wayside because there were no longer empty slices of time in which certain habits were triggered.
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Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit should be on the reading list of every aspiring writer. It will tell you absolutely nothing about craft or getting published, but it’s an incredible resource for hacking your life and figuring out the kinds of triggers that will get you writing more often. Beginning writers are often told to schedule a regular time and place to write, but Duhigg’s book lays out the reasons why that kind of behaviour pays off.
If making time to write involves playing mind games with yourself, as author Kristine Kathryn Rusch suggests, then Duhigg’s book is the cheat code that lays out what you’re playing against. It gives you all the theory you need to know about making starting writing something you don’t have to think about, and gives you guidelines for implementing those theories in its appendix.
One of the things that Duhigg talks about is the existence of habit loops–routine sequences of behaviour that are triggered by a specific cue in our environment. Sequences of learned behaviours that no longer need our conscious attention in order to be completed: tying our shoelaces, for example, tends to be an automated sequence, as does making a coffee first thing in the morning, or putting our keys down in the same place when we return home for the day.
They can also be much bigger tasks — if you’ve ever driven to work on autopilot, not really remembering the trip, it was probably a habit loop at work. As Duhigg puts it:
The reason the discovery of the habit loop is so important is that it reveals a basic truth: When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately fight a habit—unless you find new routines—the pattern will unfold automatically.
Duhigg, Charles. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do, and How to Change (p. 20). Random House. Kindle Edition.
The patterns of this loop are simple: there is a cue, there is the routine actions, and there is the reward that makes the action worthwhile. Once you recognise the patterns in your life, you can use them to build new habits by grafting them onto an existing cue and sequence: “I will write 500 words after finishing breakfast every morning,” for example. Or, “I will edit my manuscript for 15 minutes after brushing my teeth.”
It also made my smart terrifying, because the cue that triggered my associated habit loops was omnipresent and routinely sent me bouncing from app to app searching for the rewards of recognition and approval.
The smart phone was the thing I reached for during any brief moment of boredom and indecision, and while we only eat breakfast once a day and walk through the door a handful of times, there are a multitude of boring and indecisive moments scattered throughout any given twenty-four hour period.
Those moments would start the loop: check Facebook and like a few things, maybe post something new; swap to Twitter and check in there; check my email; check in with Instagram. Go back to Facebook and see if there’s any responses. Back to Twitter. Check my website states.
There was always something to do next on the phone, even if I’d last opened the app a few moments before. Social media, after all, is all about showing you something new. The algorithms keep adjusting to deliver on that promise, better and better.
My phone could fill a short slice of free time with ease, even though it rarely delivered more than a new post, a new like, a quick conversation. And there was a constant chance that a quick check would quickly transform into a long engagement, cycling through the loop of checking until I was forced to break free.
Basically, the stark lesson of the smart phone and social media, for writers, really comes down to a simple question: someone is going to monetise your attention during these short moments. Would you rather they defaulted to Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and co, or would you rather that person was you?
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When I first decided to go all-in with Newport’s digital minimalism approach, I found myself pondering what all those smart phone habits had supplanted. What did I do with all those little slices of time before I owned a smart phone? What loops did I run through in those moments? What automated behaviour did I engage in?
I don’t remember clearly, after a decade and a bit of walking around with a smart phone in my pocket, but I can make a decent guess after spending the last few weeks engaging in a digital fast.
Those slices of time where where checked email sometimes, or flicked over to a wrestling forum. They were the gaps where I checked my RSS feed, catching up on blogs from around the world. Little distractions, much like social media, albeit attached to my computer.
But when I wasn’t there. When I was waiting for trains, or killing an hour before classes? When I was anywhere but seated in front of my desk, tethered to the internet via a chord?
It appears that’s when I read bits and pieces of books, and the moments where I thought about stories. How to fix a problem, or pull together a voice so it worked. How to implement a plot point or problem that didn’t make much sense.
I turns out, the little slices of time were the place a surprising amount of work got done in short, focused bursts.
Those short slices of time, all those empty minutes, were the places where thinking tended to be done.
More importantly, focus begat focus. Just as spending two minutes on Facebook could blossom into an hour of cycling through apps, two minutes spent connecting with a project can result in more work getting done.
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The second use of Duhigg’s book is figuring out how to circumvent automated habits when they’re unwanted. Case in point: there are very few rewards for looking at my Smart Phone these days. No social media, no email app. No web browser to go looking for info on the internet, or circumventing the absence of apps by heading to the browser set. No stats for my website, or my email newsletter.
