August 18, 2023

Focus.

I’m always looking for an app that allows me to focus on writing and only writing, without the interruptions and such often associated with the Internet.

If I was a hipster you’d probably find me sitting in Starbucks with a manual typewriter, banging away creatively and thinking I was impressing everyone within a 1/2 mile radius with my ability to type on a Royal manual typewriter, but I’m not a hipster so I settle on typing on my iPad or laptop.

After reaching out on Mastodon to find something that resembled a word processing program from the 1980s or early 1990s, I abandoned that approach and decided to go back to the IA Writer application on my iPad again. I forget that I have this program because I have an unfortunate tendency to want to try out the latest and greatest shiny thing, but here I am, typing away in “typewriter” mode on the application and it’s working exactly as I wanted it to.

Some of the joy around writing this blog is that I am able to quiet the noises in my head, bring focus to my thoughts in a positive way, and hopefully get into that flow state the enhances my mood and makes me feel more alive and in tune with what’s going on around me.

I often feel like having my iPad Pro is redundant in my setup; my laptop (MacBook Air) does just fine with all of the tasks I want to do, but I find myself getting easily distracted while working on my laptop. My thought wanders and before I know it I’ve moved to another screen, fired up a web browser, and I’m looking for photos of a Kmart in 1986 to reminisce about the scent of their awesome popcorn that was oddly served near the jewelry counter instead of in the back at the Kmart cafeteria.

Guess what I did between the last paragraph and this one?