Here's my advice on how to focus but also just kidding

I'd like to find the everlasting fountain of focus, please.

Even though it's become a bit of an inside joke that my personal aesthetic leans a bit too proudly on the "shops at Kohl's" side of the spectrum at times, I'm a very visual person. That—paired with my ever-charming anal-retentive tendencies—can make it very hard for me to focus on writing, even if/when it is a hell of my own making.

In every home I've called my own, I've absolutely delighted in making my space tailored to encourage my own version of creative thinking. From the carefully curated magazine clippings on my walls to the books that live on my shelves, I want you to be able to walk into my home and accurately guess my profession, or at least land within the right ballpark. Actually, I mostly just want you to be like "yes, KC totally 100% lives here" and totally make my day. That’d be great.

With all that comes a bunch of personal isms that I believe are automatically part of my being a writer. Honestly, I'm equally fascinated and annoyed by all of them. For example, I can't really ever write write if my bed is unmade, if too many dirty dishes are in my sink, if there is no seltzer/coffee/water/nearby bathroom, if there's nothing visually stimulating nearby or if there isn’t a lit candle in sight. Also, this is absolutely not a conditional truth, because sometimes (and by sometimes I mean basically always), you just have to sit down and do the work. But, when I'm in my space and working on my own time, I like to have things ~just right.~ That can mean doing absolutely nothing productive for hours until "inspiration strikes." It could simply mean doing emails first and then rewarding myself with a walk around the block or something dumb but nice. Or it could mean too much time has already passed and I have to take a hot shower to "reset" my day before I want to give up too badly and then just stress myself out even more. All of this admittedly wastes a lot of time, and it certainly doesn’t help that lately my ability to focus has been hot garbage.

It has taken me a long time (i.e. one calendar year) to get my current apartment set up in a way I'm really happy with, and now that I have an actual desk and a real computer chair, and my books off the floor finally, and my kitchen table no longer in the middle of my living room area (studio apt life holla), it's time to focus.

But with the covid and the election and the social media and the doomscrolling and the news and the orange chaos agent of a president that won't go away and the quarantine blues and the being three thousand miles away from my family and just everything, I'd say my focus game is looking like a solid three out of ten these days. On a good day, it's like a generous seven. My latest deadline took me ten hours yesterday even though my quoted rate suggested it'd take closer to four. Whooooops.

Recently, I started really thinking about how my attention span no longer exists (yikes!) and I let that thought consume my brain for an entire seven day period, if not longer because what is time. It got to the point where I knew I wanted to write about it. But first I had to clean my entire apartment! If you know, you know. And then a week went by. And then I lost three more quality focus days because of the presidential election. But then Biden won! And then I realized I'd have to focus on finding my focus again. And now here we are.

So, yeah. I'd like to find the everlasting fountain of focus, please. Even if just to dip my toes in for a second or two. It’d really help me out, I think. Anyways, while I continue on with my quest—and open up 17 more tabs on my computer and grab a fresh seltzer and crack my back and make sure I don't have any important unread texts—I'd like to leave you with an insightful quote by James Clear that's been living rent-free in my head all week: "In a world where information is abundant and easy to access, the real advantage is knowing where to focus."

Look! Since I’m a visual person and all, I even put it on my bulletin board so it could stare me in the face all day:

So, did that help at all? Do you feel it in your bones you're ready to do some focus? No? Ah well, there's always next week, right? Let's take the weekend off, we deserve it.