Distraction-free writing, without installing anything

The cost of an interruption is not the interruption

The figure usually quoted is that it takes around 23 minutes to return to a task after being interrupted, from Gloria Mark's work at UC Irvine. The exact number varies by study and task; the direction does not.

What matters more than the number is the shape of the cost. It is not that you lose the seconds spent reading the notification. It is that the reconstruction of context, where you were, what you were about to say, which thread of the argument you were holding, has to be done again, and writing holds more context in the head than most work.

This is why the interruption you handle in four seconds still costs you a paragraph.

What actually helps

In rough order of effect:

Full screen. Not a setting so much as a decision: if the other windows are not visible, the number of things that can catch your eye drops to nearly zero. It is the single highest-return change and it takes one keystroke.

Notifications off at the system level. Do Not Disturb, not willpower. Every operating system has it, and using it is not the same as promising yourself you will not look.

Phone in another room. Not face down on the desk. There is reasonable evidence that the mere presence of a phone within sight costs attention, and the cost of testing this is zero.

A separate space for writing and editing. These are different activities and they interfere. Writing wants momentum and tolerance for bad sentences; editing wants judgement and intolerance of them. Doing both at once produces a first paragraph polished twelve times and no second paragraph.

A word target rather than a time target. "Write for an hour" is satisfied by staring. "Write 500 words" is not.

What does not

The application. Every few years a new minimal writing app arrives to solve this, and the people who buy it write exactly as much as before. The tool is not why you are not writing.

Elaborate setup. Choosing a typeface, tuning a colour scheme, and researching organisational systems are all more comfortable than writing and none of them are writing. If you have spent longer configuring than composing, the configuration is the avoidance.

Music with words in it. The evidence here is mixed for most tasks and fairly consistent for tasks involving language: lyrics compete with the words you are trying to produce. Instrumental music is fine. Silence is fine.

Writing straight into the CMS. A publishing system is full of buttons, previews, scheduling options and an autosave that sometimes loses things. Draft somewhere plain and paste it in when it is done.

Where a browser tab wins

The specific advantage of writing in a browser page is not the typography. It is that there is nothing else in it. No sidebar, no comment thread, no revision history, no colleague's cursor appearing in the margin.

The specific disadvantage is trust: people close tabs. Anything worth writing should survive a closed tab, a browser crash and a reboot, so a writing tool that does not persist locally is a toy, and one that persists to somebody else's server has your draft.

Saving to the browser's own storage on the machine in front of you is the middle path: the draft survives, and it stays where you wrote it.

A short version

• Full screen.
• Do Not Disturb on, phone elsewhere.
• Instrumental or silence.
• A word count target, and do not edit until you hit it.
• Save somewhere the draft will survive being careless.
• Stop reading about writing.