Day 496: Why does the Alphasmart make me so productive?
Feeling mellow
I had another bad IBS flareup this morning, which woke me up early so I didn’t get a full night’s rest. But I think I dealt with it a bit more quickly this time. I took my drugs and sat down to rest until they kicked in.
The drugs make me tired, so I’m feeling pretty mellow right now.
I was supposed to do an experiment to write at my Alphasmart at my standing desk today, but I’m too lazy to clean out my desk so I think I’ll just use the Alphasmart at my sitting desk.
I’m only doing one 25-minute sprint. I’ll also try to do the editing in my Alphasmart to see how that goes.
If my health remains good, I want to move immediately into blocking. If I’m disciplined enough today, I’ll get at least a couple hours done before lunch, and then a couple hours after lunch.
Energy like candy
I’m trying to be more aware (or feel the urgency?) of doing my writing work as soon as possible after I wake up, outside of any health issues that morning. I am hoping that doing my work when I have the most energy will enable me to be more productive.
It seems pathetic that I have to proportion my energy like doling out candy. I used to own a whole bag of Snickers, but now I’m lucky to have a handful of candy corn. (I guess I have Halloween on the brain.)
I would never have imagined that my IBS (and a few weeks earlier, my sinus headaches) would sap my energy so much. I mean, obviously it’s difficult to work when you’re in pain. But I never realized that it would be difficult to work even when I wasn’t in pain because of how the pain leaves my body feeling like I was trampled by a horde of rabid Trick-o-treaters.
(On a completely unrelated side note, I think my husband is going to dress up as Elvis. I hope he doesn’t scare the children.)
***
Good intentions thrown out the window by distractions
I was too easily distracted by Xmas gifts for my relatives, and that took up about an hour of time when I should have been working. I’d like to blame the drugs, but I know that’s not entirely true. I really need to have firmer resolve when it comes to battling procrastination!!!!!
Luckily, I had set an alarm to remind me to hang the laundry, so that jolted me out of my retail procrastination. Thank God for house chores! (I never thought I’d say that.)
I also cleared away things from my desk that might further distract me and now I’ll get to work.
***
Alphasmart for the win again
Wow I again wrote at a very fast writing speed on the Alphasmart. There were some paragraphs that were simply copied from the blocking notes, but in general it was all new writing. I’m really surprised because at the beginning, especially, the writing went a bit sluggishly for about 5 minutes.
I guess I really can’t poo-poo these minimalistic writing tools. There is obviously SOMETHING about the Alphasmart that has been working really well for me.
The Alphasmart has a regular scissors keyboard and a plain LCD (I think it’s LCD?) screen, but unlike the Freewrite’s e-Ink screen, there’s no lag between keystroke and when it appears on the screen. So I was able to correct occasional typos quite easily and quickly, and I’m sure that eliminated some of the anxiety I feel when I write on the Freewrite and can’t correct typos. So that might have helped me relax more and be able to write faster.
It’s harder to see the Alphasmart screen than the Freewrite screen (which is clearly visible in sunlight, and you can tilt the angle of the screen). The Alphasmart screen is at a fixed angle, and I admit that if it’s on my lap, the angle is just off enough that I have to lean forward to read the screen.
But on the Alphasmart, the screen is so small that you can only see 4 lines at a time. That may be one reason I can keep writing, since I don’t see what else I’ve written beyond those 4 lines.
So I wonder if it’s the limited focus of the screen that forces me to keep writing? Would I get the same effect from using something like Focus mode on Scrivener or on CalmlyWriter.com? (I thought maybe Sprinter.getfreewrite.com might have that focus mode too but I can’t remember.)
I thought at first that the Alphasmart also works because it reduces that one extra distraction of being online. But the truth is that while I’m writing, I have my Scrivener app open in front of me on the computer screen so that I can read my blocking notes, so I’m not really completely offline. And yet I didn’t go surfing the internet while writing.
Then again, this was only one 25-minute sprint. Who knows if I might have gotten more distracted if I’d been doing 3 or more sprints? While my writing speed on the Alphasmart has been impressive right from the moment I tried using it this past week, I’m still only doing single sprints right now because I’m working on the blocking instead.
