Unplug to get things done

At one point last year, the wifi went out at my house for a week. It’s a long story of how this happened. At first we thought it was a widespread outage, but it turned out that the crew aerating our yard had accidentally clipped our cable. In any case, before we figured out some workarounds, and then ultimately got the cable fixed, we had very little digital access.

This was all frustrating, but there was this silver lining. I had been procrastinating working on a draft of an article. On Friday after my internet went out, I couldn’t do a lot of other things…and I couldn’t pretend to be productive by checking email…so I wrote a draft. It only took a few hours when I wasn’t giving myself the option of doing a million other things at the same time.

Airplane mode

Perhaps you’ve experienced the same thing on a plane. I know you can get wifi on a lot of planes, but sometimes you can’t if you’re over water, and sometimes it’s buggy. Or expensive. If it’s a short flight I tend not to make an attempt. I’ve often assigned myself a writing project on the plane and found I’ve been able to crank out something sizable before we land.

We often rely on connectivity to take a break from work. We can convince ourselves that the emails need to get sent and such, and maybe they do, but maybe not immediately. Depriving ourselves of easy breaks sometimes means we soldier through and score some big wins.

If you find that to be the case, then maybe you can consciously unplug for a bit. I would not recommend asking your yard crew to accidentally cut the cable. But you could create the equivalent. Put your phone in airplane mode or put it somewhere else. Go somewhere with no wifi. Assign yourself something that’s going to take some serious concentration to do.

It’s OK to take a break

You’ll probably want to check in on things at some point, and that’s fine. It’s actually really hard to concentrate on anything for more than 90 minutes, so you might take a 10-minute break to make sure nothing disastrous has happened in your world. My guess is that it hasn’t, and hopefully that will empower you to try disconnecting more often.

In any case, we eventually got the wifi working again, so I could stop commuting to Starbucks or the library. I can check email constantly if I wish. But when I really need to get things done, I try to arrange a situation where I can’t easily connect to the world. Sometimes, it’s best to keep these things in check.

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