The Zone

Today, at around 4 30 p.m, I found myself in the Zone. I quite like being in the Zone, it's a space that harbours hyper-productivity and I like being able to get a lot done given that I spend a lot of time getting nothing done on most days. I was looking like I would be finishing a whole chapter within the hour and would undoubtedly be finishing another whole chapter by the end of the week.

At 5 20 p.m someone came into my room and made a fuss about who would be cooking dinner, deciding that since I had mentioned I was at home during the day I could cook (despite not being able to plan a meal and get ingredients etc etc etc) even though the task had been prescribed to someone else. To put it plainly, my mother came in to my work space and acted rudely. The interruption in and of itself was frustrating. The death sentence to my precious Zone was that the exchange left me feeling angry. I haven't written a word of that story since, despite being on a roll of sorts.

This post is meant to be about the Zone, not the interpersonal dramas in my home, so I won't go into further detail about my afternoon. The Zone is like a bubble. You can call out to someone inside it and they will be able to hear you, but try and interact with the person inside and the bubble will burst instantly. It's such a delicate thing. Staying in the Zone can be challenging purely because it is so fragile. One can learn, and do so very quickly, how to stay in this Zone provided they are not interrupted. Thankfully the Zone promotes tunnel vision, so it is surprisingly difficult to get voluntarily distracted by things like the internet and food and that spot on the wall that is suddenly very interesting, all of which are common distractions to a person working while outside of the Zone.

The externals can simply not be controlled so easily. I can turn my phone onto silent mode but it will still light up and beg for my attention if someone sends me a message or calls me. I can ask that my dinner be left aside so I can reheat it at my leisure but at some point I will still have to eat it. I can be in the most isolated room in the building and someone might still choose to enter it.

Minimising these external threats to the integrity of the Zone is crucial to prolonging its lifespan, I have found. I have also found that there are in fact simple was to minimise these threats. Leave phones out of sight. Have an emergency sandwhich in your workspace when you start writing. Hang a 'Do Not Disturb' sign on your door. Untangle yourself from headphone cables lest you find yourself in an infuriating spaghetti-esque bundle.

"But Pixie," you cry, "I did all these things and someone still ignored my 'Do Not Disturb' sign so they could tell me off for not cleaning my room!"

Here's a quick guide for what to do when you are, for some reason or another, pulled out of the Zone. Fist of all, let it out. If you're angry, let it out and get the anger out of the way. Then lie down for a bit, maybe watch something on youtube. Numb your brain a little bit and let yourself get distracted. All the explosive emotion released when that bubble burst will get buried beneath the distraction and you'll return to the neutral state you were in when you entered the Zone. If you can't just sit down and pick up where you left off, go do something else creative. Pick up your local guitar, doodle something, make fart noises to the tune of 'Call Me Maybe', go write a blog post...