The Perils & Pitfalls of the Laundry Basket — Why I Leave Home to Write
“The home is filled with the familiar, and the familiar snares our attention, destabilizing the subtle neuronal dance required to think clearly.”
– Cal Newport, Slow Productivity
Whether we work from home or not, our homes can be overwhelming.
And wouldn’t you know it but there’s a neurological reason for this.
Professional writers, in some sense, were the original remote workers,” writes Cal Newport, in his book, Slow Productivity; The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. “And what you find when you study their habits, is that they often go out of their way to find somewhere – anywhere – to work that’s not inside their own homes.”
I get it!
Although I am working from home at the moment, when I wrote the first draft of this blog a couple of months ago, I was stationed high up on a mountain on the beautiful island of Folegandros in Greece. I was happily hunkered down in my small and very remote Notos rental home, complete with a kitchenette, a bed, a place to write…and a breathtaking view of the Aegean Sea. I was in a writer’s Heaven.
But even Heaven isn’t always perfect. On that visit, a new home was under construction a mile away but the sound carried and when the bulldozer was at work, I could hear it. I am extremely sensitive to noise. But no problem. Why? Because I learned a long time ago to always be prepared for situations such as this. As such, I always have earplugs, noise-cancelling headphones, and a white noise machine with me when traveling.
However, the writer’s challenge of dealing with noise isn’t what this blog is about.
This blog is about the writer’s challenge of working at home. If you’re a writer who works from home – or do any type of remote work from home that requires deep concentration OR are just trying to focus deeply on a project of some sort – and find yourself feeling overwhelmed and distracted by all the household chores and tasks (never mind the humans and pets and plants) awaiting your attention, you are not alone.
In Slow Productivity, Newport sites examples of some well-known writers who had to find other places to write, in order to get their work done:
#1. Peter Benchley, author of Jaws, would write in a rented room at the back of a furnace factory, complete with clanging hammers as his background noise (wouldn’t work for me obviously).
#2. Maya Angelou would rent cheap hotel rooms to write in. She’d ask the staff to remove all artwork from the walls, and to enter each day only to empty the wastebaskets.
#3. John Steinbeck would write on his fishing boat.
#4. David McCullough wrote in a garden shed in his backyard.
Why do many writers find they need to write somewhere other than at home?
“The problem,” explains Newport, “is that the home is filled with the familiar, and the familiar snares our attention, destabilizing the subtle neuronal dance required to think clearly.”
Wait, what?
“When we pass the laundry basket outside our home office, our brain shifts toward a household-chores context, even when we would like to maintain focus on whatever pressing work needs to get done,” explains Newport.
“This phenomenon is a consequence of the associative nature of our brains. Because the laundry basket is embedded in a thick, stress-inducing matrix of under-attended household tasks,” writes the author, “it creates what the neuroscientist Daniel Levitin describes as “a traffic jam of neural nodes trying to get through to consciousness.” In this context, work tumbles forward as one stress-inducing demand among many.”
Oh my goodness gracious.
At long last, I am starting to understand WHY I am often feeling stressed out, anxious, and frazzled at home, struggling to move my deep-work writing projects forward, and doing all the other administrative work associated with my business and charity, and all the household chores, and all the gardening tasks, and the zillion other life tasks that need to get done. And have some sort of social life!
Although I am certainly able to focus in my one-hour increments to write, my overwhelmed brain is effectively stuck in a traffic jam whenever I am at home.
“This is why Benchley retreated to the furnace factory and McCullough to his garden shed,” explains Newport. “They sought a more advantageous mental space to produce meaningful work. By calming their relational-memory system, they could slow their perception of time and allow their attention to mold itself more completely around a singular pursuit.”
By Jove, I think I’ve got it! By finding a mental space that enables us to produce meaningful work, we calm our mind, which slows our perception of time, which enables us to fully focus on a single piece of work.
The writing space away from home needn’t be fancy.
Newport makes it clear that the aesthetics of one’s outside-the-home work spaces doesn’t necessarily matter that much. What matters far more is the disconnection from the familiar.
“A citadel to creative concentration need not be a literal palace. It just needs to be free of laundry baskets.”
– Cal Newport, Slow Productivity
So the next time someone says to me yet another snarky comment along the lines of, “Why do you travel so much?! Why can’t you just write at home?” I shall tell them I do so in order to calm my relational-memory system. And if they then say, “Huh?” I shall then explain how the familiar snares my attention and destabilizes the subtle neuronal dance required for me to think clearly.
And if they still don’t get it (which they won’t), I’ll politely suggest they perhaps mind their own business and focus on their own laundry basket, not mine 🙂
Related blogs by Maryanne
Diary of a Digital Nomad – A Day in the Life of a Writer Working (Solo) on a Greek Island
Danger of Constant Distraction
What I Re-Learned on my Recent Solo Writing Retreat in Oregon
Maryanne Pope is the author of “A Widow’s Awakening.” She also writes screenplays, playscripts & blogs. Maryanne is the CEO of Pink Gazelle Productions and Co-Founder of the John Petropoulos Memorial Fund. To receive her blog, “Weekly Words of Wisdom,” please subscribe here. And be sure to visit our PinkGazelleCards Etsy shop.