The first step in achieving the zone is removing external and internal distractions. If you have something in your life that you can’t stop thinking about, it will block the zone just as much as the television.
If you have a big date tonight or you’re worried about making rent, those powerful thoughts can prevent you from hitting the zone. You might be in a Catch-22 situation. You need to finish the book to get paid, but you’re so worried about rent that you can’t write well.
We need to develop a way for you to clear your mind. One of the biggest mind-killers for me is email. I have created a rule in my life that I only check email once a day. I only check it in the morning. It’s the first task I take care of when I sit at my desk. Once I have replied to all my emails, I close the application, and that’s it for the day.
I no longer get distracted by wondering if a new great email has come in. That urge to constantly check your email can be very distracting.
I also find it harder to get into the zone if my body isn’t feeling healthy. If I go more than three days without any exercise, my work quality starts to collapse along with my emotional state.
My body is a machine designed for use. Just yesterday morning, we tried a new kettlebell workout video as a family. It was awesome, and I’m still sore today. That physical activity means my body feels great, and I’m able to slip into the zone easily.
You can try yoga or meditation to find your inner peace. Sometimes I play my guitar for twenty minutes before I start writing. We are all unique people, so we each will need a different technique to relax. As I mentioned earlier, some people even use adult coloring books to put a buffer in between the stress of the day and their writing sessions. I’ll post some links to my favorite coloring books on the 20K page.
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Finish Your Chores
In order to enter the zone and achieve our writing state of nirvana, we need to eliminate all of those things that are holding us back. We need to eliminate all those distractions. There are external and internal distractions that can significantly affect us. If you’re trying to write and you're thinking about your chores, upcoming decisions, or even your next meal, those distractions will hurt your writing speed.
Every time you get close to getting into the zone, those little decisions and those thoughts in the back of your mind will pop back into your head, and they'll distract you. It’s like when you are trying to go to sleep and right before you nod off, some thought pops into your brain and suddenly you’re fully awake again. You get kicked back to square one.
It's impossible to achieve the zone with external or internal distractions, and the way to remove these distractions from your life is to handle all of your other decisions first. Checking my mail first thing in the morning removes that distraction from my mind for rest of the day. I also check all my social media and chat accounts to get them off my plate. I never book phone calls or meetings for the middle of the day, because I don’t want to lose my concentration when the meeting alert from my calendar app starts beeping.
I've just begun working on a project for a very exciting video game website, and I am excited about where that project is going. I put a bunch of work in this morning on that project before coming out here for my writing session. I don't have to worry if I get contacted by the owner of that website asking me what I accomplished today or if I've gotten anything done. There is no risk of getting hit with a surprise task that I need to handle immediately.
I already finished my two primary tasks for the day and sent in my work. It’s the first day of that project, and I already took care of what I needed so that it wouldn’t distract me from my writing. If I knew that task was waiting for me when I got back into the house, it would affect the quality of this dictation session. It could easily keep me out of the zone.
Finishing my chores first declutters my mind, leaving it free from extraneous and distracting thoughts.
95
People are Distracting
We need our minds calm and decluttered to achieve that perfect writing state. We need to actively fight against distractions to become great and prolific writers.
Yesterday, my writing was distracted. As I was recording my sunset session, I discovered my daughter playing somewhere she should not be playing that wasn't very safe for her, and no one was watching her. Her mother was nowhere to be found; neither was her nanny. This external distraction took me right out of the zone and forced me to take her home, find someone to watch her, and by the time I got back to my dock, I had lost my rhythm.
External things can destroy the zone, so you need to teach the people around you not to distract you when you’re writing. There are certain times when I love having my daughter next to me while I’m working. But when I need to hit the zone, I need a bit of isolation.
This is one of the biggest challenges that you'll face, especially if this is the first book you're writing and your family or your roommate is not used to you getting into the zone or being totally focused on a project. People don't take work at home seriously. If they see you at home on your computer, they think you're playing a game even if you're working on a project that will pay you five, ten or twenty million dollars. The people around you most often will not understand what's happening; they don't realize that what you're doing is real work, not a hobby.
Most of my family doesn't understand what I do on the computer. They don't understand the connection between my sitting on the computer and money coming into my bank account. They are used to traditional employment. Most people see the business world as exchanging time doing something you hate at an office for a paycheck to fund your leisure activities. Regular jobs pay you to make up for how much you hate sitting in that office.
Most people can’t connect with the idea of doing something that you like and getting paid for it. That sounds too unrealistic to them.
