How I Use My Distraction Journal To Stay Focused Leave a comment

If you sit down to do something important for your business but then get distracted by something urgent, this episode is for you.

I’m sharing what a Distraction Journal is – and how to start using one today – so that you can follow through on the uncomfortable tasks that need to be completed to build your business. I’m also sharing why perfectionist thinking causes us to distract ourselves in the first place and the practical things you can do about it.

If you’re a perfectionist building a business, you want to listen to this episode today.

READY FOR MORE?

The Power Planning Course is now open! If you want to learn how to plan properly as a perfectionist so you can consistently get your most important business tasks done without burning out, sign up for The Power Planning Course today at samlaurabrown.com/planning.

Perfectionists Getting Shit Done is opening for one week on 8 April 2026. If you’re ready for coaching, accountability and support to take consistent action and grow your business successfully – and sustainably – join the waitlist for PGSD at samlaurabrown.com/pgsd.

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Introduction
This is the Perfectionism Project, the only podcast created specifically for perfectionists who are building businesses. I’m your host, Sam Laura Brown, perfectionism expert and entrepreneur. I teach perfectionists how to plan properly, consistently follow through and rest without guilt so they can build profitable and fulfilling businesses without burning out.

I’ve helped over a thousand perfectionist entrepreneurs do exactly that inside my program, Perfectionist Getting Shit Done. If you’re tired of procrastinating, overthinking and half finishing your ideas, you’re in the right place. Now, let’s dive in.

Sam Laura Brown
Okay, so today I just want to do an episode that I thought I would have already recorded by now, given my nearly at 600 episodes, but I have not. And I was mentioning this on last week’s PGSD coaching call, and everyone looks so surprised. And I just thought I would share it here as well, because this is a key tool that I created and that I use very regularly, especially to support me with following through on my power planning.

And I haven’t talked about it for quite a few years, there is a lesson on it as well, somewhere inside perfectionist getting shit done. But I wanted to share here on the podcast with you this really helpful tool, because it has made such a difference for me. And if you find yourself when you are sitting down to do things, especially for your business, since this podcast is for perfectionist entrepreneurs, if you sit down to do something, and then your brain immediately offers you something that you actually do have to get done.

And it suggests to do that right now, so you don’t forget it. So this is my solution to that. And especially because there is so much discomfort with following through on tasks, if you have a perfectionist brain, when you are following through on tasks, you are risking rejection, failure, you are inviting self judgment, self criticism, nitpicking, you are putting at risk your identity that you have a lot of potential, and that you’re someone who’s very capable, because when you actually complete things and put them out into the world, you might discover that you don’t do as well as you thought you should.

I think that is one of the ultimate perfectionist fears. And I’m actually going to do an episode on it coming up. It’s the fear of finding out or how to overcome the fear of finding out that your best isn’t good enough.

And also how to overcome the fear that only your best is good enough. And therefore, this is if you’re a perfectionist who does a lot of overworking, you’re working all the time doesn’t feel like overworking, it feels just necessary. So I’m going to do two episodes on those concepts.

I’m really excited to share about that. But it is a vulnerable thing to do as a perfectionist to complete things and to make decisions and follow through on them and put them out into the world and get feedback about your own capability. And also just the own stories we have with ourselves, the the way that we talk to ourselves as we see ourselves doing something poorly or doing something and it takes a really long time.

It just there’s a lot of emotions that can come with that. And so what we like to do is to do something that allows us to feel productive without having to feel all of those feelings. And so what I found is that my brain and this isn’t for me because I have any issues with focus, I can be really focused and follow through on things.

But it’s the emotional side that the perfectionist thoughts that I have make it really uncomfortable in my body to focus sometimes. Because the self-criticism is so intense, the fear is so intense that my brain can focus behind those emotions going on. I don’t want to feel them.

And so I will do things to avoid feeling them without having to feel unproductive at the same time. So for me, I can’t remember the exact year that I started doing this. It would have been maybe 2018 or 2019.

So I’ve been doing it for a long time and I’ll share exactly what it is. You can literally start using this today to help you. It’s very simple and so good.

I love it. So when I started doing this simple practice called The Distraction Journal, I just wanted to have a solution for my brain would just always say to me like, oh my God, you have to send that email right now. Or you have to go, there’s like just something urgent you have to do right now and you actually have to do it and we want to make sure we don’t forget.

