CyberFootprint

When working on projects and articles, the main nemesis is always productivity and a lack of attention span. You know the situation – e-mails keep pouring in, the screen is buzzing with Twitter updates, there are some exciting news to be read yet… Suddenly, you have to leave the computer to meet a friend, shockingly realising that you haven’t done any real work.

The real problems are the overabundance of information and inability to concentrate on what is the most important in writing – the real intellectual labour of juggling ideas around and capturing them on a piece of paper or the computer screen. Who is to blame that there are so many more exciting things to work on, other than that stupid article due tomorrow?

Blame your text editor’s interface.

When the writers get stuck and do not know how to proceed further, they result to tweaking the text and playing with other Word functions. Sometimes it gets even worse, when the author escapes from the text editor to the web. The rich interface of the text editor is keeping them away from evaluating ideas and thinking about how he can articulate them more efficiently.

The best remedy for the distraction disease is to change the interface of the text editor, or the whole program.

“The medium is the message,”

said Marshall McLuhan, albeit in a totally different context. He expressed in this statement that every program is constrained by its form, be it in the technical capabilities or graphic design. In other words, if you want to create a good copy, you must do it in a program that gives you the best environment for creating a truly exceptional piece of writing. The MS Word will not offer that – it is coded to be a multifunctional editor.

Dark is good

On the other hand, there are some free text editors, like Q10 or DarkRoom that create a perfect environment for the writer to mold ideas. Their interface contains nothing but a dark background, light text and one info toolbar (only in Q10). The user can copy and paste, spell check, and perform some other actions in a limited scope. There are no icons, no surplus text and no complicated menus. It’s just you and your work. Splendid!

The downside of the editors is the inability to work with other than plain text files. Thus, it would be unwise to use these programs to write a book or a complicated thesis with many headings. No matter how beautiful simplicity is, it proves to be limiting in this case.

Moving back from the ultra-sophisticated MS Word 2007 to a plain text editor that works only with .txt files seems like re-inventing the wheel or downright stupidity, but it helps the productivity to soar.

Links to visit

For a more comprehensive review of Q10, visit The Writers Manifesto, and for its pros and cons list, pay a visit to Litlets.

Bill Weaver reviews DarkRoom very well and in-depth. DarcKnyt compares it to its colleague JDarkRoom.

UPDATE: If you want to know more about the tools for distraction-free writing, look at my post at BadLanguage.net.