Not Practicing What I Preach

I hate when I don't listen to me!

There I was. Tuesday afternoon. I set my trusty egg timer. Ready to get to some serious work. The space was set, or so I thought.

It was as though I'd forgotten the basic rules and I was the one who wrote them!

I didn't shut down my email program. Worse I didn't turn the sound off my mobile so I wouldn't hear  the lovely little chime it makes every time someone texts me. That day it was as though I was the most popular person on the Upper West Side. The texts kept coming. And as though channeling my demons, I chose not to shut it off. I could have. But I didn't.  An hour later I wondered why the project I was trying to complete still sat unfinished.

Duh? Did I not just write a whole book about this? Have I not been tweeting and Facebooking its arrival all over cyberspace? Isn't the reason I suggest good old-fashioned analog egg timers instead of digital devices to eliminate those intrusive distractions? To form a safe and quiet space to focus on creating?

Yes, I know better. But I slipped. And like all modern day tech addicts, it can be hard to restrain oneself once those nasty intrusions have infiltrated one's space. They are, after all like crack. It's as if you are rendered helpless to their power. As though they are the ones who have strapped your hands behind the chair in some new variation of Fifty Shades of Grey keeping you out of  reach of all those buttons that say OFF.

It happens. Even to the best of us.

You let the distractions mire your thought process. You are unable to focus on anything but what you might be missing. And not only do you get nothing accomplished, but the hangover that ensues in the aftermath, that mixture of guilt and lack of productivity. It will make you swear on whatever tickles your fancy, never, ever to stray again.

But you will. It happens. Even to those of us who literally wrote the book. Sometimes that's okay. Sometimes it all works out. Point in case, this blog is a direct result of my going off the wagon. So I was, after all that, actually accomplishing something.

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