Concentrating. Hard.

This morning was my first trial of a new discipline: Two Golden Hours.
This is the plan. You sit down at your desk, metaphorically nail your feet to the floor, assume the position, and write.
No researching, no looking up references, no fact-checking.
No editing as you go - supposedly not even correcting spelling but I can't quite take it that far.
No reading articles or searching databases for citations. And especially no emails, no checking the news sites or facebook, no suddenly remembering you meant to reinstall software or reorganise files, no putting out a load of washing or checking the letterbox or feeding the chooks.
Just Two Golden Hours of drafting. First thing in the morning, before getting distracted by any other tasks.
I wrote 1500 words. I'm not saying they're all brilliant, or even usable, but two key scenes are out of my head on down on ... well, pixels or something. That's normal for a morning's work but it felt a little more intense, and it's definitely draft - not processed (much) on the way from brain to Save button. If I couldn't immediately think of the right word I just chose the closest thing and highlighted it to fix later.
But it was strangely difficult. I'm someone who can easily write for long hours, forgetting to eat and not realising it's nightfall and that I was supposed to be somewhere. But to do it on schedule is a different matter entirely. I got twitchy. Kept looking at the clock.
It's important to schedule the time because we easily get lost in historical research, or think we have to find more and more academic references, and working at home also has a whole lot of other dangerous distractions as well. Like morning tea. And afternoon tea.
I try to be at my desk at 9 and work through, just like a day at the office, but it's easy to get distracted from the drafting by the need to look stuff up. And then you realise you don't know some related thing, so you go look that up. And then you see a reference for an article that might help, so you go trawl for it online. And while you're doing that you notice this journal you didn't know about so you kick off the usual searches to see if there's anything there related to your subject. By which time you've forgotten the original problem you were researching and why. And you might be working but you aren't actually writing.
So I've written it into my Filofax: Two Golden Hours. Capital G. Capital H. The capital letters make the two hours a serious commitment to yourself, a thing that cannot be rescheduled or easily forgotten. They are important.
After all, we multitask all day every day, with meetings, and emails, and people asking questions. You have to do stuff and think at the same time. Even on the train, even in the evenings. Focusing your mind gets harder and harder.
Choosing what's important among all the many options floating around in your brain is sometimes impossible, so the brain opts for the easiest.
I learned about the Two Golden Hours at a handy seminar for postgrads at uni last week: 'Turbocharge your writing', with Hugh Kearns from Thinkwell. Highly recommended.
Now all I have to do is to put it into practice.
I will do that every Thursday and Friday morning. I would do it every single day if I could, but unfortunately I have to earn a living - which is, as we know, quite a different thing to being a writer.