Got Concentration? Writing in the Dark

It used to be so cool to say that you multi-tasked. Man, I used to say it so proudly. What I was really saying was that I tried to do many things at the same time, poorly, and seldom really finished anything.

Writing is one of the most difficult tasks to do without concentration and distractions are many. Write on a computer and you have all those lovely “other” things you could be doing. The entire World Wide Web is waiting for your surfing pleasure, and of course, email, twitter and Facebook and … and …

One set of tools that might help are a collection of dark screen word processors that as you type show nothing on your screen but your typed prose (Well, I guess you can write poetry this way, too). There’s nothing there but you and your text on the screen.

A couple of these worth trying are DarkRoom for Windows and WriteRoom for Mac. WriteRoom costs $24.95 but might be worth the price in your increase in productivity — DarkRoom is free. Tell your boss I said it was okay to put WriteRoom on your expenses.

Another slightly less effective approach is Writer which is a free web service. Now I know I’m always suggesting using web services over desktop programs, but not this time, Writer sure enough provides a dark window for writing like the other products and means well but, unfortunately, it’s stuck right there in that beautiful browser amid way too much temptation.

Give one of them a try and see whether they work for you.

WriteRoom on my Mac using custom colors.