I can read books on it, and chat with my partner–two activities that I truly valued when I looked at phone tools that enhanced my life. I can track my steps per day and other health metrics. I can photograph things and listen to podcasts. I can check wikipedia and IMDB, and update my Goodreads account.
I can update online documents where I’m working, or add notes to my project OneNote. Turns out, you can remove a lot of things from your smart phone an it will still feel packed to the gills with options
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Sometimes, you start a project without being sure where you’ll end up. This post is one of those.
I wrote the final part of this post in a hospital visitor’s lounge, seated in an uncomfortable chair and trying to ignore the terrible television playing in the background. It’s 1:00 PM in the afternoon, the day after I wrote the first paragraph. My father fell and broke his hip while I was teaching classes. Was scheduled for surgery this morning–the start of a long rehab process, complicated by his Parkinsons and the associated dementia.
One of his Doctors has given us stats on the procedure, giving us some insight into what’s coming. Dad’s Parkinsons diagnoses is about fifteen years old by now. We’ve had lots of these conversations since then, and I think that I’m prepared.
I’m not. I never am.
My dad’s surgery was the second major medical news of the week, occurring five days after my sister was diagnosed with cancer and started scheduling visits to surgeons and specialists to plan her ongoing treatment.
The next few months of my life will be more ‘little slices of time’ than ‘big, productive writing blocks,’ and stress and fear that come with this kind of thing is a prime combination for triggering a reach for social media.
I know, because I downloaded a browser to check my email and start cancelling plans from the hospital while my dad was getting prepared for surgery. And when I looked up, two hours later, I’d been cycling through the same apps and sites, killing time and trying not to think.
Because here’s the thing: the urge to write and the urge to post to social media are both driven by the same need for connection and recognition, and those needs seem a lot more urgent when you’re stressed and afraid. Writing may deliver bigger rewards, but it’s riskier and requires a lot more investment.
So I took the browser off my smart phone, making it dumber once more. Then I sat down and finished writing this post. Then I did some work on a short story between updates from the hospital staff about Dad’s condition, scribbles a paragraph for my novella in the moment after that.
And for the most part, I didn’t think about it: there was a moment of free time, and my phone offered no real rewards for engagement once I realised the connection-rich environments were gone, so the notebook or the PC were the next port of call. Writing something was the next thing on that list of things to do when I’ve got a spare moment and need to not think about all of this.
There is a single image in The Art Of Neil Gaiman that’s stuck with me ever since I read the book–a note tucked into the corner of a notebook, intended for Roger Avery during a dark period of Avery’s life.
It says, very simply: when things get really bad, I go to the writing place.
There are worse impulses to embrace.
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There are still things that I really value about social media, email, and similarly distracting apps. Some of those things are things that social media does really inefficiently in every respect but one–they have the audience share and the buy-in from millions of users. As Dan Tynan discovered when he quit Facebook last year, just because you’ve decided the platform isn’t your preferred way of doing things, there are lot of people who do love it and they’re not yet ready to move away from the tools just to accomodate you.
And even as my focus swings around to doing my things — writing blogs, sending newsletters, finishing what fiction I can — I do it with the knowledge that social media is a driver. It’s a tool that will spread things out to an audience, and a tool that is effective because it has the weight of large-scale buy-in.
I’m not leaving those tools behind, just giving them a difference set of minutes. Work minutes, intentionally chosen for that specific purpose. Social minutes, intentionally set aside to catch up with the things friends are doing.
Building habits around doing things in focused blocks of time, instead of surrendering every available moment to the promise of distraction.
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The problem with talking about your relationship with social media — especially when you’re pulling away from it — is the moral dimension people seem to associate with it. The implication that you’re wasting time on your feeds, for example, is right up there with the kinds of judgements that are levied at any mass-market phenomena.
This is especially true when you’re pulling away to get other things done, since the nature of capitalism implies that being a good producer is more important than being a habitual consumer.
Let me assure you — I am still embracing moments of sublime, mindless consumption. I’m flaking out in front of the TV and streaming familiar comfort programs. I’m reading books that make me happy, even if I’ve read them a dozen times before.
We make choices about the things we consume. We make things about the things we do. Right now, I’m chasing a dream, getting in touch with habits that felt like they were getting me closer rather than pulling me further away.
Creating time for that dream when there’s far less time for dreams than I’d like, and when I need dreams more than I did two weeks back.
I’m making it easier to go to the writing place, even if only for a few minutes while waiting in a cafe queue or sitting on a bus.
Making connections, building ideas. Scribbling the new words down.
Not so different form the things I did on Facebook, on Twitter and Instagram.
Just slower. Bigger. More ambitious. Less likely to make the connections I’m craving now, but with a chance of better connections later on.
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