DavidGoodman.Net

As I described in yesterday’s post, I’m moving from the ‘firehose’ model of taking in information to a more nuanced, and, I hope, cognitively healthy model based on selective reading and limited participation. Regularly following the feeds of over 60 websites was leaving me in a twitchy state of continuous partial attention.

If you break that phrase down, you get a good idea of the problem. It’s continuous, i.e. all the time. Even when I wasn’t in front of a computer, I had a phone. ‘Clearing my feeds’ became a constant, and I’d guess, conservatively, I was scanning and marking feeds read 20 or 30 times a day. It’s partial - because it didn’t take all that much effort, it’s something I’d do constantly, through a browser, on my phone, you name it. Even when there are much bigger things going on, a part of my attention was always on RSS. Finally, there’s the word itself - attention. I think some of the web punditry about attention borders on the absurd (I can’t help but think of this guy going on about protecting our precious bodily fluids), but at the same time, it is very easy to burn away hours and hours of your life on utter trivialities. Sometimes that’s exactly what you want and need to do - I don’t regret a minute spent completing Grand Theft Auto IV for example, which I’m sure the world at large sees as a triviality, but which I see as 60+ hours of interactive entertainment, and significantly more fun that sitting watching TV. But when trivialities become daily, and eat up a steadily larger chunk of time, they start to become unconscious obligations. RSS was becoming that for me.

Of course, it wasn’t all bad. I had RSS feeds which only updated two or three times a month, but which always provided in-depth, detailed, fascinating writing. Or indeed, just a bloody good chuckle. These longer, fascinating articles were what I really wanted, so when I binned RSS yesterday, I took note of the dozen or so sites I regularly found good, lengthy, interesting articles at, then stuck them in a bookmarks folder. Using Firefox’s open all in tabs functionality, I’ll scan these once or twice a day (taking maybe a sixth of the time it took to ‘clear my feeds’) and spot articles I’m interested in reading. In the past, this is where reading long articles fell down for me. I’d open a load of tabs, leaving articles open for days at a time and never getting round to reading them.

Enter Instapaper.

Instapaper is an incredibly simple, elegant solution to finding, storing and reading long content on the web. Clicking a ‘Read Later’ bookmarklet instantly saves any article to reading page associated with an email address or username you supply. You can also password protect it. You can then log in from any browser, (including your phone) to read your articles, which are formatted for simple reading on any device. If you finish the articles you’ve stored, you can read the top articles saved by other Instapaper users. In a single move, this has made long web content accessible and removed any need for RSS. I’m still reading words on the web, but now I’m enjoying it again.

This is a post that I wrote on a Metafilter thread about focus while reading, which I thought might also make a good post here. The poster asked how to create and maintain focus on their reading, and wondered aloud what was causing it. I immediately thought of my own attention-destroyer - the web itself.

I’ve found in the last couple of years that regular web use has pretty much smashed my attention span into tiny, tiny bits. This is a relatively recent phenomenon - I’ve been a web user for over ten years, and used it heavily for about five. I can sum up what’s destroyed my attention span in a handy acronym:

RSS

The constant drip-drip-drip of RSS makes the web a non-static, ever changing source of information, and makes it exponentially easier to stay glued to it. Five years ago, I’d log on at most once per day, often going without for days at a time. Then I got Bloglines, and latterly Google Reader, and now I can see, in close to real-time, when and how things are being updated. For sites like MeFi with a high update rate, that’s killer (in a bad way). I’ve slowly pruned my RSS feeds of the high-volume, short length, low value feeds (the Engadgets and BoingBoings of the world) in favour of MeFi and sites which publish relatively long pieces.

However, these pieces are still generally short in the grand scheme of things. A couple of thousand words from Bruce Schneier is awesome, but I miss being able to sit down with any book and get a lot out of it, fiction or non-fiction. I mean, really, six or seven years ago I was a two-books-a-week type. Now I’m lucky if I get through one a month. And I know exactly where that time has gone - web surfing. For a while now I’ve been considering junking RSS entirely, and going cold turkey on the web at large, because I really, really don’t want to wake up in my mid-forties and have spent twenty years punching F5 like a rat in a lab for what is, in essence, pretty ephemeral stuff.

General tips that I’ve found work even despite my small-invertebrate-like attention span?

• Good light (I sit by the door in bright sunlight).
• Good seating - get a good reading chair, and a lamp for the evening.
• Don’t read in bed if you can help it, you’ll drift off.
• Turn off the TV, radio and any other background noise (although nice music can really help if you have the ’silent room’ issue, which I’m convinced for many is a mental block created by memories of trying to study in school libraries in their youth).
• Have a glass of water at hand to still the ‘make a cup of tea/coffee/whatever’ instinct.
• I also like the ideas presented about using a notebook to record what I see as the ‘Google Twitch’. Constant exposure to the web makes it very easy to develop the habit of instantly acting on any mental question or query, in part because of ease of accessibility (why wouldn’t you look up the answer?) and partly because of the fear, whether conscious or not, that you’ll forget the question if you don’t act on it instantly. This is a valid fear in the kind of mind that RSS create - a constant river of new content. It’s less of a risk in slower, longer form discursive thought, but the notepad will be a handy crutch.

Since writing this post, I’ve gone through the sixty five plus feeds I was tracking and grabbed the ten or fifteen websites I spend 80% of my time on, copied them to a Bookmarks folder on the toolbar and wiped my Google Reader subscriptions list. Now I have a ‘Daily Tabs’ folder of regularly updated, interesting stuff, and a slightly bigger folder of ‘Weekly Reads’ with the low-volume, longer length stuff.

