Warning: The next paragraph will give you a tickle if you're a geek and will spin you round if you're not.
Picture this:
You have flock (an internet browser) running on more than 10 tabs, yahoo messenger or meebo open for instant chats and opera downloading a long form video on Crunchyroll. If you're using a PC that's underpowered your machine is probably crawling by now - but no, you have a mac - so it's not a problem to add a few Visualhub DVD conversion duties while all of this is happening.
All this in the name of GTD or "getting things done". Wow. A few years ago they don't have a name for it, now it's almost half impossible to do that people are calling it by an acronym!
So how to do get things done?
Well, personal stuff first. I am a writer for a children and teen magazine. Every month I have a deadline. Of course every month, I miss this deadline. Why? Because I sometimes write a partial article on TextEdit (Notepad to you XP users) and save it for later because I have been distracted by flock displaying juicy news from my RSS feeds, or Yahoo friend asking something, or the Crunchyroll video is finished or the "ding" from Visualhub saying "It's time to plug in your ipod, the DVD to video is now complete!". How can anybody finish anything with all that racket?
Enter WRITEROOM. It's a wordprocessor. It's very very barebones. Actually it's so barebones that it TAKES OVER YOUR ENTIRE SCREEN - blacking out everything you're trying to do in multi task - and gives you a single green blinking cursor. Yes, it's Wordperfect and 1980s EGA CRT screens all over again - but only better. The only program that still works on top of Writeroom on my mac is SHADES -w/c controls screen brightness - no threat of being distracted by that.
Don't get me wrong though - everything I mentioned above is still running - but you just don't see it - so you're not distracted by it.
So faced with a computer with a blank screen, what are you going to do? Move the mouse? Click an icon?
YOU TYPE!
And that's what has happened to me while I used the 30day trial period of WRITEROOM. Complete concentration on what I should write.
The thing about WRITEROOM is that - you should try using it. Don't judge it's simplicity because as Merlin Mann (43folders.com) said, it's simple (he suspects) by design. I, on the other hand am sure it is!
There's also a windows and linux version (yehey) both available at http://www.hogbaysoftware.com.
Oh! And if you're still reading this, here's a treat! If you're a blogger, just write a review of Writeroom and the owner will give you a free license for it and TaskPaper -another software he created, just click this sentence.. That's simply $30-60 value just to write something, so go do it!
Taskpaper review coming up!
Blogged with the Flock Browser