So here’s what I came up with. And this is very simple. So all I do is I have a notebook and I often when I’m working, I just have a notebook next to me.

I love scribbling things down. So I have a notebook. Mine is a $4 Kmart notebook.

You do not have to do anything fancy. It can be a piece of paper. It can be whatever.

It can be digital. I’ve done digital versions as well, just with my notes on my computer. But I just found that it would get lost on my computer.

It just wasn’t as simple and easy as just having it literally written with the page open for The Distraction Journal right next to me and just jotting things down. But you find what works for you. There’s so many different ways that this can look.

I’ve experimented at times with putting it into ChatGPT, like just having a Distraction Journal thread where I would just have that open. As if it’s a notebook, I just have that open on my screen. And I would write down, and I’ll tell you in a second what to write down, but I’d write something down in that.

And then I told it always just reply to me and just say, stay focused, keep going. So every time I’d put something in, it would just say, stay focused, keep going. It wouldn’t say a million different things or try and give me any feedback or here’s a PDF or whatever.

So there’s so many different ways it can look. So here is the concept. It is a page.

I’m going to talk about it in the physical version, but just apply this digitally if you want to do it that way. So at the top, I just write Distraction Journal because I often use different notebooks too, and all of that. You don’t have to have a dedicated notebook.

Don’t go out to buy the stationery. I know we all love that. Just use something you already have.

So I just write Distraction Journal, and then I typically will write the date of the day. Very simple. Then what I will do is I will do a line in the middle of the page horizontally.

This is just to divide the page into two different sections. So there’s a top section and a bottom section. The top section says distractions.

I add the second section says to do later. And so what this does is two things. One is in the distraction section.

I like to, anytime that my brain offers me to do something other than what is in my power planning, and this is why power planning is so essential because if you don’t know what you are actually intending to do, and if you’re not very clear on that, then it is very hard to know what a distraction is. It is very easy to just be like, oh, this isn’t a distraction. I just really have to get this done.

And so if you find yourself ping ponging between different tasks throughout the day, and then you end up at the end of the week feeling like you didn’t make progress, even though you were so busy doing stuff, I highly recommend starting power planning. You can sign up for the power planning course today. I’ll leave the link in the show notes and learn that.

It takes one afternoon to learn it, and then you can have the clarity and the flexible structure you need that works with your perfectionist brain instead of against it to be clear on what you need to do to build your business and then actually do it in the time that you have in a way that’s in alignment with your values and your strengths as well, like the way you actually want to build your business. So this is a complementary tool with the power planning. If you are not power planning and you’re maybe either doing like classic time blocking, which for perfectionists tends to be really over-scheduled and rigid and therefore doesn’t work, it just turns out perfectionism handbrake on.

If you have a long to-do list and then you highlight a few priorities, it’s not to say any of those ways are wrong. I have just found for my clients too that the approach of power planning is really the most supportive way. It incorporates everything that supports you to take action on really uncomfortable things and to rest without guilt and to be able to have a life outside of your business as well.

And if you’re neurodivergent, it also supports all the things that need to happen to help you focus. So it’s not to say any of those things are wrong and you can try this if you were doing something other than power planning. I just highly recommend power planning if you’re a perfectionist, especially if you’re building a business and you’ve got a lot on your plate and you want to actually get shit done without burning out.

So I have the distractions section and I will write down anything that I want to do or I have the desire to do that isn’t what I’m currently working on right now and I will write it as a distraction. Say, for example, if it’s like scrolling or often what my brain will do is like, oh, that random person that I haven’t thought of in 10 years or like that random celebrity, I need to go and look at their Instagram account right now because I saw them in a TV show and it will just offer me like, let’s do anything other than following through on the actual tasks you’re doing because it’s really uncomfortable to be following through on that task. As I mentioned, it brings up the risk of failure, rejection, self-criticism and like all of that even if it is a successful thing outwardly that inwardly I don’t feel successful as I’m creating it and that feels very uncomfortable.

So there’s just going to be that like emotional storm that comes and so my brain will offer me so many different specific little things. So in the distraction section, I will just write down any of those things that are distractions. I’m like, I don’t really need to do that later or sometimes even things like that.

