Last week I wrote about cultivating a better writing atmosphere. Here are some additional tips and reading recommendations for those who want to focus on writing more productively.
Shut off your devices
Here’s one that’s going to be hard for a lot of people: turn off your internet and cellphone while you write. Internet, messaging apps, cellphones: all of these things are just fancy distractions keeping you from being more productive. To write more, you need to buckle down and focus, and this means eliminating as many distractions as possible.
Some writers go so far as to have a computer that does not have an internet connection and they use this computer for their writing. George R. R. Martin shocked the internet back in 2014 when he shared that he still uses a 20 year old DOS computer for his writing. While his point seemed to be that he preferred the word processing software of the older computer, I still imagine he must get much more done on a machine free of the distractions of modern software.