Build a Productive Digital Environment

One of the central keys to successfully building a new habit or routine is how you design your environment. Let’s say you want to drop a few pounds, but no matter how hard you try, you can’t stay out of the cookie jar. To help you break the habit of eating junk and encourage yourself to reach for a healthier snack, you might decide to remove the cookies from your pantry or put them in a very inconvenient spot. Or perhaps you’ve been struggling to get to work on time. So you start laying out your clothes at night so you don’t waste time trying on four different outfits in the morning. Whatever the case may be, it’s clear your environment plays a major role in your routines and habits.

Writing is no exception. In fact, when it comes to creative work, I would argue that your environment becomes even more important. Writing requires time, creative energy, and full concentration. Whether you’re trying to hit 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo (if you’re in the thick of things, stay strong, you’ve got this) or trying to edit a short story (for the fourth time) a major determining factor of whether or not you’re going to reach your end goal is if you’re able to focus. Out of everything, your environment is one of the few things you have control over.

After a lot of trial and error, I have my physical writing environment nailed down. I have it to be sitting down, preferably at a table in a comfortable chair that I can lean back in so I don’t hunch over (which will cause my back to stiffen and increase the likelihood of it going out when I’m lifting or running). I like my headphones in and if I’m listening to music, there can’t be any lyrics. And I always have my water bottle on one side of my computer and a cup of coffee (that I will repeatedly reheat) on the other.

Side note: I use this setup in my 9-5 as well. When I find something that works for me in one area of my life, I tend to see how or if I can apply it to others.

However, there is another environment that I, and many other writers, overlook. Our digital environments. At some point or another, most of us will have to hop onto a computer and type up our manuscripts, and this can lead to a lot of distractions and procrastination because when faced with a hard task, sometimes, it can be easier to hop on Twitter and chat with other writers (about writing) or wind up down a YouTube rabbit hole, instead of knocking out a bunch of pages. And when you couple the dread of having to do a hard thing after a long, stressful day out in the real world, the chances of you sitting down to focus on your manuscript can be challenging.

For example, for the past few months, work has been a tornado. If I’m not working my 9 to 5, I’ve been working on freelancing projects. So, after being caught in a tornado all day, I would often wind up mindlessly scrolling on social media. The last thing my brain wanted to do was have to concentrate an enormous amount of energy into something without any sort of instant reward. It wanted to rest and be numb. It wanted dopamine . But what I’ve learned is that there’s mindful downtime, where I purposefully take a moment to rest, recharge, and refocus. And then there’s mindless downtime where my brain continues to be overstimulated because I’m hopping from one app to the next, scrolling, or checking my company’s Slack for signs of trouble.

All of this is to say, Houston, is that I had a problem.

Rather than let the trend continue, I started to track my patterns (just through mindfulness, no charts or screen time readings) and then used my observations to create a digital environment that would help rewire my behavior to ultimately build better habits both for my mental health and my writing.

Currently, my goal is to edit a short story called “The Argus” for a forthcoming anthology from Inked in Grey Press and finally finish “The Crypt Inspector” novella. But to do that I need to consistently sit down and focus, rather than wind up wasting time down in some random black hole for hours on end.

So I took a look at how I could design my digital environment and I’ve rearranged my digital house and condo—aka my laptop and my phone. Redesigning my phone was simple. While working at St. Martin’s Press, I quickly learned the importance of keeping my work email far away from my phone and I’ve maintained this boundary at Bantam Tools. However, between the recent launch of our new desktop CNC machine and traveling to trade shows, I’ve been keeping Slack on my phone so I could keep in touch with the team more easily. But whenever I would go onto my phone after 5 pm, I would still check Slack, then my personal email, send a tweet, scroll through Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts, and then check Bantam Tools’ Slack again. My brain was stuck on this constant loop of looking for entertainment, problems, and everything in between.

So to rewire my behavior on my phone:

• I still keep my phone in the kitchen at night

• I’ve deleted Slack from my phone

• If I want to scroll through Twitter, YouTube, or Reels, I have to be sitting up, rather than lounging on the couch. I’ve figured out that if I’m lounging doom scrolling is basically the millennial equivalent of channel flipping.

With my phone all set, I turned my attention to my computer. Of the two, this was the most important one to get right because this is the tool I use to get my writing done. Just like my phone, I found that this was my typical behavior:

1. Log onto computer

2. Open internet browser

3. Check Twitter or LinkedIn

4. Google something

5. Wind up back on Twitter or LinkedIn

6. Close internet browser

7. Open up Word and attempt to start writing

8. Feel my brain buzzing from overstimulation and not being able to focus

After doing this for a few days in a row, I noticed something critical: When I logged onto my laptop and immediately opened my internet browser, the odds of writing went down drastically. But, if I opened up Word first and wrote at least one or two sentences, even if I needed to look something up online, the odds that I would keep writing (and not start to bounce all over the internet) drastically decreased.

So to rewire my behavior on my laptop I:

• Swapped my Word app over to where my Safari app usually is on my desktop.

• Removed the Slack app (so I stayed consistent with the behavior I was building on my phone)

Since we read from left to right, I figured it would be a good idea to put Word on the left side of the dock because that will be where my eyes naturally go. So far it’s been working.

In both scenarios the redesigns I did were simple. But often it’s the small changes that have the biggest impact. By not making jarring changes, I was able to keep my environment familiar, but I was also able to dial it in and better engineer it to encourage myself to stop acting mindlessly and instead encourage me to do the thing I find most fulfilling: writing.