I will write that in the to-do later section and then when it comes to later, and I’ll talk about this in a second, but when it comes to later on, I will review everything and decide what I actually want to do. But I will just, some things are just blatant distractions, so like get up and go to the kitchen when I’m not actually hungry, like there’s a lot of things like that that my brain, especially when I’m feeling uncomfortable, like my legs just want to move me out of wherever I am. I just want to like physically move away and so I would just write that in distractions.

But the key to this, because I used to just do the distraction journal with just the distractions, the key thing that shifted things to me is having this to-do later section because such a strong objection from my brain was, but you actually have to do that, that thing really is important. And if it was something that I had procrastinated on, say if it was like sending an important email to someone and I was meant to do that yesterday, my brain is like, well that’s already overdue, you were already behind on that. So that needs to be done right this second and it has to be done now, otherwise we won’t remember because you didn’t remember yesterday and the reason I didn’t remember the day before is because it was uncomfortable to do it.

And so now it’s like my brain is only remembering it because it would rather do that uncomfortable thing than the more uncomfortable thing that I need to do to build my business. So I have this to-do later section that I just will add in when my brain offers me those specific things, I will just write it down. So I can know, basically I’m outsmarting my brain, I can know that later on I will be reviewing this list and I won’t be forgetting to send that important email because I have somewhere specific that I have captured it and I am in the habit of capturing it in this way.

Plus with power planning, you’re already much better at proactively thinking about things instead of just relying on your memory to hold it all. When you’re power planning, your power planning will hold a lot of the information that you currently hold in your brain. So you will just, in general, be a lot better at remembering things.

But my brain will be like, oh, but we’re going to forget it. So I have this to-do later, I will add it in there and just as I go. So this morning when I was doing… So today for me is Tuesday, which is my Monday, my first day of the week.

And I do my weekly review, I do a business and financial review and I do my power planning to start my week, to connect in with my business, with myself, with my week, with my goals. Like there’s a whole process that I go through. This is what we teach you in PGSD.

There’s a whole process that I go through to connect into everything that matters and set myself up for a really successful and productive and restful week. So as I was doing that, I had so many things that I wanted to do instead because it can be uncomfortable to look around at everything. It can be tedious at times, like it just isn’t the most enjoyable thing to do ever, I find, for me.

I have dread about it sometimes. I just don’t… I’m not like, oh my god, this is the best thing ever. Even though I love reflecting, I love planning, but it just… I can have dread about it.

I can have resistance about it. So I was having all of these distractions and I was writing them down of things that I wanted to be distracted by but wasn’t. So I’d write it down instead of being distracted.

I would just write down the thing I wanted to be distracted by. Or when there are times where there’s a distraction and I let myself be distracted by that, I still write that down as well. It’s just having that awareness because as you do this more and more, you’ll be like, oh, I can see me.

There are these three key things I do as a distraction. You’re probably like, I already know what I do to distract myself, but there are some subtle things. If it’s like, oh, suddenly I remember I need to put the laundry on right when I’m halfway through writing my weekly email newsletter.

You’ll start to see patterns like that. But your brain will offer you this valid life admin task at a really convenient time for your own emotions and comfort levels. So you can really, and this is, I love all the tools.

This is growth goal, power planning, clean rest. All of it is to support you with connection with yourself and not just self-awareness but self-awareness that you can actually do something with and actually create change and actually not just be frustrated by the awareness and then just have it and not be able to be any different, but to be able to notice the distractions. Then you can start planning for that in your power planning.

I won’t go into that in this episode. It’s beyond the scope of it, but when you are power planning, you are able to, when you have the awareness that comes from using the distraction journal, you are able to really just preempt yourself in a way that is otherwise challenging to do, even as someone who is really self-aware, even as someone who feels very in tune with how they operate, what their limiting beliefs are, how they work best, any of that. This really increases self-awareness in a practical way that then supports you to make even better plans to follow through on.

For example, if you keep noticing that in your distractions you want to scroll, it could be you just literally want to have that as an explicit activity that you do with your time, but you don’t have a designated time for that, so you’re trying to find somewhere to squeeze it in, for example. In the to-do later, I was just writing down all of these different things that I need to do. I was talking to someone on my team about something specific that was personal life, admin stuff as well that I need to do.

My brain was like, oh, go do this. Oh, go do that. Oh, go do that.

