You have it, I have it, we all have it. In this busy world we live in attention spatter is something we all suffer from. We get so busy that we dont even realize that we are not giving the matter at hand our full attention. How many times have you thought I need to get that done, only to find yourself taking care of stuff, taking a phone call, checking your email or doing some other errand or chore that could wait. Maybe you dont even realize that you are so scattered that you arent accomplishing as much as you would like.

This post was inspired by an article written by Christine Kane a great motivational writer and singer part 1 and part 2, a blog you should read, where she talks about how easily we divide out attention and as creative types we tend to do that more. It is both a good and a bad thing. Good on the side that we can multi-task well. We can have several things on our plate at once and juggle them all.

But sometimes we use this attention splatter to not get to work on the projects we want to do. Kind of like we are waiting for the one brillant moment where we just sit down and it all gets done, only the road to getting there is littered with distractions. Distractions we actually invite into our day, our lives. We do it so automatically that I am not sure we realize how much it steals away from our day in moving along with our artistic goals.

I know I am guilty of that on many days. I plan to sew, then I get on my computer, check my email, read my favorite blogs, do some research I was planning on doing, then I call a friend after all its lunch time already and I can just chat over lunch, now it’s 1pm and I didnt bake that loaf of bread I wanted to have with dinner, now its nearing 3 pm and oh gosh who wants to start a project now, so I will just fiddle with little things the rest of the day, maybe read a good book after dinner and get my project started tomorrow.

See how easy it was to while the day away and not actually get to work on anything of substance.

Your distractions might make a whole different list than mine, but they are still distractions and they still get in the way. There are so many things that can take up your day, some of them necessary some of them well, a lot less necessary. So what are we to do?

Well lately I have been trying to be more aware of how I can waste away a day and not get much done, walking away from my computer is one thing that can create more time and I am tryig to be more conscious of what I allow to take up my time today. Just one day at a time seems to work and I can turn these little moments of paying closer attention to my spatter into habits that change my days and how I spend my time.

One thing that works for me is to check my email early in the morning and then walk away from the computer and make a deal with myself not to go back to it all day, or until I finish up my work today. That can create a great deal of time for me to focus on my projects. Another is to clean after I am done working. Some days I figure I am going to make a mess anyway, so I will just to all the straightening up at the end of the day. You see I like to start being productive early in the day, by around 4 pm I am done and find this time a great time to do my cleaning, it gets me moving after a long day of sitting at the sewing machine, so it serves a purpose in doing it this way too.

I have a long way to go in learning to tame the attention spatter beast in my life, do you have one in yours? how does it steal away your day, and what things have you learned to reclaim your time and attention? Maybe we can all share a bit of our attention spatter and how we do or can deal with it so we might all find ways to improving our creative time.