As I mentioned in a prior post, I’ve been thinking a lot of late about Cal Newport’s excellent new book, Deep Work.  In it, Cal argues for the power of being able to focus hard on a single difficult task for an extended period of time.

Cal proposes a slew of ideas to help push towards that goal. But I’ve also been collecting tools that help nudge me in that direction. A lot of my own deep work is writing-related.  And for me, the hardest part of writing is just getting the words down in the first place.  So I need to force myself to bang out shitty first drafts.  Otherwise, I end up critiquing and editing, or stare at the blank screen.

Enter the excellent app Flowstate.  And the recently-launched free website The Most Dangerous Writing App. Both do the same simple yet powerful thing: they delete what you’ve written if you stop writing.

In either app, you choose a time frame for which you have to keep moving – five minutes, twenty.  And then you start typing. And you keep typing. You pour stuff out, good, bad or ugly. Because if you stop for more than five seconds, everything you’ve written fades away.  It disappears forever into the digital abyss.

It sounds a bit ridiculous. And, perhaps, it is. But it’s also just enough fire beneath my feet to keep me moving.  Sure, I need to edit the hell out of what I create. And it may not be your best bet for drafting poetry. But when I need to just get things on paper (or screen), to create a starting point, it’s an awesome tool.

Try them out, and see if living on the edge a bit helps you, too.