Two attention-focusing apps kill distractions dead

Much has been written in recent months about the growing primacy of attention. New York Times Columnist David Brooks wrote in a December piece that "control of attention is the ultimate individual power." Getting Things Done author David Allen wrote in his most recent book, Making It All Work that "Power = Concentration." And thousands of insightful blog posts and articles have described the new reality, which is that modern life in general, and life on the Internet in particular, has become devastatingly distracting.

Succeeding in this new world of social everything, information overload and media saturation requires the ability to ignore all those things vying for your attention and instead focus on specific tasks long enough to achieve something.

The need for, and challenge of, focusing mental attention is especially acute for digital nomads. In addition to using the same Internet as everyone else, we tend to physically work in noisy, busy locations like coffee joints, airports and hotel lobbies.

Recently I've been using one free Web service and one free application that have made it far easier for me to "get things done," and also to write. Which is nice, because I write for a living.

The Web service is called NowDoThis. After you've prioritized your daily to-do list, you simply click on the "edit list" link on the nearly blank NowDoThis page, and paste in the list. NowDoThis will show you only the first item on your to-do list in giant letters. A button below the current item says "Done." Press it, and the to-do item goes away, to be replaced by the next one on your list. That's it! It forces you to focus on the current task because it won't show you any others.

The application I've started using recently is called q10. It does the word-processsing equivalent of NowDoThis. It blocks out everything else, and allows you to see only the document you're currently writing. It takes over the whole screen. Press F1, and you get the limited menu of commands where you can set an alarm, change the font, as well as text size and color — that sort of thing. At the bottom, you see in very non-distracting letters the current live word count, page count, character count and current time. The advantage of q10 over, say, Microsoft Word for Windows is that it doesn't do anything. But because its feature set is so limited, and because it temporarily replaces your whole Windows user interface with the electronic equivalent of a blank piece of paper, it forces you to focus on what you're writing.

Your mileage may vary, but I have found that NowDoThis and q10 have transformed my work and improved my life.

If you try them, I'd love to find out what you think: mike.elgan@elgan.com