Hi Ghada, First, everything you're experiencing is universal; we're all human. We ALL have to battle with distraction and procrastination every day. The good news is that with practice and patience you will get better at achieving deep focus for longer periods of time. The following are some practical tools that worked wonders for me in conquering distraction and procrastination. A lot of the wisdom I'll be sharing comes from the book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and The Art of Impossible by Steven Kotler and Willpower by Roy Baumeister. Lots of practical tools in each book and both backed up with decades of study and research. PRACTICAL TOOL #1 Your energy and willpower are deeply connected. Our ability to focus, make good decisions and avoid distraction takes willpower. Our will power deteriorates over the day as our energy fades. This is why most people who are trying to lose weight succumb to snacking at the end of the night. Their energy is low so their willpower is low. I experience this all the time. If I haven't gotten a good night of sleep or if I'm working at the end of the day I'm much more likely to get distracted and procrastinate. To help prevent this, analyze your day and determine at what point you have the most energy. For most people this is early in the morning. Once you've figured out when that is, try and schedule your art time then. You will have much more willpower to avoid instagram, facebook, etc... PRACTICAL TOOL #2 When changing a habit the beginning is always the hardest. This is the time to use any means necessary to help you get started. I find it helpful to not just rely on one tool but to employ multiple tools at once to guarantee success. Leveraging technology with something likehttps://freedom.to can be one of those tools. You can use it to lock down apps on your phone, tablet or computer that you find distracting during your focus time. You're basically pre-committing to focus time and setting yourself up for success. Scheduling your focus time on your calendar and guarding that time can also help a ton. Also using that calendar to keep a streak alive is super motivating. Don't break the streak! PRACTICAL TOOL #3 Bad habits are insidious and seem to happen overnight but in actuality they take a long time to manifest. The same is true with good habits. They take a long time to put in place. It has taken me years to build a daily art habit that has lasted for 9 years straight. I was able to get this far by starting small and building upon past success. Start with 20 or 30 minutes of focus time and plan it every single day, even weekends and holidays. Every. Single. Day. The best way to build a habit is through consistent incremental progress. Once you've gone a month or more at 20-30 minutes then you can begin to increase. But keep 20-30 minutes as your minimum for the super hard days. Hard days are inevitable, but you can still fall back on your minimum and celebrate progress. PRACTICAL TOOL #4 Focus on progress not goals or finished work. If you want to make skill acquisition inevitable and completion guaranteed then focus on daily progress. I've helped many artists over the years with this simple mindset change. An artist will not do any work in a day because they don't have enough time to finish something. Then those days start piling up. Soon, they've gone a week or a month without doing anything at all. But, if they would have just put in 30 minutes of work on that drawing, or painting they would have already finished it and more. Any amazing painting, drawing or digital creation you see took years to build the skills and weeks or months to complete. I'm not talking about putting in 4 hours of art time every day, even the greatest out there find that impossible to sustain. Finding an amount of time that you can consistently put in every single day is where true lasting progress happens. Consistency and longevity will beat out any mad dash. Focus on what you can accomplish today in the time you have. Put a red X on the calendar and celebrate that you showed up and did your best for that day, then do it the next day, and the next... I hope those 4 tools help. If you're skeptical about these working, which I hope you are, please checkout my website chrisbeaven.com. I started back in January 2013 and made a commitment to do art every single day for the rest of my life and used these same practical tools to set a daily minimum of 30 minutes. After 9 years and countless bad days, even a kidney transplant, I've kept my promise to myself. Through as little as 30 minutes a day I've created some art that I'm deeply proud of and just recently I had a solo show at a local gallery. Let me know if you have any more questions by replying here or emailing me directly chris@createquest.net. Thanks for reading!

I don't avoid it, I take it all lol

Hi there, is this because you are not drawing something that gets you really excited, or have not created the right "mood" in your drawing space? Personally this happens to me when I am painting or drawing something that doesn't connect with me - With good music and a topic I care about - hours go by and I forget to eat... There is a line in an old film "Dead Poets Society" where one of the characters is running around shouting "Gotta do more - wanna be more" - this describes my motivation and the feeling in the pit of my stomach when I am really into my subject - try to find it....

I'm struggling with this also -- not so much about being on Insta/Facebook but not being able to do art for as long as I'd like to because I don't have something else to distract me when I get bored. So I often like to watch shows/binge YouTube while drawing...Do I really need to focus when drawing?

I get in that same procrastination with TikTok all the time. You literally have to be self aware and say "no!" and close the app definitely. I make my social medias harder to access on my phone by removing them from the home screen so I have to search to find it. But I think the more you sit down and decide to focus on art, the easier it gets just to do your studies. Really letting yourself dive deep into your studies is whats going to make you enjoy it more advance

I have definitely been there. For me it wasn't so much social media, but the second I wasn't feeling happy with my art piece or I was slowing down I'd open up YouTube. The suggestions already given are definitely great advice. When I work now, I tend chuck my phone as far away from me as possible (Okay not literally chuck, but I go hide it under my pillow or something similar so that it is out of arms reach). That said, there's going to be days when the energy is low and it will be increasingly harder to focus and in those days I try to implement the pomodoro method. If you haven't heard of it, the principle is that you set a short timer (20, 25, 30 minutes) and you do your best to purely focus for that time period. After the time is up, set a 5 minute timer, get up leave the computer, desk, canvas, whatever it is you're at, and take a short break. Then you repeat the process. Generally about after 4 cycles of this, you take a longer 30 minute break. These aren't set in stone time periods and you can adjust it to what works best for you. Some people can focus for longer periods... I can only focus for about 20 minutes. My one hesitation with recommending the pomodoro method is that it tends to take away some of the energy of producing art, because by setting rigid time periods it treats it as just "work". But I think the reality is that sometimes that what art is--work. That's my thought at least and if others think differently I would love to hear their opinion! Anyways, I wish you the best of luck on your art journey and working on better habits. I love the art piece and I hope you share more in the future. Take care,

Isolate yourself. Make doing the bad stuff harder than doing the good stuff. You may need to rearrange your life a bit, but it is worth it to get the focus.

Hello Ghada :), well yes I have been there, and I think that these days we have more and more social media procrastination :/ I guess it depends on why you are unconsciously opening them, is it purely reflex and you want that dopamine kick or do you feel uncomfortable while drawing and therefore your brain will find a way to avoid that and seek easy stuff. Can be both also. Finding out at what moment this habit strike is key. What's the action/thought before that make you go there ? Overall, making it harder to access will help a lot. Put your references in a software like pureref or directly on you computer and keep your browser several click away, give you time to realize what you are doing. Same if it's on a phone, keep it far away. Replace it by a safe habit of checking your media account at a specific time like just before a drawing or after and be clear about what you want from that, if it's checking you message or keeping with latest posts , so you'll now when it's done browsing. I personally totally delete the apps on my phone for an extended period as I was sick of it. I lost the habit and now they are on my phone and I use them rarely and only with purpose. It can feel a bit extreme but it worked for me xD. Very nice illustration :), you could bring us more by dropping this habit for sure. Hope you'll find something helpfull in that.