So, this Friday ended on a high with Book Authority picking “The Sniper Mind” as one of the best new decision making audiobooks of this year.

Writers know that those of us who write for a living live in a state of perpetual fugue. Yesterday’s books vie for headspace with fresh ideas, new suggestions, exciting research that takes us down new rabbit holes, talks, meetings and new book outlines that need to sound coherent long before the ideas behind them have truly crystalized.

In addition there is all that other work that revolves around the marketing of previous books, talks, podcasts, interviews and presentations. Keeping it all together requires either more than one brain (I’d really like evolution to get a move on, on that) or the ability to compartmentalize things a little and add perspective.

I currently possess only one brain. So, in order to keep it together I employ the compartmentalization technique I just mentioned above. Namely I keep everything in my head in different compartments and I am careful about not letting them spill over. Case in point, today’s announcement by Book Authority. I am working on a couple of new projects at the moment and I am also busy finishing some market analysis for clients so the temptation to just drop everything and focus on this just now was pretty strong.

What I did, instead, was treated it as another piece of research/news to be analyzed, assessed and then placed in the normal stream of data that I have set up regarding The Sniper Mind. The result is that by the time I got to it so it can be processed I was in a more detached, analytical frame of mind and could then deal with it, without it derailing my day.

A little split-personality-ish; I know. Then again, it actually works for me. It might work for you too (if you’re writing, or multi-tasking).