When "distraction-free" doesn't equal "free of distractions"

March 6, 2012

Over the past few years, the act of writing has become somewhat of a regular task for me. In fact I often find myself writing not with the purpose of writing something for either of my blogs, or to write my next e-book, but simply sort the frequent nonsense which is going on inside my head.

These little snippets of thoughts can be anything. In most cases they are nothing else than a more elaborate pro/con-list. Sometimes though these  snippets evolve into something slightly bigger.

This is one of the latter kind.

Since you survived the introduction to this post you already got the obvious: every now and then I just scribble down some things, and with some luck something more or less useful comes out of it. Well, naturally I don’t do this always, as this would turn into a very time-consuming task, but still every now and then. One should think that the simple task of writing something down (taking the quality of content out of the equation here)  is just simple. In fact it should involve three simple steps:

1. sit down and open the computer (if not already open)
2. invoke Alfred and launch a writing app
3. start writing

Nine out of ten times step one will be preceded by brewing some fresh coffee, but other than that it should be easy. Unfortunately  though, step  two  bears one big hidden obstacle: The right app!

Over the years I have accumulated many text-editors and by now I have the questionable honor of being the proud owner of a total of 22 (!)¹ writing solutions combined on OS X and iOS. Before some doubts about my overall sanity arise I shall point out, that admittedly only a small amount of these is still installed on my system(s). I have become a text-editor collector. Probably only to be topped by  Twitter apps  or  To-Do managers.

And this is where my productivity get screwed.

Distraction-Free or Free-of-Distractions?

Ever since I learned about WriteRoom  many years ago, I have been a huge fan and advocate of  distraction-free  software. Consequently I have used writing solutions like this ever since. Working a lot from the iPad I quickly found in  iA Writer  the perfect  writing solution  for me and have been using it almost exclusively. Once it came to the desktop I have been using  only this beautifully designed software, with it’s beautiful typography. My workflow was complete.

And I was happily using it. If I needed or wanted a more refined preview of the text that I was working on, I launched Marked and I was totally set.

That is until …

a few weeks ago, when I thought I could somehow re-think  my workflow. You know what I am talking about: Just trying to maybe make it a bit more effective, save a few steps  if you will. So I was looking for another writing solution. One that has maybe  this  or  that feature more.

And I found one, and implemented it into my workflow and for the first few hours it went rather fine. That is until thoughts like: “Hmmm, wouldn’t a different font be nicer” or “Maybe a font in which the ”L“ doesn’t look funny” started to cross my mind. I have the option to change something. So, why shouldn’t I.

And so I dived into the depths of the internet and searched for the monospaced font to write with. And I searched… downloaded… installed…

Font after font until I found (you might read about this in this post if you want one and then I settled.

And continued writing and working a bit…

Happily, well almost.

At the same time of course, I continue exploring new  or  different  text editors on the iPad. I kept searching for  the one, which has  Markdown  support and a clean design. Or maybe a broader collection of  monospaced fonts. “Hey, let’s continue looking for one with some nice color schemes”.

Surprisingly it is a much wider field to explore on this platform, and you might have guessed already: I never found it, because I already had it. I just didn’t see it.

Now back to the desktop:

And yet, every time I sat down to write something, I needed to change just something. “Maybe the font should be a bit bigger”, “ “ Can’t the line-height be a bit higher ” or my favourite “What about a darker background?” Or what about using yet another text-editor and use a  solarized colour scheme. I could continue with these  little tweaks  for a while if I wanted to. And remember: All I wanted was to make my workflow just this  tad easier!

The above mentioned points, naturally work out equally as well on the iPad. You’d be surprised to see how many editors have a similar feature set like desktop applications. In some cases even more features.

The natural question is of course did I manage to to write something, or being generally productive?

Well, by this time it is secure to say that this ship has sailed  at least 10 fonts and three editors ago. In fact, the ship probably has arrived already somewhere else. As I realized is that all this  tinkering  in fact was nothing else, than an attempt, to (re)create the same writing experience that  I already had, earlier with  iA Writer.

I am the first to admit that all of this is based on my own (stupid) urge to look for the perfect tool while ignoring that I have had it already there in front of my eyes. Some things are better be learned the hard way.

All self-irony aside, this made me aware that often the aspect of being distraction-free  unfortunately often only equals  minimal design and the option to go full-screen, but doesn’t equal  being free of distractions.

This is what I learned through all of this. The beauty of this app is what is not there. With it’s lack of settings or  tweaking-possibilities as I would refer it to, iA Writer allows me to do only two single things:

to write, hence  to think.

The phrase if it works, don’t fix it never felt so appropriate.

text-editor