This is Stevea Robbins.

Welcome to the Get It Done Guys quick and dirty tips to work less and do more.

Your computer is a magical writing machine.

It holds piles of reference documents.

It switches formatting at the click of a button.

It puts a world of research information just to search away.

And it checks your spelling. But it might

be too magical, because it's also your distraction machine. And since almost all of our writing

is done online these days, it takes a special approach to focus when writing on a computer.

The key to that approach is separating cognitive tasks so the very tools that make the magic don't

accidentally turn you into a frog, frogs can't type.

Gather your reference material before you write.

Bernice is putting together a blog post explaining why Audrey Toos, despite their tendency

to snack on household pets, are actually the ideal plant for a suburban lifestyle. Her essay is complicated,

of course, by the fact that next week is a total solar eclipse, and as everyone knows, Audrey Too's

and eclipses are a bad combination. But is that true? Although Bernice adores raising Audrey Too's,

she's never done actual research on them. So she finds herself bouncing between Mickey's Soft Word and Wikipedia,

slowly grinding out a draft of an article that's, well, basically a summary of Wikipedia.

After deciding that she needs to look at more scholarly sources,

Bernice ends up on a website for cute kittens dressed as fruit.

Oh dear, Bernice's fallen victim to distraction. That's because she's trying to write and

research all at once, and that is a recipe for disaster, although not for the owners of the cute

...