If the Freewrite didn’t have that lag between keystroke and screen, I can totally see how the Freewrite would be a little bit better than the Alphasmart in distraction-free writing. The Freewrite Traveler is smaller and more compact, the screen is better, and the keyboard is quite nice for a scissors keyboard. It also automatically backs up to Postbox on the GetFreewrite.com website, and I have it set up to also back up to Dropbox. (With the Alphasmart, I have to manually connect it to the computer and then wait while it downloads the text one character at a time.) And like the Alphasmart, the Freewrite only has a few lines visible on the screen, so that you write in that Focus mode and can’t see what you wrote previously.
Maybe I need to make more of an effort to get over that whole typos thing. I somehow feel like I’m missing out (FOMO).
Theoretically, I could also reproduce the Alphasmart experience, to an extent, with my bluetooth gaming keyboard hooked up to my iPad with some minimalistic text editor like Sprinter (which automatically backs the file up to my account on GetFreewrite.com). That might be an option especially if I want a nicer keyboard to type on.
Blocking on the Alphasmart
I wonder if I could do the blocking on the Alphasmart? Would that work? When I’m blocking, I’m not really writing constantly, but then again, if I try it on the Alphasmart, maybe I’ll blaze through the blocking faster?
I wouldn’t be able to edit on the Alphasmart, so I would only be able to use it to get the ideas down for the scene. I would still need to transfer the text to Scrivener and then do more massive revisions there.
I suppose I have nothing to lose by trying it out. I think I’ll try it today.
***
Alphasmart is still the boss
I did about 40 minutes of blocking before lunch on the Alphasmart, with the blocking notes on the computer in front of me, and man I actually got a lot done in those 40 minutes.
Maybe it’s the novelty of doing something new when I’m blocking, but I was able to really concentrate and focus. I would look up at the computer screen at my notes every so often, but mostly I’d focus on the Alphasmart and those 4 lines.
It could also be because I needed to brainstorm what to do for the scene, and brainstorming on the Alphasmart feels a lot like when I’m writing. But I haven’t brainstormed quite the same way when I’m typing on the computer.
What exactly is it about the Alphasmart that makes it so effective? Is it really those 4 lines? Maybe the fact it’s a separate machine, with a different screen from my computer screen for me to focus on? I’m really curious.
I’m also a bit apprehensive because my Alphasmart is starting to break down. It’s inevitable since it’s several years old. It’s not a complicated machine so I think I could figure out how to fix it, to a certain extent, but in the event I can’t, then when it’s gone, it’s gone.
I could buy another one off of eBay, but the simple fact is that I don’t want my writing productivity to be dependent on a machine that is no longer being manufactured and which has no tech support. So I’m trying to figure out why it works and what I can do to possibly recreate that effect in other ways.
Blocking on other machines
Now I’d really like to try blocking on the Freewrite Traveler, because for blocking, it doesn’t matter if there are typos or not. These are just my notes for me to follow when I’m writing. So I’ll try that after lunch.
I’d also like to try blocking with my bluetooth keyboard connected to my iPad, and opening a simple text editor like Sprinter. Maybe that distraction-free environment will recreate the feeling of my Alphasmart.
***
Blocking on the Freewrite
It worked well, actually, but it wasn’t quite as enjoyable as blocking on the Alphasmart because of the lag time. I had to consciously not look at the screen as I typed because I was typing faster than the screen could keep up. If I stopped to look at the screen, I would end up slowing down or even losing my train of thought.
But I didn’t have that anxiety about my typos that I do when I write my prose, because this was just my blocking notes.
Copying my text into Scrivener was WAY faster the Alphasmart, since the Freewrite automatically saves to the cloud.
But ultimately it was just a tiny bit harder to block on the Freewrite than the Alphasmart because of the typing.
Hit me like a ton of bricks
But when I was smack dab in the middle of blocking, the tiredness hit me like a ton of bricks. One minute I was fine, the next I was exhausted. I think this is because I only slept 5.5 hours last night and woke up early to deal with IBS issues this morning for a few hours. I think I used up all my candy.
I’m disappointed I only did 80 minutes of blocking, but at least I got some blocking done today, and I made some good progress on the scene I’m working on, which is a bit difficult.
Japanese study
I noticed this yesterday, and it’s true today too, that I’m a bit lazy when it comes to my Japanese study lately, because I’m so tired by the time I get to it. I’ve been doing it after my writing so that I have the energy to do my writing first, but since I’ve had IBS problems, I have even less energy than usual, and that means my time for my Japanese study only gets the dregs.
