I recently returned from vacation down South, which included two nights camping with a good friend along the Chattooga River on the border between Georgia and South Carolina. During that time, I was reminded of how important quiet and solitude are to achieving balance in our lives. Before I left, I had spent two months teaching courses at the local university and getting my business off the ground, and all work days and most weekends were spent with my nose in a computer screen chasing information around the Web.
Needless to say, all of that intense online work caused a lot of stress to accumulate in my brain and in the muscles of my face and shoulders. Luckily, they were no match for two days of fishing and good conversation around a campfire. Now that I’m back in the saddle again, I’m determined to strike a better balance in the demands of my online work, and so I thought I’d talk about the apps and tools I use to manage my time and balance my workload.
First of all, whether or not you work online a lot, just about anyone can benefit from the time management and productivity techniques of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system. Though originally designed without software in mind, GTD has spawned a slew of apps that support its proven methods for following through on tasks in a timely and efficient manner. For the Mac, I use OmniFocus, but there are several other apps for both Windows and Mac that produce excellent results as well. Any of these can help you implement GTD so you can keep track of your responsibilities and sleep better at night.
Freedom from The Shallows
What they can’t do, however, is keep you off Facebook, Twitter, and other social media websites when you should be focusing on imminent tasks you’ve already identified. As Nicholas Carr argues in his recent book, The Shallows, the internet, by encouraging rapid skimming and sampling of information, is eroding our ability to concentrate and reflect deeply. So when I need to focus on a piece of writing or code a specific site, I often fire up a program called Freedom, which blocks all internet access for the period of time I set. The only way I can get back access is to reboot my machine, and what kind of loser would I be if I did that? Try it sometime, and you’ll be amazed at how quickly you finish your project by focusing intensely on the task at hand. Don’t get me wrong; the internet is a great invention that makes research a breeze, but when you get tired of drinking water from a fire hose and want to forge your research into a coherent whole, give Freedom a try.
Minimal, Distraction-Free Writing
Speaking of writing, like many, I’ve used Microsoft Word for a number of years to compose letters, reports, and entire book chapters, and it’s been a great tool for creating documents that range from the simple to the complex. But most everyone who uses it complains that it has too many features that stand in the way of producing a good first draft. For that reason, I’ve begun composing early drafts of most everything I write using what is known as a minimal, distraction-free word processor.
A number of these, such as WriteRoom and Dark Room, have cropped up in the past few years to counter the feature creep of Microsoft Word. I’ve tried lots of them, but I’ve recently settled on one I really like called iA Writer, which offers versions for both the Mac and for the iPad and iPhone. What I like about Writer is that you can do basic formatting—such as headers, lists, bold, and block quotes—without touching a mouse, and you can fill your screen with a blank page, blocking out all other applications. In fact, I used Writer to compose the first draft of this very blog post.
iA Writer, a minimal, distraction-free writing app for the Mac
Technology’s a wonderful thing, and I wouldn’t go back to the days before the Internet for all the money in the world, but I do think we need to leverage technology to keep us focused on the most important things in our lives, such as family, friends, and business associates. For me, a face-to-face conversation always takes precedent over an incoming cell phone call, and I always try to make the world around me more important than what’s on the screen (though my wife might disagree with me on this one).
So if you have any personal routines or computer applications that make your life easier and more focused, please let me know about them. I’m always looking for new tools to keep me out of The Shallows.
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This is a very useful post. Most everyone will identify with the problem of 24-hour internet activity. The Web has become another television. It is true that it allows us to do research, communicate, and network efficiently. However, it is also a constant drag on time; once on the Internet, it is extremely difficult to make spot decisions about which part of our online activity amounts to good utilization of our time and which part does not. Having a continuous access to a source of information that almost shuts down one’s ability to think unhindered by the surrounding information cannot be beneficial if not tampered with common sense and efforts to manage one’s time and thinking.
To a writer (or a would-be one), it is essential to be away from the Web as much as one can. This does not mean that one avoid the Internet totally (an impossibility to my mind, unless one simply does not have access). However, it is imperative to see the Internet as a technology like other technologies. If someone has a television set or a telephone, that individual is not going to spend several hours every day watching TV or talking on telephone (although some do either or both of these things). Besides, the Web may be a more exhausting technological tool when it comes to information overload in comparison to a TV or a telephone.
The majority of our discoveries, inventions, or creative achievements may have happened before the Web appeared on the scene. Roald Amundsen did not need the Internet to become the first man to reach the South Pole. Henry David Thoreau did not need the Internet to write Walden. Gandhi did not need the Internet to finesse his satyagraha. Henry Ford did not need the Internet to mass produce automobiles.
I do not for a moment close my eyes to the Web’s undeniable contribution to our world, whether it is in e-commerce, online communication, or online problem-solving or engineering. My sole point–echoing the one you make in your post–is that we need to be careful about how we utilize our time on the Internet because time is something that no human invention can replace. The links to the “feature-free” online word processors you have provided are useful. I tried Dark Room to get started on a revision of an article, and it helped me freewrite for an hour or so. I returned to Microsoft Word after that, but I had my short intro.
I’m glad you liked this post, Anish, as well as the links to the minimal, distraction-free writing applications. I had tried Write Room several years back, at the suggestion of Quinn Warnick, but I didn’t like it for some reason. I find iA Writer to be much simpler and to the point, plus it has a few keyboard-derived styling features that transfer well over to Word via an RTF export. By default, Writer saves its files to the .md file extension, which is the Markdown file format used by Github and other source code systems. This format is what supports the inline formatting that transfers over to Word.
At any rate, I continue to monitor how many hours I stay online per day, and I usually find that during those hours I’m offline, I’m much more productive, as long as I’ve got all the information I need to get the job done. What’s tough is when I turn on Freedom to carve out some creative time and then suddenly realize I need a small piece of information that is available only on the internet. That’s when I simply type in a blank line and then come back to it once I’m back online.
Please let me know how you like Dark Room as you use it more. I hope south Georgia is not too hot yet. When I was down South last week, people in Atlanta said it had been 92 degrees one day the previous week. In the middle of March! Crazy.