Like most people, there are a handful of things I’m really good at. For everything else, I’d like to think I’m decent to mediocre. But there are a few things I’m awful at. One of them is drumming.

It’s been a long time since I’ve tried to do it. But I honestly have no desire to. I remember clearly just how bad I was at it when I was still in grade school and had to do it for music class. And I think I know why: I’m awful at multitasking.

That may sound like an odd thing for a blogger in the tech space to say, but it’s absolutely true. If I don’t focus on doing one thing at a time, I never get anything done. I simply can’t seem to utilize my brain to do two things at once. It’s why I can’t tap my foot while playing a different beat with my hands. Inevitably, with me, it all blends into one beat.

In some ways that good. When I am able to get focused, I’m very focused. With one beat in mind, I can stay on rhythm for hours. When I know what I want to say, I can crank out a thousand word post with relative ease, changing very little along the writing path. But in this day an age, distractions are plentiful. And just one of them can derail me from a thought. And sometimes those thoughts are then gone forever.

It used to be that to focus on writing, I would sit quietly at my computer. This meant shutting off music and turning off the television. When IM got integrating into Gmail a few years ago, things became a bit more problematic, because shutting off IM (a huge source of distraction) meant remembering that I had it open in Gmail and not just through iChat (which is another distraction I would close). But as someone who covers live-breaking stories during the day, it’s impossible now for me to turn everything off.

With Yammer and Skype constantly open for work, it’s hard to focus on writing during the daytime hours. But the much bigger distractions come from Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, and Gmail, which constantly pause my writing to see if there’s something hot that I’m missing.

And the iPhone had made things a thousand times worse. With Boxcar, a push notification app for the iPhone, I get notifications at least every few minutes. These include new email notifications, Twitter search notifications, Twitter @reply notifications, and Facebook notifications. And when you throw in Foursquare push notifications, BNO news notifications, and Yammer notifications, it’s rare that 2 minutes goes by throughout the daytime working hours that my iPhone isn’t buzzing. And yes, I look at it almost every time.

This ensures that I rarely miss a breaking story. But it’s awful for actual writing. This is why you may notice that every longer piece I write on TechCrunch comes either at 3 AM or on the weekend. And that’s one of the reasons that I stay up so late; I feel I can get twice as much done after about 10 PM then I can before it. After that time, the constant stream of emails slows to a trickle, tweets get quiet, and IMs stop coming in, etc.

I spend every single day looking forward to the night.

Much like Inbox Overload, I fear there is no real solution to this aside from maybe getting a personal assistant who does all of the constant online checking for me and only alerts me when there is absolutely something I need to know. But honestly, I probably wouldn’t trust someone else to do that for me. If I were a boss, I’d probably be the worst micro-manager ever.

But the real problem, as I see it, is that again, like Inbox Overload, distractions are only going to get worse going forward. In the past 10 years, it’s gone from bad, to very bad. But the past 2 or 3 years, the innovation in the distraction space seems to have blossomed.

I fear this will simply drive me into staying up later and later to do what I really like: Writing. Quietly. By myself. With no distractions. Maybe I’ll spend my days learning how to drum.

[photo: flickr/matti mattila]