This morning when I was waiting for the drugs to kick in, I think that what I should have done was my Japanese study. It would have been productive, and in a sense it would have eased my mental state into a “get ready to work” mode faster.
I don’t know if that would have taken away from the energy I needed to write and block, but it might have helped me not procrastinate this morning. I might have had an easier time starting my work right after doing my Japanese study. This morning, I only rested while waiting for my drugs, and going from “rest” to “work” is hard to do quickly.
I think I will readjust my daily schedule yet again and do my Japanese study before my writing. I know I had put it afterward, but my Japanese study has not been as thorough recently when I did that. So I’ll put it back to the start of my day as one of my “frogs.” I’ll monitor it to see if it steals away energy that I would otherwise need for my writing. I am kind of hoping that it will instead ease me into work faster.
I spend too much time blogging
Well that says it all. I didn’t realize until I was filling in my totals below that I spent an hour and 45 minutes blogging today. I know a lot of it was analyzing my productivity experiments, but I need to do something to reduce my blogging time. The problem is that I don’t know what I could do. Recording my thoughts and results from my productivity experiments has been pretty important especially the last few days.
Well, maybe I’ll leave it for the moment since I’m trying different things for my productivity right now. I think I had originally allotted one hour for blogging each day, so I’ll try to keep to that. After all, it would be better for me to write rather than blog.
***
Writing: Time spent: 25 minutes
Writing: Total number of words: 884 words
Writing: Overall writing speed: 2108 words/hour
Writing streak: 9 days
Editing: Time spent: 17 minutes
Blocking: time spent: 1 hour, 21 minutes
Email/Social Media streak: 7 days
Time spent doing other writing-related business: 1 hour, 57 minutes
My takeaway for today: Alphasmart has been great for both writing and blocking! I need to analyze why it works and try to find something similar so I am not dependent on a machine no longer being manufactured. Try blocking on bluetooth keyboard and iPad as something similar to Alphasmart.
My second takeaway for today: Readjust daily schedule so Japanese study is before writing, since I’ve been lazy about it lately when I put it after the writing.
My third takeaway for today: Reduce the amount of time you spend blogging. Productivity experiments are important, but writing is more important.
I had another bad IBS flareup this morning, which woke me up early so I didn’t get a full night’s rest. But I think I dealt with it a bit more quickly this time. I took my drugs and sat down to rest until they kicked in.
The drugs make me tired, so I’m feeling pretty mellow right now.
I was supposed to do an experiment to write at my Alphasmart at my standing desk today, but I’m too lazy to clean out my desk so I think I’ll just use the Alphasmart at my sitting desk.
I’m only doing one 25-minute sprint. I’ll also try to do the editing in my Alphasmart to see how that goes.
If my health remains good, I want to move immediately into blocking. If I’m disciplined enough today, I’ll get at least a couple hours done before lunch, and then a couple hours after lunch.
Energy like candy
I’m trying to be more aware (or feel the urgency?) of doing my writing work as soon as possible after I wake up, outside of any health issues that morning. I am hoping that doing my work when I have the most energy will enable me to be more productive.
It seems pathetic that I have to proportion my energy like doling out candy. I used to own a whole bag of Snickers, but now I’m lucky to have a handful of candy corn. (I guess I have Halloween on the brain.)
I would never have imagined that my IBS (and a few weeks earlier, my sinus headaches) would sap my energy so much. I mean, obviously it’s difficult to work when you’re in pain. But I never realized that it would be difficult to work even when I wasn’t in pain because of how the pain leaves my body feeling like I was trampled by a horde of rabid Trick-o-treaters.
(On a completely unrelated side note, I think my husband is going to dress up as Elvis. I hope he doesn’t scare the children.)
***
Good intentions thrown out the window by distractions
I was too easily distracted by Xmas gifts for my relatives, and that took up about an hour of time when I should have been working. I’d like to blame the drugs, but I know that’s not entirely true. I really need to have firmer resolve when it comes to battling procrastination!!!!!
Luckily, I had set an alarm to remind me to hang the laundry, so that jolted me out of my retail procrastination. Thank God for house chores! (I never thought I’d say that.)
I also cleared away things from my desk that might further distract me and now I’ll get to work.
