How to stay on task

This summer I have writer's block.  One of the reasons is because I recently purchased some new technology tools and well, as you know, learning new technologies can be a time eater. 

I woke up and decided to devote the entire morning to writing chapter 4 of a book about Marie Peary, daughter of the Artctic explorer. I sat down at the computer, opened up a new file, and titled it Chapter 4.  Hmmmm.  How to begin?  I reread the draft of Chapter 3 and fiddled with a few sentences there. This all took about 20 minutes and I still couldn’t think of how to begin Chapter 4.

So, I decided to check in on my email.  Three messages---all from students (this summer, I have 20 writing students from my university in Ohio).  It only took five minutes to read the messages, but one student gave a link to website she wanted me to review as a possible source for her project.  That took another 10 minutes.  Oh yes, and while I was on the internet, I decided to check my Face book posts.  Oops, someone posted something controversial on my wall—I then needed to post and upload a video and link in order to make a rebuttal.  Another  fifteen minutes. 

I decided to knock off for lunch at 11 a.m. and after that I had to watch the news and after that, I was a little sleepy so I took a walk to wake myself up.  The walk made me tired, so I decided to take a little nap, and when I woke up, I didn’t feel like writing anymore.  Therefore, I decided to devote today to working on Chapter 4 and here I am writing this blog post. Now that it’s done, I think I’ll have lunch because it is 11 a.m.  After that, I’ll work on Chapter 4.

How about you?  Is technology sometimes a distraction to writing?  Share your ideas aboput how to stay on task.