Get focused with QuietWrite

I love simple ideas, and QuietWrite is simple… really simple. It’s a text editor with very few bells and whistles. No fancy formatting, no mail merge, no inline drawings. Just you and your text.

The idea is to provide a space for you to write your text with as few distractions as possible, allowing you to focus on what it is you’re trying to say rather than wondering whether there’s a way to turn each letter a different colour of the rainbow.

I love the simplicity of it, but if that was all there was to QuietWrite, the same effect could be achieved with a copy of notepad! So how is QuietWrite different?

Auto-Saving

Getting to the end of a long piece of writing, only to have the editor crash or power go out is a tense moment. I always ask myself the same question, “When did I last save that?” Re-opening the document to find some or all of it is missing can be soul destroying, especially if you put a lot of effort into your writing. Fortunately, QuietWrite auto-saves your work as you go, so even if your web browser crashes you’ll never be more than a few sentences behind on what you’ve written.

I can personally vouch for how much of a life-saver that features is. Before WordPress introduced auto-saving, I lost several large blog posts due to poor network connectivity. More often than not, I was so cheesed off I would rewrite a half-hearted version of the article and post it saying, “that’ll do”. Auto-saving has stopped me losing so much work, and stopped me losing my sanity. [note: as I was writing this, my network connection went down. QuietWrite told me something was up, reloaded the page, and I'd only lost half a sentence].

Publishing

Once you’ve finished writing, you may want to share it with the world. QuietWrite has a built-in publishing platform that will make your words publicly viewable.

WordPress Integration

If, however, you don’t want to publish on the QuietWrite website, and you have a WordPress blog, you can publish from one to the other using your blog’s URL and login details. You will have to tweak your post once you get it into WordPress, maybe taking the chance to add a little formatting, categorising and tagging it, but it’s nice to see the link there.

Conclusion

I started out by saying I love simple ideas. I genuinely love the simplicity and sparseness of QuietWrite. By removing the temptation to play with fonts, insert graphics, or see whether there’s a way I can make section headings look a bit fancier, QuietWrite frees me up to just think about what I want to say. Yes, there will probably be some reformatting later, but for now, in the moment, it’s great to just be thinking about one thing.

If you have something you want to get down “on paper”, give QuietWrite a go and see if it helps you focus. And why not tell us how you get on in the comments?

Thanks to John Ager for tweeting about QuietWrite and giving me the head’s up – you can read John’s post about QuietWrite too on his blog.