I just captured it. Then what I did after that is, and you can do this either after, if you have a lot of stuff come out, you can do it then, but I typically will at the end of the day or if there’s a lot of stuff, right before I have lunch and then at the end of the day again, any of that to-do later stuff, I will look at and really determine, does any of that actually need to be done now? If so, specifically, when am I going to do it? Then I will adjust my power planning and do my little tweaks so that I’m not just trying to squeeze everything in constantly. It is really challenging to build your business in a really sustainable way that you enjoy if there are lots of things that need to get done, but you don’t give yourself adequate time to do it.

You’re just constantly squeezing things in and therefore not really able to even trust yourself that you will get things done because oftentimes when we try to squeeze things in, either we then just sacrifice our own wellbeing to do that or they don’t get done because life happened and then that thing that was going to get squeezed in this weekend couldn’t get squeezed in. So we want to not be squeezing things in.

We want to have a plan and sometimes it’s like you just need to group a bunch of these things together and have a half an hour block where you just send that email and then make that phone call and then book that appointment, but actually giving yourself time to do things will really change how you relate to yourself and how you feel about how you’re doing because if you never give yourself enough time to succeed at stuff, no wonder you always feel like you’re failing.

No wonder you always feel like you’re behind. It’s such an important piece of being able to feel successful day to day and then actually be successful in terms of your accomplishments is giving yourself adequate time for things. When we feel time pressure with perfectionism thinking, we will try and really underestimate, like be super optimistic is another way to say it.

Be super optimistic and hopeful about how long everything will take. So we give ourselves less time and then you might give yourself a much shorter lunch break and then you’ll underestimate your commute or how long it takes to do a workout or you’ll skip things like a workout altogether. So fundamentally for your power planning, we are shifting how we relate to time and getting out of that scarcity of I don’t have enough time and then that puts pressure on you and therefore you feel stressed and therefore you don’t make good choices about what to do with your time and therefore you don’t actually get things completed and shipped and done which means you then are just busy and exhausted but not actually making progress.

So then you feel even more behind, then you put more pressure on yourself, you feel more stressed, use your time more poorly and so the cycle repeats. So we get out of that. Partly one of the steps of doing that is actually giving yourself time to do things wild and give yourself time to do things and shifting the way that you relate to time and you relate to yourself is really important with that and I teach that in PGSD and also in the power planning course as well but when you have this to-do later section where you can capture those things, ultimately what it allows you to do is when your brain says oh no no we can’t finish that email newsletter now, we can’t do that post now, we have to especially if you notice like 80% of the way through getting something done that’s when your brain’s like oh my god I just had this idea, oh my god I just realized I had to do something because it could be like inspiring business ideas as well like oh my god I’m gonna start this new thing and I’m gonna do it right now because I feel so inspired.

That’s another to-do later item to note down but if you just notice that you are in the habit of not following through because you interrupt yourself about 80% of the way through completing something or maybe it’s 20% in to completing something that you interrupt yourself with a distraction or a to-do later item either it’s an inspiring idea or it is life admin, business admin, something that you’re behind on that you should have done yesterday, you should have done a week ago, you should have done a month ago that this will allow you to stay focused on what actually needs to be completed which you will know because you’re power planning and when you’re power planning you have your growth goal.

You know what your needle movers are so your week isn’t just focused around being busy, your week is focused around doing what will actually build your business and so that will include tasks that will make you feel different feelings, sometimes it will be you feel really excited and inspired but other times you will feel dread, other times you will have feelings that you want to distract yourself from and so what we want to do is work while those feelings are there so continuing to work while you feel uncomfortable, continuing to work while you feel dread like if you have done like myself, if you have done any university degree, college degree, schooling, you know how to complete things while feeling dread, you know how to do that and so that’s what we need to do to build your business as well and what happened is when you were in school there was an external deadline and then you’re like okay well now I really have to get it done because I don’t want to be the person who doesn’t hand it in and also now I don’t have enough time to make it perfect so it’s okay if it’s not perfect and the work that comes up in entrepreneurship and this is something major that we support on Inside PGSD.

Is that because there are no external deadlines for the really important stuff that often will be for say client work and things like that but things like starting a YouTube channel or a podcast or following up with a lead or different things like that there’s no external deadline so you have to learn how to follow through on things even when it’s uncomfortable when there is no external deadline and how to get yourself support yourself to complete things that you’d rather not do so that you can achieve something that you ultimately really want and the only reason often that you’d rather not do the thing isn’t because you don’t enjoy it but it’s because you’re having perfectionist thoughts that make it unenjoyable.

