Between blogs, email, Facebook, etc. I find myself jumping around too much. I need a way to concentrate on my writing better.
So, this week, I’m trying Q10. It is a text editor that fills the screen with no tool bars, no access to other programs unless you save and exit, and a built-in timer.
So, this week, I’m trying Q10No tool bars. There’s nothing but straight text. You don’t worry about formatting, or anything but content. Period. It’s actually quite amazing to do this and in some ways reminds me of writing with paper and pen.
No access to other programs. Now, this is both great and disturbing. Great because I can’t bounce in and out of email or web pages or anything else.
It’s also disturbing because I’m so USED to having that access to other programs. And yesterday, I was writing something that I needed references from the internet, so it didn’t work well. I finally had to use my regular word processor.
Built in timer. Now, this I’m going to try today. Set the timer for 15 minutes or 30 minutes and tell myself that I can’t exit the program until the timer goes off. I wonder how much I’ll get done!
Saves as .txt. The program saves as .txt, so it will import into any other word processor. It also has the word-wrap set right. Some text editors will add a hard return at the end of each line so that you don’t have to go in and delete it, wasting lots of time. If Q10 did that, it would be unusable.
Will I like it? Don’t know yet. But I do know that I need to try something to get that unbroken space of time writing without frequent interruptions for email, etc. Now, I’ll just have to remember to set my iPhone to not check on mail updates!
What tricks do YOU use to make sure you get unbroken time to write?
Step 1: go to email program. Press ‘apple-Q’ to quit it.
Step 2: set 1-hr timer.
Step 3: Open internet browser only if absolutely essential for research that’s stopping my progress.
Windows +q10 gives me access to other programs, while still allowing me the option of no distractions. I love q10. It’s so simple to make goals for word count, see how many words are in each scene etc. That plus ywriter for revisions.