Now that I have your attention. Christ. I thought summer was supposed to be mellow and drifty. Whimsical, even. So far July has been a shitstorm of information to process, opine on, and carry out. Especially if you're in, ahem, communications. Who would have thought that the time suck of Facebook would seem like a pinch of sand in the hourglass of social networking?Back, say, twenty-two years ago, when I rented an electric typewriter and hefted it up to my sixth floor walk-up, slammed it down on the kitchen table and extension-corded it to an outlet in the next room whilst my babies crawled and toddled about at my feet, I thought to myself, "I can't wait until my life is free of all these distractions!"
Ha!
The physical demands of single-parenting two kids under three pales in comparison to the monkey mind default of today's information-obsessed routine. I'm in that weird quagmire of having finished a manuscript (my book is out to editors) and beginning the next (which I've started, but am loath to venture too far into until the publishing world opines on book one). I am ripe for distraction. I have a hard time carrying a concept to its rightful conclusion before being shanghaied by the next bolus of must know abouts.
The result is, I'm walking around feeling largely scatter-brained. I do my work with Tweetdeck shrieking at me in the upper right of my screen. I stop what I'm doing every time I hear the ding of a new Outlook email. No sooner do I wrap my mind around a project, it seems it's time to troubleshoot the latest Facebook conundrum in behalf of my clients.
My days are fragmented by minutiae like never before. I am completely divorced from falling into the dream of story and I just realized that it's making me cranky and anxious and fear-driven. What am I afraid of? Not having enough people in my Google+ circles? Missing out on a Groupon deal?
Clearly, I need to recalibrate. Anyone have any fail-safe ideas on how to do that? Any of you writers/artists out there come up with a way to carve out some time for depth?