***
Alphasmart for the win again
Wow I again wrote at a very fast writing speed on the Alphasmart. There were some paragraphs that were simply copied from the blocking notes, but in general it was all new writing. I’m really surprised because at the beginning, especially, the writing went a bit sluggishly for about 5 minutes.
I guess I really can’t poo-poo these minimalistic writing tools. There is obviously SOMETHING about the Alphasmart that has been working really well for me.
The Alphasmart has a regular scissors keyboard and a plain LCD (I think it’s LCD?) screen, but unlike the Freewrite’s e-Ink screen, there’s no lag between keystroke and when it appears on the screen. So I was able to correct occasional typos quite easily and quickly, and I’m sure that eliminated some of the anxiety I feel when I write on the Freewrite and can’t correct typos. So that might have helped me relax more and be able to write faster.
It’s harder to see the Alphasmart screen than the Freewrite screen (which is clearly visible in sunlight, and you can tilt the angle of the screen). The Alphasmart screen is at a fixed angle, and I admit that if it’s on my lap, the angle is just off enough that I have to lean forward to read the screen.
But on the Alphasmart, the screen is so small that you can only see 4 lines at a time. That may be one reason I can keep writing, since I don’t see what else I’ve written beyond those 4 lines.
So I wonder if it’s the limited focus of the screen that forces me to keep writing? Would I get the same effect from using something like Focus mode on Scrivener or on CalmlyWriter.com? (I thought maybe Sprinter.getfreewrite.com might have that focus mode too but I can’t remember.)
I thought at first that the Alphasmart also works because it reduces that one extra distraction of being online. But the truth is that while I’m writing, I have my Scrivener app open in front of me on the computer screen so that I can read my blocking notes, so I’m not really completely offline. And yet I didn’t go surfing the internet while writing.
Then again, this was only one 25-minute sprint. Who knows if I might have gotten more distracted if I’d been doing 3 or more sprints? While my writing speed on the Alphasmart has been impressive right from the moment I tried using it this past week, I’m still only doing single sprints right now because I’m working on the blocking instead.
If the Freewrite didn’t have that lag between keystroke and screen, I can totally see how the Freewrite would be a little bit better than the Alphasmart in distraction-free writing. The Freewrite Traveler is smaller and more compact, the screen is better, and the keyboard is quite nice for a scissors keyboard. It also automatically backs up to Postbox on the GetFreewrite.com website, and I have it set up to also back up to Dropbox. (With the Alphasmart, I have to manually connect it to the computer and then wait while it downloads the text one character at a time.) And like the Alphasmart, the Freewrite only has a few lines visible on the screen, so that you write in that Focus mode and can’t see what you wrote previously.
Maybe I need to make more of an effort to get over that whole typos thing. I somehow feel like I’m missing out (FOMO).
Theoretically, I could also reproduce the Alphasmart experience, to an extent, with my bluetooth gaming keyboard hooked up to my iPad with some minimalistic text editor like Sprinter (which automatically backs the file up to my account on GetFreewrite.com). That might be an option especially if I want a nicer keyboard to type on.
Blocking on the Alphasmart
I wonder if I could do the blocking on the Alphasmart? Would that work? When I’m blocking, I’m not really writing constantly, but then again, if I try it on the Alphasmart, maybe I’ll blaze through the blocking faster?
I wouldn’t be able to edit on the Alphasmart, so I would only be able to use it to get the ideas down for the scene. I would still need to transfer the text to Scrivener and then do more massive revisions there.
I suppose I have nothing to lose by trying it out. I think I’ll try it today.
***
Alphasmart is still the boss
I did about 40 minutes of blocking before lunch on the Alphasmart, with the blocking notes on the computer in front of me, and man I actually got a lot done in those 40 minutes.
Maybe it’s the novelty of doing something new when I’m blocking, but I was able to really concentrate and focus. I would look up at the computer screen at my notes every so often, but mostly I’d focus on the Alphasmart and those 4 lines.
It could also be because I needed to brainstorm what to do for the scene, and brainstorming on the Alphasmart feels a lot like when I’m writing. But I haven’t brainstormed quite the same way when I’m typing on the computer.
What exactly is it about the Alphasmart that makes it so effective? Is it really those 4 lines? Maybe the fact it’s a separate machine, with a different screen from my computer screen for me to focus on? I’m really curious.