Let’s see how it works out. Do you feel your attention span getting shorter? Did you even make it to the end of this article?

With the first steps into writer-dom, there’s often an obsession with tools, settings and process. Most beginning writers are convinced that if they only get everything right, they’ll be able to turn out writing that makes the angels weep. The elements vary from person to person, but there’s an internet-wide obsession with places you can write, software and hardware you can write with and the endless different ways to approach the blank page. In fact, I think I’ll write a few more posts about all the things wannabe writers do and buy to avoid actually writing.

I must admit, I’ve got my own bridge to cross in this regard. Point 10 of Hugh McLeod’s How to Be Creative puts it well, when he says

Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on an antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would SERIOUSLY surprise me.

But that hasn’t stopped me obsessing over what I should be using to write.

Having limited funds, I don’t get to indulge in a shared writing office or anything so grand as that. And Scalzi’s scathing coffeeshop jibes have certainly put the kibosh on that kind of ‘check it out - I’m WRITING’ silliness.

No, my weakness is far more geeky and can be indulged regardless of where you are, as long as there’s a web connection - you see, I’m all about the writing software.

I wrote my first and so far only novel entirely in Microsoft Word, and the fundamental flaws of that software are legion. Once you’re producing anything over a couple of thousand words, Word becomes incredibly frustrating to work with. These days I use NeoOffice, a Mac-specific fork of OpenOffice.Org, but I don’t do first drafts in it, because I realised there’s far better tools out there to produce draft material than a standard WYSIWYG word processor.

These days, I use Scrivener for heavyweight drafting, as well as for journaling and storing notes and clips. Scrivener is one of those perfect tools, because it’s so adaptable and beautifully executed that it blows other applications out of the water. With loads of different ways to outline, organise and otherwise structure your work, it wouldn’t be surprising if the actual text editing was underwhelming, but it’s not - it’s just as customisable as everything else. Want to type away on a fullscreen turquoise background with puce letters? Go right ahead, it’s simple! You can draft away to your heart’s content, with everything saved in cross-OS text files, all wrapped up in a beautiful, useful interface.

It took me a while to get to Scrivener. If there’s a free writing app for Mac, I’ve probably tried it. I’ve been particularly enamoured of full-screen editors, and I’ve tried everything from tapping away in Pico on a Linux command line to trying (and running away from) vi and emacs. Frankly, I’m a bit sick of real techie types telling me I *need* to use something like emacs or vi (the two main factions of the Editor Wars), saying those wonderful techie phrases like ‘it’s so powerful, customisable and extensible”. All good, I thought, til I read it and realised I’d have to write my own mini-app in LISP just to get a word count. Fuck that.

You see, I’m a writer, whether of short fiction, novels, blog posts or non-fiction. My ‘coding’ needs are limited to hacking a little PHP on my website (and by ‘hacking’ I mean changing font sizes) and inserting hyperlinks into blog posts. So I don’t need my text editors to syntax highlight for fucking FORTRAN.

What I do need is a way to limit distractions. Something that lets me screen out blinking icons and doesn’t let me fiddle with formatting or line spacing or anything else. So when the new vogue for full-screen editors kicked in, I was delighted.

The first one was Hog Bay Software’s WriteRoom, and it both epitomises what is right about this idea, and wrong too. It’s a slick little app, even if Mark Pilgrim dismisses it saying

“These programs aren’t for serious writers at all. They’re for the writer’s equivalent of script kiddies - people who want to go to Starbucks and pick up chicks with their Macbooks and their iPods and their glowing full-screen text editors.”

Him and all his ‘I was writing in angle brackets way before Facebook, kid’ buddies. Yeah, thanks for that, but I don’t really fancy learning fifteen different key bindings to write a ten line blog post. The downside is that it costs you $25 to get rid of the little nag screen that pops up every time you use the damn thing, and frankly, it’s not really worth all that, especially when the much more fully featured Scrivener is only ten bucks more.

I use DarkRoom, a windows equivalent, to write at work, and someone did a cross-platform version called JDarkRoom. I think there’s even an in-browser version (which takes things a bit far, frankly). What all of these have in common is that they strip the writing experience way down. For a while there, I even toyed with the idea of getting a Neo. Yeah, so I lack self-control. What’s your point?

Anyhoo, I’ve finally found an answer for the times when I want to tap something out, but don’t necessarily feel like booting up Scrivener, starting a new project etc etc. It’s a fantastic, free and customisable text editor called Smultron. And when you pair it with the Firefox extension It’s All Text, find the (newish) full screen option and set it up so it’s easy on the eye, it’s an instant, distraction-free and fun to use way of producing writing for the web. If you just want to use it for dashing off quick things like emails or notes, just use Quicksilver to make it appear and disappear fast. Free, and awesome, just the way I like it.

So, that’s my toolkit for producing lots of luvverly text on the web and elsewhere. I’ll refine it, and doubtless I’ll try other editors, but Scrivener and Smultron are my two big hitters.

What do you use?

Inspired by surfing around FTrain, The Morning News and Kottke, I’ve just reskinned the site, again, because the original theme (Simplr) was a little too simple. It was kind of hard to find your way around the site, so I’ve used a rather nice one called PlainTxtBlog, which is still quite minimalist, but has the basics you need to get around a content-heavy site like this. I’ve also moved an extracted linkblog up to the front page - click the Links page to see the full feed from my del.icio.us links. If you’re a blogger, what are your favourite minimalist themes or site designs?