I find Microsoft Word to be a spectacularly procrastination-laden way of writing text.
I may be deluding myself, but like to think it’s because I’m a perfectionist. As I write I need the finished article to emanate from my fingertips – fit for consumption by my eager audience. But of course writing’s not like that at all; it’s a cognitive process of putting ideas into words.
And this is why I find Word unhelpful at the content generation stage, because so much of what Word does is formatting – heading styles, bullet points, numbering, bold, italic, font sizes and colours – the list is huge, and yet, everything except the actual words you type can be added after you have your ideas down. Even the semantic structure can wait until later.
To avoid the temptation of formatting I write my text in a plain text editor, and my program of choice is Ultraedit, but there are plenty of other similar and sometimes free ways of doing the same thing.
There’s even a nice free app in the Google Chrome Web Store called Write Space that you might try… but the thing is, don’t let the search for ever newer and more diverse ways of simplifying your writing become another source of procrastination – find a single solution and stick with it.
It’s not only the simplicity of the program that makes my writing more productive, it’s the simple process of firing up the program and sitting in front of it that helps so much – I have trained my brain to interpret Ultraedit turning on as the moment I start writing. Probably a little like Ivan Petrovich Pavlov’s dog – as soon as it is on my mind starts salivating words.
Once Ultraedit is on and I’m typing, the other thing I try and do is finish what I started. Don’t multitask, or stick it in the background, just keep writing until you get to the end. I reckon if Jack Kerouac had used a PC he would have written the single scroll of On The Road in Ultraedit.
A word of warning – you lose Word’s spelling and grammar check-as-you-type feature, so don’t forget to paste your text out of Ultraedit and into Word to gain the benefit of all those red and blue squiggles.
