The queen of multitasking1 has hit the wall. I sent an email announcing that I was taking a sabbatical from the Train Campaign, but that was a gentle way of saying I’ve put that project on a shelf.

Why? I’ve been wearing too many hats, trying to do too many things. Something had to give, and the Train Campaign was the obvious thing. First, because it was a volunteer effort I have never really been able to afford. Second, because the old-boys outlook that limits train innovation in the United States means I feel I’ve been spinning my wheels.

Instead, I’ll be focusing on my publishing business, and I finish a book I started working on nearly 10 years ago, soon after Valerie Eliot died, about women’s pursuit of power, and of powerful men. (See Too Near the Flame in Writing a Woman’s Life.)

Call it focus, or flow2, or lilt3, or just plain concentration, this vital process has been missing from my life.

You know all about that, I’m sure, because you’re a human living in the 21st century, bombarded by emails (including this one) and red dots, popups, notifications, spam texts and phone calls. That’s on top of all the 20th-century distractions that are still with us.

Maybe one reason I read old books for relaxation is that I want to experience a life where people had time to read books, all the way through. I did that once upon a time: I read Henry James’s novels, for heaven’s sake, and Dickens, and all of Trollope. (Trollope still holds up, even in these hectic times!)

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But multitasking has an exponential growth pattern, like any addiction. I wonder if that’s a part of why students have suffered so much from the lockdown remote schooling - no boundaries, no sense of completion.

What I am doing now is what Bill McNeill advised years ago: write the book.

No, I have no sabbatical or research grant or paid leave, so I can’t literally devote all my time to writing. I have a active business and household, as well as these occasional newsletters (some designed to help with the next books!). But I can be clear about my first priority, and allocate my best time to it.

One book at a time, one task at a time.

Academic writing advisor Joli Jensen, who is also a professor and author, has a tip in her book Write No Matter What, however, that may bring you as much comfort as it did me: backburner projects are okay, and even beneficial.

Back-burner projects offer fresh options, interesting approaches, and future direction for our scholarly work. They motivate us to finish what we are working on now so that we can start on them next. They energize us, and they reassure us that we will have more of once we complete our current project.
There is an art to the care and feeding of aspirational projects waiting in the wings. You want to stay connected with them, but lightly, just enough to be able to 'stir the pot' with additional references, ideas, outlines, or supporting material, but not enough to take you away from your front burner.

Listen to our conversation about her work supporting other academics trying to finish their book projects.

You may remember that I’m a fan of letters, real letters, on paper. Here’s a passage I like, quoted in a pandemic email letter of mine called “A Letter is Better: Love and Remembrance,” that speaks to the question of focus in our relationships:

I believe we may be actually closer and more truly communicating in letters than when talking. The vertical connection downwards and inwards, each on his solitary own, may be making a connection of souls through imagination, connection that does not necessarily happen in live conversation or on the telephone. I am saving, Mister Interviewer Ventura, that an interview does not have to take place “in person.”
Now, if this be so, or enough “so” to be worth exploring, then the immense hyper-communication industry of portable phone and cellular phone, satellite dish and call waiting, of fax, beeper, modem, answering filters, and voice-activated recorders—all those oyster shell-colored, plastic-covered chip devices that turn the citizen into hacker, plugged into everyone everywhere—”I am because I am accessible”—does not, repeat, not, put an end to my aloneness but rather intensifies it.

Concentration is one big challenge faced by all writers, but today people also face a plethora of publishing options and a lot of consultants and companies offering their services. (Self-publishing has become big business not in terms of book sales but in terms of the money to be made from aspiring authors.) A subscriber wrote this week to ask if I could mentor a friend with a book project, in response to a letter from earlier this year about the zombie publishing industry. Similarly, I’ve had Berkshire Publishing authors ask if I could help them keep to their writing schedules. Naturally, I’ve had to say ‘no.’

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But I’m wondering if it would be useful to you if I were to offer live chat or quick email answers to paid newsletter subscribers? I certainly don’t claim to know everything about publishing, but I can often steer people in the right direction based on many years of dealing with trade and academic publishers, publicists and agents, production folk and marketing gurus. Leave a comment or drop me a line.

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What’s the best tool for staying focused? I’ve tried all kinds of things, from Freedom and the Pomodoro Method to Scrivener’s full-screen composition mode (I’m a fan of Scrivener). But what really works for me is very simple: a deadline4, and someone who doggedly asks, day after day, “How much do you have left to do?”

On that note, on this western Massachusetts snow day, I’m diving back into the 20th century tangle of T. S. Eliot and his women, sorting truth from lies and misrepresentations. Happy Holidays!

Thank you for reading Karen's Letter. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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1

While swimming laps, I listen to Pimsleur Mandarin or Spanish lessons, and keep a waterproof notepad and pencil at one end of the pool to jot down ideas.

2

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience is the title of a book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who also wrote on “Creativity” in our Encyclopedia of Leadership. The Harvard Business School review says, “Pulling together this mammoth set appears to have been a Herculean undertaking,” and I can tell you that it was because I carried most of the load.

3

“Look for the lilt” is a technique Joli Jensen explains in Write No Matter What. It’s pretty obvious once you think about it: the moments, the passages, and the experiences that really excite you and make you happy and energized tell you where you should focus.

4

When I wrote the original Home Ecology, my deadline was my baby’s due date - highly effective, if not much fun at the time. I turned in the manuscript 2 days before she was born.

Focus & Flow: The End of Multitasking