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Books for Writers
Reclaiming Your Writing Focus in a Distracting World
Indistractable by Nir Eyal
Successful writing is all about managing attention.
Writers need extended periods of focus for the drafting part of the process. Uninterrupted focus is tough to maintain in the modern world. A thousand seemingly urgent messages demand our attention and quick responses.
If you want to be creative (and we all do), you also must give your mind a chance to think laterally and discover unexpected associations. Creative insight happens during periods of open attention, when our minds wander while we’re doing something else or when we’re bored.
Those opportunities are disappearing as we fill every moment with consuming information. If we have a few spare moments standing in a line, we turn to email, Instagram, Twitter, or other dopamine-firing activities that protect us from boredom or daydreaming.
As a writer, focus is my most important asset. That’s why I jumped at the chance to read Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life by Nir Eyal.
If that name sounds familiar, it’s because he’s the author of the best-selling Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Who better to tell us how to reclaim our focus from…