Because you’re judging yourself because you’re criticizing yourself because you’re worrying about what other people will think because you’re putting so much pressure on yourself for it to be perfect all the fun is zapped right out of it so in PGSD we learn we teach you how to shift that perfectionist thinking as well in a really intentional and direct way but also this really supports you as you are.

I always love the practical things as you are literally in the middle of doing a task instead of going to do some self-coaching and there’s a time and a place for self-coaching but my recommendation is if you’re right in the middle of a task that you have your distraction journal next to you just your piece of paper or your notebook or your digital note whatever you want to use and you capture for yourself what are the distractions which and this is all the stuff that isn’t what you had planned to do so with your power plan you’ll be clear on exactly what you’re going to do with a certain block of time and the outcome not just the activity of like update website but this specific outcome for example if it’s about me page published something that’s really clear you can tell whether or not it’s done instead of just like work on launch work on website do email marketing like that’s so vague it’s just gonna turn your perfectionism handbrake on.

So with this it really supports you in the moment to be able to stay focused on what matters the most and then and this is key and again you’ll learn this in the power planning course and inside PGSD as well that with all of this that I’ve been talking about it probably doesn’t sound any fun to your business and there is lots of fun stuff about building a business but also you will at times this is the reality of it you will at times need to do things that feel uncomfortable and so what to do to support you with that is to have clean rest time time where you are intentionally saying I’m not going to be working on my business at that time and even if I want to I’m not going to.

So that you can actually allow your brain to switch off and you are also going to have buffer time in your calendar as well so if you do get distracted that’s okay that’s okay you’ve accounted for that you’ve got buffer time so if something took you longer than you planned that’s okay and we do our little tweaks we’re making adjustments to your calendar as we go to keep it workable so it’s not like time blocking where you just fall off and you’re like okay I’ll try again next Monday and then you stay on it maybe Monday afternoon you’re already behind and then you just try again another week if you’re having follow-through problems and you’re a perfectionist entrepreneur and maybe there are things at play as well like ADHD as there are for many of our PGSDers that you can have practical tools like power planning and like the distraction journal which you can literally start using today I’ve just told you exactly how to do it that’s a whole tutorial on how to do the distraction journal.

And that can really support you to follow through there isn’t something wrong with you you just haven’t got the right tools and the right methods to support your perfectionist brain and how it actually works and because of the perfectionist thinking and the perfectionist fears that have you put so much pressure on things and have you self-criticize and judge yourself as you’re completing things and have you not want to complete things because it feels scary to complete it and risk finding out that that idea that was so good in your head didn’t actually work out in the real world.

These are really practical things that can really support you and I just I used to be someone who couldn’t follow through with stuff and definitely couldn’t follow through consistently and then the tools of the distraction journal and also power planning coupled with the growth goal needle movers and clean rest that is what has allowed me to become someone who even as a perfectionist who still has a lot of that perfectionist thinking and those perfectionist fears they don’t cause problems like they used to because I’m working with my perfectionist brain instead of against it.

So I hope this episode has been incredibly helpful and I want to invite you to join us inside perfectionist getting shit done when we open for enrollment on the 8th of April for one week only so you will learn power planning and the growth goal and needle movers and clean rest and you will get coaching and support and accountability and community and there are so many other things as well that are taught in PGSD to support you with taking action without burning out and building a business that is successful and actually feels like you is actually what you want to be building so I really want to invite you in samlaurabrown.com/pgsd. Did I say that before I can’t remember but I will add that link below and go and join the wait list so you can be the first to know when doors open and so you can find out more about the program as well and get ready to join us inside so that is all for this episode I hope you’re having a beautiful day and I will talk to you in the next one.

Outro
If you enjoy this podcast, I recommend signing up for the waitlist for my program called Perfectionist Getting Shit Done, aka PGSD. This is a program designed to help you get out of your own way in your business. You’re going to learn how to release your perfectionism handbrake by setting a growth goal for your business, planning properly as a perfectionist with power planning, and getting regular guilt-free clean rest.

You’ll learn the skills required to get out of your own way and be supported every step of the way to do it. To find out more about the program and join the waitlist today, go to samlaurabrown.com/pgsd.