# focus: maintain focus by freewriting

how does one avoid all the distracting thoughts while trying to focus on a task?

by freewriting! (the technique explained in @/stream.)

# caveats

i should start with a few caveats though. everybody is different so freewriting won't work for everyone. i suspect that for this to work you need to:

• have an inner voice (surprisingly not everyone has that),
• think primarily in words (there are people who think primarily in images, emotions, etc which can be hard to translate to words),
• work on a thing that needs writing mostly (document writing, programming are such things).

also, as with any habit, it's quite hard to start working like this. but it's pretty mechanical, so it's easy to tell whether you are doing it right or not. and it might take a few months until you get the hang of it which means you might give up before you start seeing the benefits from doing this.

# modes of operation

i think there are two main modes we operate in:

• instinct mode: your mind just follows ideas and activities that feel right in the moment. this is the mode when we daydream, procrastinate, check the phone, netflix binge. there's nothing or nobody there to stop us from doing this.
• feedback mode: in this mode you get some immediate feedback if you get off track from the expected activity or thought pattern. this is when we drive, talk with a bank teller, following instructions to assemble a lego building. here the impatient driver behind you, the sleepy bank teller, or your kid will quickly remind you to get back to work in case you start doing anything else.

you need to be in feedback mode when you work on something that you don't necessarily love. when you work on a computer alone, there's nobody who will tell you to get back on track if you ever start doing something else. and a lot of work actually happens invisibly in the head. so even if you had another person watching you, they wouldn't be able to tell if you are distracted or not.

and often even yourself cannot keep a watch of your own thoughts. maybe a very distracting thought keeps popping back into your stream of consciousness. e.g. a drama from your personal life, or a strong desire to do something else (play a video game, or watch netflix/porn, smoke). they simply overtake your ordinary thoughts that you need for the task at hand.

i propose that the solution consists of two parts:

• you must project your thoughts onto paper to bring some order and oversight to them.
• you must guide your thoughts based on the data you see on the paper in front of you.

# anchoring

expressing a thought in a written form makes it more coherent, more concrete. that's a big help in understanding your own ideas. but the primary utility is in anchoring.

whenever you complete a thought, a bunch of new thoughts appear. they can either relate to the previous thought or they can be completely unrelated (e.g. a desire to procrastinate).

if you are daydreaming (i.e. you are in instinct mode) you would select the most comforting thought and you would follow that without anybody stopping you. if this new comfortable thought is unrelated to your task at hand, you pretty much stopped thinking about your task.

but if you are freewriting then you now need to write down this new comforting thought if that's the one you want to select as your next thought. if it's unrelated to your previous thought then writing that down will feel wrong. it would make your writing way too incoherent. and that feeling of wrongness is the feedback that will help you get back to your task (i.e. you are in feedback mode). you are now more likely to drop the comfortable idea and select a different, more on-topic thought to write down.

so as you write down your sentences, they act as an anchor that keeps you somewhat on topic. and the act of writing takes time during which you need to keep your thought in mind. this helps you to gain more on-topic followup thoughts.

writing things down also helps you avoid thinking in circles. in instinct mode we often busy-loop over the same obsessive thoughts. but if you keep writing everything down, you'll quickly notice that you'll develop new thoughts just to avoid writing down the same sentences over and over.

# anecdote

i found a nice anecdote about the renowned feynman that suggests to me that he also did use writing to sort his thoughts out. here's the anecdote:

When historian Charles Weiner looked over a pile of Richard Feynman's notebooks, he called them a wonderful 'record of his day-to-day work'.

"No, no!", Feynman objected strongly.

"They aren't a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process. I actually did the work on the paper."

"Well," Weiner said, "The work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here."

"No, it's not a record, not really. It's working. You have to work on paper and this is the paper. Okay?", Feynman explained.

if he thought writing is the real thinking process, then maybe it's really worth a shot to write more!

# in practice

so what is the actual method?

suppose you have to write an essay or a complicated email. what often happens is that you don't even know where to start. you don't even know what should be the first sentence. i propose that you run the following algorithm in a loop:

• 1. you know what to write in your essay? type that in.
• 2. you don't know what to write but you have thoughts in your head? freewrite the thoughts to your notebook. eventually some good sounding sentences will appear that you can then type in via step 1. spot check yourself every few minutes if you are still thinking about your task and gently guide your thoughts back if not.
• 3. your mind goes blank: well, if you think "nothing comes to my mind" then you do have a thought so you should follow step 2 to write "nothing comes to my mind" to your notebook. but if really nothing comes to you and this state persists, then you need to ask a friend, coworker, or a mentor to help you brainstorm/kickstart your thoughts about the topic on hand. hopefully you'll get some starting notes out of this and then step 1 and 2 will keep you busy.

published on 2021-11-06

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