Square one and web apps

October 13th, 2006 in Design. Weblog

I’ve been reading a book about writing. Not one of those dry technical pieces either, it’s a downright reasonable read. Not that I’m recommending it of course, unless you want to hear about writing from the tiny little voice in someone else’s head.

Anyway, in one of the chapters that I read this week the author talks about how to write. Not how to form sentences of any semblence of coherence, but how to actually get off your ass and do some writing. It’s an interesting problem, one that she illustrates with several funny stories and metaphors.

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My favorite device-slash-image from the chapter was the suggestion to write everything that you would like to write about in a 1×1 inch square, a list of sorts. You can’t fit much in an inch of space, which makes it easy to actually do. Even better, the visual of a problem smashed into a 1×1 square is powerful: it makes the problem even smaller than it is, providing the sort of nudge that might actually get you to do it. It’s a small step.

And even better yet, 1x doesn’t allow a lot of room for distraction.

Speaking of distraction and metaphor, while writing this post I was watching House, M.D., a show about an obsessive-compulsive doctor. He had something funny to say about metaphors:

You do realize that the point of metaphors is to scare people from doing things by telling them that something much scarier is going to happen, than what will really happen? God, I wish I had a metaphor to explain that better. — House, M.D.

The 1×1 inch constraint is a good tool to help you focus on a small amount of work, but it doesn’t save you from external distraction. Getting things done is both about starting, and continuing at a useful pace.

And that’s where the web comes in

So I’m writing tonight, something I don’t spend near enough time doing. I have no problem with the starting or with the focusing my initial blob of work. And I don’t struggle to find inspiration or with the tools. All of that is easy for me. The problem I have is that I’m constantly distracted, and not by the sort things you’re expecting. I’m interrupted by the variable of the network itself, and the low quality of appications used to do web stuff.

While the net is everywhere, it isn’t there all of the time. It goes up. It goes down. It stutters. It’s a pencil that keeps on breaking (some days more than most). A tool that’s only there part of the time is a royal drain on my gusto.

And the net isn’t just spotty, it’s a bad excuse for shitty applications. I am still far more productive working in a real word processor, which is a writing interface well-tuned over a decades of development. These damned web interfaces look cool, but they’re a distracting drain on my desire (and ability) to write.

I mean not that anything stopped me tonight, I still wrote something … it just wasn’t as focused on the writing as it could have been.