The tabs I keep open when I write
My preferred work mode is hyper-focused, do-it-‘til-it’s-done.
Of course, like every modern human I get distracted. But I’m not one for taking a lot of breaks. I’m happiest working in 3-hour blocks, intensely, without switching tasks. Think… escape room, not water park.
Yes, I close email, turn off notifications and sometimes even silence my phone (gasp).
That being said, I do keep a few tabs open which quickly connect me to the resources I use most often. These tabs are NOT Facebook, wordle, CTV News, Graham Norton on YouTube, or surprise.katespade.com.
They are…
Thesaurus.com, obvs.
It could be perfectionism, it could be my advancing years, but sometimes I sense there’s a better word for what I’m trying to say… but I can’t remember it. Thesuarus.com is not a robust thesaurus (see below for that), but it’s quick. I can usually spot, in the visible section of the site, that elusive word I can’t put my finger on but which I know is closer to what I mean than the word I just typed into search.
An even better thesaurus, Wordflex.
This is a truly magical word expansion tool. I paid under $10 for it way back when, but it looks like it might be free now. There’s no desktop version, so I use it on my iPad while I write. It’s so beautiful! If you really don’t know what word you want to use, you can have just an inkling, enter some vaguely connected word into search and voila – all sorts of words bloom like flowers before your eyes.
Just watch it work! You can tap to expand, hide, drag things around. It’s like playing in Dumbledore’s penseive but for logophiles. Which is the nerdiest sentence I’ve ever written.
Google Keep
I’m a Google workspace person… because it happened. Keep is Google’s sticky note app. So I have a bunch of things ‘stuck to the side’ in Keep that I can pull up when I need them. Mostly useful lists, like:
· A list of detailed tone descriptors (cheerful, dry, playful, romantic, unapologetic etc.)
· A graphic of the Wheel of Emotion
· A list of the Core Motivations for each of 12 Archetypes
· An infographic: 29 Psychological Tricks and Tactics used to make people buy more (this isn’t a checklist I use! OMG no, it’s so I can use the right term in rationale for clients)
· Quotes that defend what I believe, like “Don’t tell me how good you make it; tell me how good it makes me when I use it.” (Leo Burnett)
Copy a block of text and paste it into the app. Hemingway (the app, not the author) will score the readability by grade level, give you a word count, highlight passive voice and any problematic sentence structures. I like the grade level score. Not sure I agree that I need to limit myself to 2 or fewer adverbs. And a sample of Hemingway’s own writing (the author, through the app) only scored a “good.” I turn to Hemingway (the app, not the author) for hard data, and ignore the qualitative assessments.
My own, or a client’s, Word Rules.
Shameless plug for my Word Rules service, but TBH, it’s super helpful and that’s why I do it. It’s the pre-writing exploration I prepare with clients to capture their tone of voice, sticky phrases and on-brand words. The beauty is, whatever needs saying, we’ve probably already got the nugget in their Word Rules. So if I get stuck I hop through that deck and the word, sentence, idea will appear in front of me. Or trigger ideas that are on-message and on-brand.
So those are what I use to keep the words flowing with minimal distractions while I enjoy the deep flow of start-to-finish work. I know not everyone wants to work that way. I give you my spouse, who has ambient music playing, the tv on, scrolls twitter, while on a conference call. And STILL interrupts me with questions about our Visa bill. Some people.