One piece of writing advice I've seen over and over is to work without distractions when it's time to write. The biggest and most controversial writing distraction is, according to these authors, the internet.
I'm inclined to agree, at for myself. I do a lot of research via the internet. But my ratio of research to fooling around is way skewed to the 'fooling around' end of the scale. So, I'm trying it out. I just bought a used laptop, installed Office XP (the last version that makes sense, for me at least) and disabled my network card. This is going to be my dedicated writing machine. I have a 16 gig thumb drive to move files back and forth, so if I have to email something, I'll physically copy it over to my old laptop and send it out there.* Will this make me more productive? I don't know, we'll see. I can still find ways to distract myself, I'm in my library after all. But hopefully this will be a bold new world of work time meaning work. And and end to playing video games and surfing instead. Anyone else cut the cord, *I could, of course, re-enable the network card and email from the work laptop but I'm trying to pretend there is literally no way to connect to the internet on this device. I know myself well enough not to give myself any leeway there.
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Internet is disabled on my writing laptop every weekday from 9am to noon. I can run upstairs and do research if I need to. Been doing that for, I don't know, four or five months? It's a manual network configuration (I think router), so I can't cheat, but if I get tired of the setup, it can easily be switched back.
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9/15/2011 02:39:33 am
I put my netbook in a separate room from my gaming computer, and it's working well. I "banned" myself from Twitter, but I sneak and do it anyway, and it's still easier to focus and get down to work.
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AuthorI'm a lightly-published author with several novels completed and I hope to have them up on Amazon shortly. Archives
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Mark Andrew Edwards |
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