Finding Productivity in Writing

Well I’m back from my brilliant holiday and ready to blog again. Since coming back I’ve been really busy what with Y’s 12-week ultrasound and of course, finishing my book.

On that last thought, with the deadline looming, I’ve found some great, and free, apps that have really improved my productivity when writing. I don’t know about you but when I’m on my computer I often get distracted with emails and the Internet. When work’s going slow I tend to think that the odd five or ten minutes surfing the net will really help to recharge my batteries. Of course ten minutes usually turns into an hour or more as I surf from one blog to another, one website to the next. Well no more thanks to these free apps.

A while back I heard of a great piece of software called Writeroom. It’s a simple text editor that blanks your desktop and just displays a single column of text so that you can focus purely on your writing. As Writeroom takes up your whole desktop, as opposed to opening in a window, it even blocks out your task bar and icons so there’s really nothing to distract you from the job of writing.

Unfortunately Writeroom is only available for the Mac and as I use a PC I’ve been unable to use it. Then I found Q10, Jdarkroom and Pyroom, all of them clones of the Mac Writeroom.

Q10 runs on Windows and which I can use via Wine, a piece of open source software that allows you to run Windows programs on linux. Of the three it’s the most mature, and one of its best features in my opinion is the real-time word count that’s permanently displayed in the lower left of the screen. You can also download a version with a spellchecker included and has a quirky typewriter sound effect and the carriage-return “ping” when you type (though to be honest these don’t work with Wine – nor have I been able to get it to install on Vista). You can also get the word count to work backwards, so if you have a 2,000-word assignment due, you enter you total word count and with every word you type it knocks one off the total.

JDarkroom, available for Windows, Mac and Linux, is another great full screen text editor that also includes a word count but unfortunately it’s not in real-time and is only displayed by using a keyboard shortcut. Unfortunately page navigation doesn’t work either on my laptop via the Page Up and Page Down keys, which sort of defeats the object. Everytime I open Jdarkroom I’m at the start of the document and when that document is over 100 pages long, it takes forever to navigate down to the bottom one line at a time using the arrow keys.

Finally Pyroom (linux only), is written in python and is quite new. As such all it does is display your text and does not yet include a word count or spellchecker though these are meant to be on the to-do list. I actually like this the most and looks like it will be a great Writeroom clone once it matures a little. I sure hope they include a word count in real time and especially a word count that works in reverse like Q10.

Obviously these editors are just plain text editors. After each chapter has been written I’ve to open the file in OpenOffice and format the headings, change fonts, insert the foot notes, and once the book is finished I’ll have to insert the chapter list and index as well, but even so, taking all that into account, I can still confirm that my productivity has drastically improved with all the distractions of my desktop removed.

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