G'day! Thanks for returning!
Everyone‘s favourite Lauren Bacall soundalike Canadian podcaster, Donna PepsiCola, has recently put me onto the estimable Matthew Stibbe who, in a series of posts, has been contemplating the art of avoiding distraction when writing. (If Australians come from Australia, and Americans come from America, why don’t Canadians come from Canadia?)
Distraction, for a writer, is serious business — even a humble request to ‘take out the garbage’ midstream can cause 40 minutes of lost productivity, as one of Matthew’s commentors to his post Tools for writing: Distraction-free text editors points out.
As Matthew says,
I am easily distracted by things on my computer: email, blogging, IM etc. (More tips on how to concentrate on writing in my recent post.) Several people have recommended using a back-to-basics fullscreen word processor. Here are a few alternatives:
- Mac: WriteRoom
- Windows: Dark Room
- Java (should work on Windows, Mac and Linux): JDarkRoom
- Microsoft Word: Amit Agarwal has some tips to make Word run like WriteRoom
I’m going to try writing an article with one of these and I’ll report back on how effective it was.
Amit Agarwal’s tips on how to make make Word run like WriteRoom is a bottler, as we say here in the Antipodes (meaning that it’s terribly good).
It brings back to mind that for many years Word allowed you to emulate WordPerfect — complete with blue screen and white text. I went hunting for it on Word2007 beta2 but alas couldn’t find that option. I guess that the Word project team decided that no one would remember WordPerfect these days, and perhaps they are right — it is only old curmudgeons like me that do. But not fondly. I used WP for a few months and was frustrated by all the arcane codes one needed to enter to do something as simple as embolden or italicise something. Then Word came into my life and I never looked back!
But Amit’s post and screenshots took me right back to my earliest days with personal computers (just after I had got my head around punch cards). First the green screen, then the WOW! factor of orange text.
I’m now so used to typing black text onto a white screen that it will be interesting to try out Amit’s suggestion and see if the distraction-less environment makes composition easier.
I usually work in full-screen mode with Word, knowing the keyboard shortcuts for most of the things I need on a daily basis, but I confess to forgetting how to remove the annoying little ‘full screen’ toolbar when I do. No matter where I position it, it gets in the way and becomes its own distraction.
But I am again grateful to the sublime Ms P for pointing out another blogger worthy of adding to my feeds. I’ve been heavily culling and re-arranging my feeds in GreatNews and I must say I’m pleased with the result. Matthew makes it into my second-tier ‘Darjeeling Breakfast’ list.
