Stopping the Bees in My Bonnet From Derailing My Life

Many suggestions are out there to combat this. Set a goal and a focus time. Remove distractions such as your phone or the Internet. Minimalize your working environment.

I fail them because I still need to work on my discipline. But I fail them also for another reason: the suggestions above protect from external distractions. I’m prone to internal distractions instead.

My mind is often constantly buzzing. It’s as if it’s on constant brainstorm mode, thinking about topic A may spawn off thoughts about its relation to topic B, C, D, etc. While I’m still working on A, I can’t shake off the thoughts on B as well.

I can see how it’s useful for creative or lateral thinking or big picture thinking. It is a foe for focused work.

Try as I might to push the thoughts out and gain my focus back, I often do not (yet) have a strong enough discipline to do so. Rather than waste time and mental energy with this struggle, I avail myself of another option — accept the buzz, and embrace it.

This sounds very like the typical case of succumbing to distraction. The tweak though is, how I can spend the minimum time and effort to satisfy this bee in my bonnet so it will go away and allow me to go back to my original focus. In other words, do just the bare minimum enough to postpone further action, rather than proceeding to craft the thought into a well-formed idea or acting it out. I call this approach my Minimum Viable Postponement (MVP).

In my context, I want to quickly get the bee out of my bonnet. Where the buzz is small, I can summon my willpower to forcefully get it out of my mind to focus on the main task on hand. But for those with constant loud buzzing, I can not simply get them out of my mind. Hence, the need for a measured approach with the MVP.

The key here is viable. In a product sense, MVP needs to still be viable for a minimal set of customer. For postponement, the customer is my mind: I need to trick my own mind that I have done enough that the current idea can be postponed, so the mind is satisfied and can move on.

What’s minimally viable may vary. A few variations I have practised:

Simply adding a reminder in my mobile phone for a later time (or date) to think or do something about an idea has often eased the idea nicely out. I guess when the mind is assured that there is a commitment to follow up (ie the later date), it can let go more easily.

When a thought occurs and strains itself for more deliberation on the various possible scenarios that follow, I quickly jot the thought down in my Evernote (my equivalent to a diary for the hard copy people).

It may be a topic for a possible article, with thoughts for key paragraphs, in phrases to be fleshed out as drafts in the future. It may be a word capturing the idea, and associated keywords that I had wanted to immediately google. All captured in the bare minimum, not even full sentences, but enough to assure the mind that this is enough information for a future resumption and hence can be postponed. This should take seconds; otherwise, it’s not “minimum”.

I saw an image that I thought with some adjustment would be useful for a slide deck I will be preparing for a future presentation. I snapped a picture of it and emailed it to myself. I stopped short of cropping, editing, annotating, and everything else that comes with it.

If it’s an idea that involves other parties, engineer a delayed feedback channel with them. A new collaboration with others who share the same hobby? Don’t work out the details, drop a quick email to the potential collaborator to see if it interests him as well. A possible home improvement? Text the wife a topic for her input later. Get a “prototype” of the idea, not a fully functional one, to the others for feedback, and my mind is content to switch away while waiting for the response (or absence of one).

Such quick postponements have saved time and preserved mental energy for my main priorities. But akin to Minimum Viable Product, my Minimum Viable Postponement has also quickly helped me refine the ideas for the long run.

Some of the thoughts that come up in the heat of the moment stirred by certain emotions, when revisited in a calmer moment, turned out to be things that I would not spend more time on. Some writing ideas in a new lens look definitely not worth drafting further. Some thoughts bounced to others quickly came to a halting reality check, be it through a sobering reply, or simply an absence of one.

All the MVPs that survive any of these filters then find a new lease of life. They have been validated to stand the test of (short) time, enough for me to iterate on them further. They are now proper ideas, not mere distractions, that I can plan to focus on.

This MVP is no substitute for keeping the focus on my main priority. I can’t just do this to every idea that pop up. 100 small postponements will still eat up at least an entire hour — I can’t keep Shazam-ming every song that sounds reminiscent.

Those small trifles I will just brush aside, and hopefully reduce their occurrences in the first place as I develop my mindfulness practice more. What the MVP offers me though is an additional tool in my arsenal to balance my approach between the resistance of distraction or the acceptance of one, in a minimally disruptive form.

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