Doing laundry on a day when you have nothing to do but write and get a few things done around the house seems like such a good idea. Hey, laundry takes nothing right? You put it in, the machine does its thing for an hour while you write, you take it out and put it in a different machine that does its thing for another hour while you write. You take it out and put it away. (Note that some people would add a step in between the ‘take out’ and ‘put away’ steps. I believe this extra step is commonly known as ‘folding’.)
So why do I ominously suggest in the title of this post that laundry might be dangerous? Mostly because laundry requires you to get up from the keyboard periodically to attend to it, which gives your brain a chance to think about something else. As any writer can tell you, giving your brain a chance to think about something else while in the midst of writing can be dangerous…to your productivity that is. Despite how much we writers love writing, often when we sit down to the keyboard our brain simply decides that it doesn’t want to think about our latest plot dilemma or whether our character is developing realistically.
Sometimes our brain decides it wants to think about whether that stain is going to come out of our favorite dress shirt, what in the world that was we spilled on our jeans, or whether that weird noise the dryer is making means its about to die.
Before you know it the dryer is going off and you haven’t written a word.
“No problem,” you say, “I’ll just knock out this load, start the next, and then I’ll buckle down.”
Sure you do…Sure you do.
As you can see, laundry is truly dangerous business for a writer. So what do you do when this happens to you? Me, I try to keep something story related nearby my work station to redirect my attention to. Once I’ve distracted myself from the distraction its easier to redirect my attention back to the work at hand.
Do any of you non-writers experience something like this? What do you writers do when you need to get refocused?
