multi-tasking

Multi-tasking using Social Media seems to be all the rage these days. You say you’re a writer. Do you want to be a successful writer? Do you want to take your writing to the next level? Then I highly suggest you jump off the Social Media bandwagon and turn off your internet while you write. Why, you say? Here’s why…

1. Let’s say we’re true writers who allot so many hours per day to write. Remember, writing is a job. If we want to be professional writers, we need to, and must, commit to spending x amount of hours at our desks putting words on a paper. How many of us have been happily typing away, and a notification pops up on our desktop reminding us that today is Ralph’s birthday. We have only written 300 words so far out of the 3000 that is our daily goal. But, it’s Ralph’s birthday! Let’s just pop over to Facebook and wish him a Happy Birthday before we forget about it. Happy Birthday, Ralph! Oh look, Auntie Mame is getting a breast reduction done on her size FFF breasts this morning. Let me just take a few minutes to wish her well.

2. Auntie Mame just happens to be on Facebook and sees our well-wishes. She shoots us an instant message and wants to tell us all about her ungrateful children who won’t call or write and who don’t care about the fact that she’s having major breast reduction surgery because all of the weight she’s carrying around on her front half is causing debilitating pain on her back half and she’s so happy we took the time to write and did we happen see this interesting article on the cute little puppy who dances the merengue?

3. Hmmm, there’s a puppy in the next chapter of our book. Maybe we should just take a minute to do a little research. We click on the link Auntie Mame so generously provided and find a cute little five-minute video of a Havanese puppy dancing in front of a delighted audience of oriental children. Wait, what’s a Havanese puppy? Let’s just Google that breed because we may just want to use that one as the second puppy who comes to meet the first one in the chapter we haven’t written yet.

4. Oh yeah, that reminds us, we only have 300 words written so far. Back to Word where we stare at the page a few minutes wondering what we’d written so far. Let’s just start at the beginning and re-read what we wrote because we need to keep the flow of the book going with just the same rhythm we had when we first sat down to write. Oh yeah, there’s that word we couldn’t think of in the second paragraph. Let’s pop over to the online thesaurus and try to come up with just the right word. Hmmmm, there’s one that might work, but what’s the exact definition of that particular word? Let’s click on the dictionary to find out. Oh! How cool! That word has a link to…

5. Wikipedia. Whew. Now we can really find out why the word we were going to use might not work because it was used in ancient Greece to let the hedonistic slaves know when it was time to come in to work for their owners. Uh oh, we know what that means…and we certainly don’t want our readers to think we’ve stepped into the slightly erotic zone in our writing. Phew, we dodged the bullet on that one.

Well, the time we allotted for writing is now over because we have to go make lunch and walk the dog. But wow, what great research we did, and we scored points with Auntie Mame and Ralph. And well, we did get those 300 words written, didn’t we?