Unlocking Productivity: The Surprising Battle Between Deep Work and Shallow Work You Didn’t Know You Were Fighting
Ever find yourself staring at a blank page while your phone insists on buzzing every two seconds like it’s auditioning for a soap opera? Yeah, me too. The art of writing—whether it’s a screenplay, a novel, or a blog post—demands that rarest of commodities: uninterrupted time. But in this hyperconnected age, where tweets, texts, and endless notifications burst in like uninvited guests crashing a quiet dinner party, carving out that space feels nothing short of heroic. I’ve been down this road, from the early days of dot matrix printers to today’s digital rabbit holes. And let me tell you—it’s a battle to keep deep, immersive writing time sacred. So, what do you do when THE WORLD chooses you first, even before your coffee kicks in? Here’s a slice of wisdom on how to safeguard your creative sanctuary with four practical strategies that might just save your sanity and your story.
As writers, we need to protect time for the former from the encroachment of the latter. Here are four strategies to do precisely that.
Over a twenty-one month period between 2021 and 2022, I wrote a book. It was different experience than writing a screenplay. Different than blogging. Similar but different than writing lectures. It was not only a challenge to hit 300 pages by the due date as specified in my contract, it was also a unique creative experience.
One aspect of the process remained the same as all these other forms of writing: Time to immerse myself in the subject matter and give myself over fully to the writing process.
I wrote my first screenplay in 1986 on Apple IIc computer with a dot matrix printer and 5 1/4 inch floppy discs. It was easy to slide into long writing sessions that would morph from day to night, time slipping by as timelessness. Technology was my ally. No distractions.
Cut to 2019. Like all modern consumers, I have it all tech-wise. Two MacBook computers, one iPhone, Twitter and Facebook accounts for over a decade. I have access to THE WORLD at any moment I choose.
Or perhaps it chooses ME.
It is so easy to get caught up in the details and busy work of day-to-day life. Tweets. Texts. Email. Clickhole hell.
How to protect time for the deep immersive work a writer needs to do on their creative projects?
I was pondering this and remembered I had flagged a NYT article on this very subject. Sure enough, there it was in my Instapaper file: How to Actually, Truly Focus on What You’re Doing by Tim Herrera who writes:
Here’s what my browser generally looks like: work email in the left-most tab, always open. TweetDeck in the next one, always open. A few Google Docs tabs with projects I’m working on, followed by my calendar, Facebook, YouTube, this publication’s website and about 10 stories I want to read — along with whatever random shiny thing comes across my desktop. (Not to mention my iPhone constantly nagging me, though I’ve mostly fixed that problem.)
This is no way to work! It’s awful, and my attention is divided across a dozen different things. My situation is far from unique, and most people who do most of their work on a…
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