When people see you at home working on a project, they will assume that it’s just a new hobby. They won’t take it that seriously. It feels like you're just doing something for fun, so they don't know to leave you alone and not to distract you. If they want to go to a movie, they'll come and invite you. If they want to watch your favorite TV show, they will come and tell you.
96
Train Your Friends
Getting into the zone involves training the people around you to let you work. I've been with my wife for many years, and it took a long time to teach her to recognize when I'm in the zone working. We've been together a long time now, so she knows that when I'm in the zone, it's not the time to distract me; it's not the time to ask me questions. It's not the time to ask me if I think we should give the nanny a raise. These types of questions are best reserved for when I'm no longer in the zone.
Because I work from home full-time, she has had to learn the difference between when I need absolute focus and when I’m working on something that doesn’t need focus. For much of my work, I prefer to have her and the kids in the room. During the editing and rewriting phase of this book, my daughter has been hanging out with me at her little desk right next to mine. She plays with her Play-Doh and shows me her creations.
When you're training the people around you, you must put systems in place that they can understand and know when it's zone time. This is work time; this is not playtime.
One of the easiest ways to set those systems in place is repetition. If you always sit in the same chair for work, if you always work at the same time, then they know that this is work time. They know that when you're at your desk between 6 and 8 PM, it's not playtime.
It will take a little while to train the people around you. There will be some inopportune distractions. Not everything is perfect on the first try. That’s just the nature of the beast. Get a pair of headphones that are your "zone headphones." Even if you already have a pair of headphones for your computer, get another pair that's a bright color.
I just got a new pair of noise-cancelling wireless Beats headphones. They are bright gold and white. All the
other headphones in the house are black. When I pop them on, my family knows I’m in the zone on something and not to be disturbed. When I don’t mind talking, I listen to music over my speakers instead.
Those Beats are my writing headphones. They are my "in the zone" headphones. And when my kids see those headphones, they know it's not the time to distract Daddy because Daddy is in the zone.
It's a lot easier for your friends and family to recognize that you're in the zone if you use brightly colored headphones. Anything bright will work: neon blue, neon green, bright red, bright orange. Any color headphones will make it easy for people to know that those headphones mean, “Don't disturb.” My previous work headphones were bright lime green, and they worked perfectly.
As you begin to remove these distractions and set your writing patterns, you'll find that getting to the zone becomes easier and easier. You can train your body to know that it's zone time if you always sit in the same chair. You always work in the same location. You always go through the same ritual to begin your writing process, and you remove the distractions of other people. And after you remove your extraneous decision-making distractions, it gets easier and easier to instantly jump to the zone each time you're working.
97
Ritual
I'm a big believer in the power of ritual in both my personal life and my work life. I establish rituals as quickly as possible with each new endeavor. Rituals are repetitive behaviors that follow a very strict pattern in a certain order, and each step in the ritual always takes the same amount of time.
Repetition of location and action is how we train ourselves. Just like Pavlov trained his dogs, we can teach our bodies to get into the zone at the end of our "starting to work" ritual. When your writing pattern is always different, and when you always do things in a different order, you will struggle to find the zone. If you write at a different time every day, or if you write at different locations every day, the zone will remain elusive. All of these little things add up to make this a harder and harder process for you.
The more repetition in your writing pattern, the easier it will be to hit the zone consistently. If you can use the same writing location every day, that will help a lot. But I realize that’s not always possible. Professional athletes compete in different arenas every single week and still hit the zone consistently. They do this using the power of ritual. If you watch any professional athlete before a competition, you will notice they do the same things in the same order every single time. You should prepare for writing the same way the pros prepare for the big game.
If you always write in a coffee shop, order the same drink. If you get a different drink every time, if sometimes you write for a few minutes then you get a drink, sometimes you get a drink right away, sometimes you get a drink after 30 minutes, this instability in your patterns, this lack of ritual will hurt your writing success. It will slow you down. It will affect how quickly you can hit the zone, dramatically.
At first, the idea of ritual might sound very monotonous, and there are certain parts of my life that sound very dull. I follow the same pattern every morning between when I get up and when I complete my morning ritual. My morning ritual involves recording my podcast episodes to get that out of the way first. It involves when I record the podcast, how I record the podcast, and where I sit. All of these little steps are very repetitive, but they allow me to finish my work very quickly, and then the rest of the day I am productive.
The power of ritual lets me get done in one hour what would take other people ninety minutes or two hours. The faster you get your work done, the more time you can spend doing what you love and relaxing. Creating more free time is the real goal here.