I’m also a bit apprehensive because my Alphasmart is starting to break down. It’s inevitable since it’s several years old. It’s not a complicated machine so I think I could figure out how to fix it, to a certain extent, but in the event I can’t, then when it’s gone, it’s gone.
I could buy another one off of eBay, but the simple fact is that I don’t want my writing productivity to be dependent on a machine that is no longer being manufactured and which has no tech support. So I’m trying to figure out why it works and what I can do to possibly recreate that effect in other ways.
Blocking on other machines
Now I’d really like to try blocking on the Freewrite Traveler, because for blocking, it doesn’t matter if there are typos or not. These are just my notes for me to follow when I’m writing. So I’ll try that after lunch.
I’d also like to try blocking with my bluetooth keyboard connected to my iPad, and opening a simple text editor like Sprinter. Maybe that distraction-free environment will recreate the feeling of my Alphasmart.
***
Blocking on the Freewrite
It worked well, actually, but it wasn’t quite as enjoyable as blocking on the Alphasmart because of the lag time. I had to consciously not look at the screen as I typed because I was typing faster than the screen could keep up. If I stopped to look at the screen, I would end up slowing down or even losing my train of thought.
But I didn’t have that anxiety about my typos that I do when I write my prose, because this was just my blocking notes.
Copying my text into Scrivener was WAY faster the Alphasmart, since the Freewrite automatically saves to the cloud.
But ultimately it was just a tiny bit harder to block on the Freewrite than the Alphasmart because of the typing.
Hit me like a ton of bricks
But when I was smack dab in the middle of blocking, the tiredness hit me like a ton of bricks. One minute I was fine, the next I was exhausted. I think this is because I only slept 5.5 hours last night and woke up early to deal with IBS issues this morning for a few hours. I think I used up all my candy.
I’m disappointed I only did 80 minutes of blocking, but at least I got some blocking done today, and I made some good progress on the scene I’m working on, which is a bit difficult.
Japanese study
I noticed this yesterday, and it’s true today too, that I’m a bit lazy when it comes to my Japanese study lately, because I’m so tired by the time I get to it. I’ve been doing it after my writing so that I have the energy to do my writing first, but since I’ve had IBS problems, I have even less energy than usual, and that means my time for my Japanese study only gets the dregs.
This morning when I was waiting for the drugs to kick in, I think that what I should have done was my Japanese study. It would have been productive, and in a sense it would have eased my mental state into a “get ready to work” mode faster.
I don’t know if that would have taken away from the energy I needed to write and block, but it might have helped me not procrastinate this morning. I might have had an easier time starting my work right after doing my Japanese study. This morning, I only rested while waiting for my drugs, and going from “rest” to “work” is hard to do quickly.
I think I will readjust my daily schedule yet again and do my Japanese study before my writing. I know I had put it afterward, but my Japanese study has not been as thorough recently when I did that. So I’ll put it back to the start of my day as one of my “frogs.” I’ll monitor it to see if it steals away energy that I would otherwise need for my writing. I am kind of hoping that it will instead ease me into work faster.
I spend too much time blogging
Well that says it all. I didn’t realize until I was filling in my totals below that I spent an hour and 45 minutes blogging today. I know a lot of it was analyzing my productivity experiments, but I need to do something to reduce my blogging time. The problem is that I don’t know what I could do. Recording my thoughts and results from my productivity experiments has been pretty important especially the last few days.
Well, maybe I’ll leave it for the moment since I’m trying different things for my productivity right now. I think I had originally allotted one hour for blogging each day, so I’ll try to keep to that. After all, it would be better for me to write rather than blog.
***
Writing: Time spent: 25 minutes
Writing: Total number of words: 884 words
Writing: Overall writing speed: 2108 words/hour
Writing streak: 9 days
Editing: Time spent: 17 minutes
Blocking: time spent: 1 hour, 21 minutes
Email/Social Media streak: 7 days
Time spent doing other writing-related business: 1 hour, 57 minutes
My takeaway for today: Alphasmart has been great for both writing and blocking! I need to analyze why it works and try to find something similar so I am not dependent on a machine no longer being manufactured. Try blocking on bluetooth keyboard and iPad as something similar to Alphasmart.
My second takeaway for today: Readjust daily schedule so Japanese study is before writing, since I’ve been lazy about it lately when I put it after the writing.
My third takeaway for today: Reduce the amount of time you spend blogging. Productivity experiments are important, but writing is more important.
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