Slaying the Hydra
July 19, 2018

          I shall from now on shape my life around writing instead of squeezing
  writing into my life whenever I can. -- Ted Hughes, in a 1956 letter to his
  sister

Let me begin by acknowledging that I know I'm lucky to be able to be a freelance
writer. Many of my struggles are different from someone who's trying to write
while holding down a job, or who has family or other responsibilities that
require them to fit in writing where- and when-ever they can.

However, one struggle I think I share with many writers is that hydra called the
internet. I've had to go to great lengths to prevent myself from wasting too
much time randomly surfing. This, even though I agree with Cal Newport that the
internet should be used for information rather than entertainment, and so try
hard to only go online for research purposes.

But it's in research where I now appear to be falling down. As I've mentioned
before, I don't use the internet before noon so I can do my writing in the
morning; instead, I note down what I need to research and keep going. My writing
now rolls along until twelve p.m. And then I often quickly plow through my email
and find the answers to my writing-related questions in a very short time. But
recently, I've found myself spending hours afterward doing more "research" on
topics such as "best fountain pen inks for left-handed writers" or "text-only
browsers."

While many of these searches are technically work-related (or I can justify them
to myself as such) because they have bearing on my writing and how I do it, I
also have to admit that some of these searches have been "info-tainment" on my
part. And the time I've wasted on this sort of "research" has occasionally
rippled through the rest of my day, leading to workouts started later than I'd
planned or chores that had to be pushed off to another time.

It looks like if I want to get my productivity back to where it had been, I'll
need to cauterize yet another head of the hydra. I'm going to have to put limits
on not only when, but for how long I use the internet each day. So as of this
posting, I'm limiting myself to one post-noon hour per day of internet time.

I'll let you know how well this self-imposed internet diet worked (or didn't) in
a month. In the meantime, wish me luck.

(c) 2018 by Andrew Gudgel 
email: contact [at] andrewgudgel.com