When I sit down to write, it always seems like there are more pressing things to do than actually write.
If I’m not distracted by email, or sidetracked by my RSS feeds, I’m fiddling with fonts or trying to get rid of Clippy the animated paperclip. Between featuritis and software bloat, sometimes I think my word processor makes it too easy for me to lose focus.
So what to do?
Jeff MacIntyre thinks the answer might be zenware, a trend in software that’s
an attempt to return to a simpler interface. Think of it as traffic calming for your desktop.
An example of this is the writing software WriteRoom.
Today, Nora interviewed Jeff MacIntyre about writing and zenware. It will air on an upcoming Spark, but you hear the whole unedited interview below, or download the MP3.
Play audio:
What do you think? How do you deal with digital distraction?
I see that Writeroom is only available for Macs…of course, that makes perfect sense!
Dark Room is a free clone of WriteRoom that works on Windows
http://www.download.com/Dark-Room/3000-2079_4-10562359.html?tag=dl-blog
And then there’s pen and paper.
All this leads to the myth of multi-tasking that operating systems have hyped for years: there’s no such thing. Every window you have open on your desktop is a possible (and probable) distraction; that’s why I still often work at the command-line, either in Windows, Linux, or Unix.
I think Microsoft Word might have been worse… even in 2000.
And they just keep on adding more “features” in each release. There was an excellent TED presentation from a while ago, where David Pogue talked about the software upgrade paradox — “If you improve a piece of software enough times, you will eventually ruin it.”
When I talked to Gina Trapani from Lifehacker a while ago, she talked about “firewalling your attention” when you need to buckle down and work. She suggests you might even need to–gasp–work offline, so you can’t keep checking email. Speaking of which, I am leaving this comment instead of writing my column!
Ahhh distractions. Such a beautiful thing. I definitely have to add a +1 for Linux in terms of the ability to minimize distractions. For the longest time I used a very, very bare bones system. Virtually everything was text-only and instead of the Windows “Start” button I had to right click the background image of my work space to get the menu of options. I was using a “window manager” instead of a “desktop environment.” Nothing cluttered the desktop because there wasn’t a desktop to clutter! Life was beautiful (if you don’t include the amount of time I spent tweaking the shade of border around the windows).
Now that I’ve switched back to using a “desktop environment” I find that I’ve allowed more clutter to creep in. Thanks for the reminder that there are more elegant ways to approach tasks that aren’t bloated with buttons and options!
Why don’t you use a pen and paper?
Amongst other things, my wife and I write for a living. If we were forced back to pen and paper, we wouldn’t be in business. I love to work with five and six programs running at the same time. I draft in Word, layout in InDesign, organize photos in iView, edit them in Photoshop, drop them back into InDesign and export it all to Adobe Photoshop. Meanwhile, Outlook and Facebook are running so I can keep up a conversation with a number of people from across the country. I am not a great multitasker. This is a very zen process. You just have to ignore the unnecessary and focus on the flow.
Well, I am a huge fan of software that _just works_ rather than software that gets in your way, but there comes a point when too much functionality has been removed. If your text editor (that you use to write documents for printing, mailing, etc) doesn’t even support bold or italic, never mind different fonts there is a problem. This is not a word processor. This is a text editor. On OS X you have TextEdit.app, and on Windows, Notepad. You don’t have to pay for these. Just make their windows really big. Or if you want to edit in Luxury, there is TextMate (Best programmer’s notepad ever made, ever).
But I digress. You are trying to sell us on a word processor but what you have here is a text editor, and quite frankly I have TextMate for that (which does syntax colouring, and text macro completions for my favorite programming environments). I would die without it
the thing that I love about this is that I fell into this post while procrastinating-sorry multitasking and after immediately downloading the product am now posting about it and seriously considering sending out some emails about it. I think I might be the problem not the software.
@ Sarah–hilarious! Much as I love the Spark blog, it’s given me a whole new set of procrastination ‘tools’: moderating the blog, er, commenting on the blog. I mean, it is part of my job to do that, but it also makes it way too easy to put off prioritizing properly. Oops, gotta go!
Jon Udell had a blog entry and related screencast about this.. you made me go and dig them up!
http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/02/14/adaptive-ui-for-focused-attention/
http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/07/13.html
http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/cleanDesktop_flv.html
Jon is one of the smartest tech journalists I’ve ever come across.
Here’s my gripe with digital distraction – As my years advance well into the 50′s I am continually frustrated by the small font size / long line lengths in so much digital material. Over the last few centuries publishers have figured out the relationship between font size and column inches; and now the digital world seems to largely ignore basic readablity principals. Even online newspapers seem to have forgotten this. On occasion I have cut and pasted long online articles and word processed them into readable column inches !
I know most 15 year olds can sit in their darkened basements and read the finest print on CD liner notes – if they ever actually buy a CD – but the rest of us need a break – let us read what you have to say!
@ Dave, I know what you mean. I remember way back in the mid-late 90s, there was a tech website…daily news about tech…that was a completely blank screen with one long *narrow* column down the centre. It was beautiful, readable, and, I recall, influential at the time, but it–and its aesthetic legacy–have long since disappeared (of course, I can't remember the name!)
I think that kind of website would spook me! What else is there?! What are they hiding?! I'm so used to all the dross around web articles that they almost anchor my attention like a frame around a painting. I can glance and dismiss it all (or open interesting things in new tabs for later) and then focus on the text. If it wasn't there maybe I'd wonder what I was missing instead of knowing I'm not missing anything important. That said a lot of sites have gone way too far and have so much on the page that you can't even find what you were looking for, let along focus on it. That's when Readable comes in handy.