The decision to close my video company arrived long before I made it. It kept coming back, in different forms, at different hours, and every time it did I pushed it away. I blamed a bad mood. I told myself I was tired. It was easier than admitting the thought was real.
When it wouldn’t leave, I tried to sit with it. But every time I got close, something pulled me out. Family needed something. The dog wanted attention. A notification. And here’s the part I’m not proud of: I was relieved when the interruption came. This was one of the hardest decisions of my life, and a distraction was a reason not to face it. I let myself be pulled away because I wanted to be.
The morning I stopped letting that happen
It only changed when I gave the decision a whole morning it couldn’t escape.
A cafe, no wifi, phone in airplane mode, noise-cancelling headphones on. No one who could reach me. I sat there for a few hours with nothing to do but the one thing I’d been avoiding for weeks. And in that stretch, with nowhere to hide, I finally saw how much the company was costing me. That was where the decision got made. Not in any of the moments the thought first appeared, but in the one long sitting where nothing could interrupt it.
The thought had been available for months. I just never stayed with it long enough to hear it out.
What distraction actually takes
People talk about distraction like the cost is time. Ten minutes here, a scroll there. That’s the small version. The real cost is depth.
My best work has only ever come from flow. I believe in it completely. And you cannot reach flow while you’re being interrupted. So I plant the conditions for it deliberately. Notifications off, headphones on, and my brain learns the signal: this is what we’re doing now. Get pulled out of that state, by anything, and it’s brutally hard to get back in. You drop to the surface. You keep working, but it’s shallow work, and you miss the thing you were actually there to find.
The morning in the cafe wasn’t productive by any normal measure. I produced nothing. But it was the deepest thinking I’d done in months, and it changed the direction of my life. That’s what depth is worth. That’s what distraction quietly takes when you let it in.
My own worst versions of it
I’m not writing this as someone who’s solved it. I still get caught.
Social media stories when I’m stressed. News when I’m bored. And the sneakiest one: hunting for a good deal on something I need to buy. That one comes dressed as productivity. I tell myself I’m being responsible, saving money I can put back into be still. Forty-five minutes later I’ve saved eight dollars and lost the only clear head I had that day. It’s distraction, and it’s more dangerous than the others because it arrives pretending to be discipline.
The rationalisation is always the tell. Real focus doesn’t need a justification. When I’m reaching for one, I already know what I’m doing.
Build the room and stay
Distraction rarely announces itself as a waste. It shows up as a small, reasonable thing. A message, a deal, a quick check. And each time you take it, you trade the depth you could have reached for the surface you can get to easily.
The thinking that changes things doesn’t happen in the gaps between interruptions. It happens when there are no gaps. You have to build the room for it, and then you have to stay.