At the end of the day, you want to be a writer, and you want to have success writing quickly so you can have more time to do the other things you like, even if the other things you like are writing more books.
If you always go to the same coffee shop, you need to sit in the same chair. Establishing a pattern trains your subconscious to enter the zone. Repeating the same steps in the same order will move from routine to ritual. The more seriously you treat your pre-writing pattern, the easier it is to get into the zone. Ritual is one of the most powerful techniques you can master when becoming a faster writer. I will put some pictures onto the 20K page of my ritual to give you a visual point of reference.
98
Double Your Speed
The first step is to eliminate as many distractions as possible. You can't eliminate every distraction in the world, so be prepared to deal with the unexpected.
It's ironic that I'm writing this section right now because for some reason in this completely empty restaurant they've decided that at this exact moment, they should adjust every single chair behind me.
There was not another person within one hundred meters when I started recording here, and now they're moving around all the tables very loudly. It's a brutal distraction. How funny that these are the little things we always have to deal with. Other people, especially outside of your family, will never understand what you're doing.
Ninety-nine percent of the people who go to coffee shops with laptops never make a penny. They write books they never finish, screenplays they never complete, blogs that nobody will ever read. They work on projects that never achieve profit. Even though you tell people that your time is valuable, that what you're doing is profitable, they won't understand because most people don't succeed.
This is why in the café near where I live, where there is not a single other person, they are loudly banging around moving every chair right now. They don't understand that I’m not playing; I'm working.
There are other things that you can do to speed up your writing process. If you want to eliminate distractions, the very first thing you need to do is turn off the Internet. There's no reason to be online while you're writing. If you have to do more research while you're writing, if you need to be online while you're writing, that is a sign that you haven't properly prepared for your writing sessions. All of your research, all of your notes should be together in an offline format so that you can write without needing to be online.
Turning off the Internet will double the speed at which you can write immediately. There will be no more dings from your email, alerts from Skype, or exciting news stories fighting for your attention. All of these distractions will be eliminated. All these little things that we do without thinking about them will be removed.
We also need to firmly establish the rhythm of your day. You should always get something to drink at the same time. You also want to eat at the same time throughout the day. When you have extensive writing sessions, if you're writing for eight hours a day, if you're writing for six hours a day, when you're doing longer writing sessions, you need to eat your meals at the same time.
I eat at the same time every single day. I eat breakfast at 7:30 AM, lunch at noon, dinner at 5 PM every day, seven days a week. This pattern allows everyone around me to know when my meals should be ready. It also lets my body know when it's time for a break, when it's time to take that lunch break, and when my morning writing session is over. Sometimes it's tempting to push and keep working past noon, to work until one or two, but then my body gets hungry, everything gets distracted, and my rhythm in the afternoon is ruined. Extending the morning session often destroys the afternoon session.
99
“Write drunk, edit sober.”
Hemingway never said this, and he also never wrote drunk. It’s misattributed to him. Even on Californication, a show about a writer who acts like a maniac in Hollywood, you never see him writing under the influence.
There are certain things that you should simply not do. I don't recommend drinking while writing. As much as it's fun, it becomes a distraction. On top of slowing down motor function as the alcohol floods into your system, it will also actively block you getting into the zone. Achieving perfect consistency between your cocktails is impossible. One will be stronger than the next. Then one wil
l be weaker. You will drink them at different rates. This means you will be affected slightly differently every time.
You are creating a similar, but not identical experience. You will mess up your rhythm even though you feel like a cool 1950s type of writer. Your effectiveness will be diminished. Your ability to stay in the zone will weaken because your body is in a different chemical state every time.
We need to maintain a consistent state to remain in the zone and to write very quickly. Anything in your life that is a big temptation is a big distraction you should remove. When you're sitting at your desk, you need to remove all those distractions and temptations. Playing a video game, watching a TV show or movie, talking to someone on the phone, and texting your friends are distractions we need to eliminate. Take the batteries out of the TV remote. Hide the video game controllers. Turn off your phone and put it in a drawer. Remove these distractions in advance and your effectiveness will skyrocket. You will be shocked at how fast you can write without all that noise around you.
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Skills and Talents
Ninety-nine percent of the population has no idea what the difference between a skill and a talent is. We have this tendency in our culture to blame other people’s success on anything other than hard work. We say things like, "He's so blessed. He's so lucky. He's a natural athlete. He was born that way. He was born with different advantages."
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