In a world with so many distractions, it can be difficult to remain focused on your tasks and intentions. With streams and streams of information competing for our attention, we are constantly bombarded with distractions in the form of pictures, promises and fancy sparkling objects. In order to become a better DJ you need to remain focused.
Distractions
I am sure that my regular readers know my recent views on Facebook and how I feel it is a waste of time and energy. People aimlessly sift through the pages looking at what others are doing with their lives and finding out how successful or unsuccessful their friends, and often non-friends, are.
I have recently been carrying out a lot of research amongst my ‘physical’ friends, as to their uses of Facebook. My research has led me to the following conclusion.
If you want to excel at your hobby, you need to exchange the time you spend on Facebook, to time spent on your hobby. Of course this only applies if Facebook isn’t your hobby!
I was telling one friend of mine that I had pulled away from Facebook and hadn’t posted one single personal update in over 2 months or even looked at the news feed. He instantly jumped into animated conversation and said, “Yeah man, me too, you should check out my sound cloud! Since I gave up Facebook I’ve found the time to produce so many tracks!”
This added weight to my whole experiment and made me realize just what can be achieved if we stopped spending so much time on Facebook. Sometimes we spend an hour or more simply scrolling our feed and clicking items that loosely intrigue us. If we spent that hour on producing music, or learning how to use certain software or how to mix two records together, we would continue to improve our skills and knowledge of our chosen hobby.
Every time you log into Facebook ask yourself, “Should I be playing with my music right now instead?”
Spend your time Wisely
I understand we all find valuable content on Facebook, but it can often be hit and miss – we might need to spend 3 hours to find only one article that truly helps or benefits our goal. Instead, find the resources you can trust, follow websites of those that help you towards your goal and fill your online time with gold, instead of useless guff.
This isn’t just a ‘slam Facebook’ rant, this applies to any distraction. Remaining focused on what’s important to you will re-align you with your passions and place you back on track. Before I launched Traktor Tips, I read a book called The Passion Test. I found this book extremely helpful in attaining my goals and manifesting my dreams. The one aspect of the book that stuck with me was their advice to use your passions as a factor in every decision you make. If you come to a fork in the road, or have any decision to make, filter it through the question, “Which route is more inline with my passions?” Using this method, along with the other tools and tips inside the book, will help you towards realizing your passions.
You’ve got to Show up
A friend of mine, Paul Jarvis, recently wrote a great article about simply ‘showing up‘. His advice is for those that like to write, explaining that if we don’t simply sit down and write everyday, then we won’t improve our writing. The same is true of your DJ’ing. Fire up the decks, hit record, make a mix and give it to all your friends. Your mix may not be of the same quality as John Digweed or Steve Lawler right off the bat, but if you do this everyday, you will get better at it. You will learn so much and soon, you will be the next Steve Lawler or John Digweed.
You won’t get anywhere as a DJ if you’re not DJ’ing, so get off Facebook and step up your game. We all learn from doing and we always learn from mistakes. Don’t worry about making those mistakes, they will help you grow. When I look back through some of my earliest blog posts and tutorials for Traktor Tips, I can see how different they are in comparison to those of today. If I could just locate those tape cassette recordings of my DJ mixes from back in 1994, I’m sure I would cringe at some of those too!
Remember to keep a balance, whilst it’s important to DJ every day, it’s also important to not over do it. Now go have a mix and become a better DJ.
See you in the club.
photo credit: birgerking
Traktor Tips 
I just uninstalled FB and Twitter from my phone. I think it is a big step in fighting the distraction bug for me. Also, I unpinned my FB and Twitter tabs from my web browswer.
Awesome! Yes, removing facebook from my phone and turning off ALL notifications is the best thing ever! Happy distraction free life! 😉
Thumbs up!
Thanks for consuming my articles and commenting! Glad you like! 🙂
A timely reminder. Thanks for the article.
Happy to offer some inspiration – hope you weren’t getting too sucked into the vortex? 😉
Nothing wrong with what you’re saying here, but it does come across like you’re slamming Facebook to a degree. +1 for just getting into it, ignoring distractions, losers etc, but if you tailor your FB feed and limit it to following quality output such as DJTechtools, Digital DJ Tips, Ableton/Traktor/Serato news etc and of course this blog, it can be a valuable resource. Like an RSS feed. Push this post back in time 10 years and replace FB with TV?… same story.
Hi Dexter, yes, I see what you’re saying and I completely agree with you that if people use their facebook page like a specific news feed and are able to customize it to the point as to limit distractions then yes, great. The problem is, facebook is designed in such a way as to trap you there with notifications and shinny object. As we are now living in an information age, we all think our lives will end if we stop consuming every last drop of information. But, the world goes on and we free up an unbelievable amount of time for the things that we truly want to do and will find the answers to the things we need, when we need them.
In the world of ‘instant’ news, everyone wants to be the first to know something, but in the grand scheme of things, it really doesn’t matter. We seem to be turning into predators of information, and it’s becoming too much.
TV was designed to control / inform the masses and now Facebook is doing the same through it’s marketing. Money talks and its the money that controls peoples thinking and what they think they should like, just because their group of friends do. It’s kinda like a peer pressure marketing.
So, I guess in some way I sort of am slamming facebook, but maybe more perhaps the way in which it is being used and how it’s taking over peoples lives. Perhaps to be more specific I would say, it’s the desire for information that is the main distraction in all of this?
I appreciate your comments and enjoy discussing this kind of stuff. I am glad you’re on facebook as maybe that’s where you found this article!? 🙂
What I’ve found really useful with Facebook is really simple: “Hide all from xxx” (just click at the arrow that appears at the right of any feed and click that option). My news feed now displays only interesting things to me, and it takes me less than half an hour to scroll through a whole day of facebook activity.
That worked a lot for me, facebook was a big problem, now it’s not any longer.
This completely works too yes. Limiting your time on their is key. There is no need to go to the extremes of deleting accounts, I have always used friends lists to filter stuff out too. It’s just so easy to look at useless information sometimes. It’s a dangerous vortex….
Thanks for your pointers, let’s hope more people find them valuable and are able to free up some time. 😉
Nice advice,am gona work with man keep it up
Thanks Moses – hope it has inspired you and many others to focus on their true passions. I find people being overwhelmed with so much stuff and they want to try everything, each weekend it’s a different hobby. Hopefully this article helps people narrow things down and slow down and focus! Thanks.
Nice article! Thanks for linking up to my post.
A pleasure – I have learnt some great things from you Paul…. 😉