5 ms·

I love the idea, but I'm not sure if I'm using it right. The premise is your writing session dies if you go 5 seconds without typing as a means to get you in t

by slindz 11y ago

I love the idea, but I'm not sure if I'm using it right. The premise is your writing session dies if you go 5 seconds without typing as a means to get you in to flow. When your session 'dies', everything you wrote disappears forever (as far as I can tell) so there's a lot of incentive to keep going whatever the cost. I presume there's some sort of congratulatory messaging/saving opportunity if you last your entire stretch (I didn't last the minimum 5 minutes) Given these stakes, I'd be too nervous to use it for anything I'd actually want to hold on to due to the risk of something out of my control commanding my attention for five seconds. I'm still glad the project exists - it's easy to picture it being great for somebody.

chinathrow 11y ago
> it's easy to picture it being great for somebody. In my opinion, it's very hard that this app is great for somebody - yes I know, just one data point. But I think it's really useless with the imminent erasure of text.
- slindz 11y ago
  I was thinking it might make sense for people who have to do a lot of brainstorming. If your job is to come up with new ideas and you're having troubles getting started, you could fire this up. It's like playing a game which might make it a little easier to flesh out new ideas. Where your text might disappear, the thought work that went in to that forced session can be rebuilt without much effort. That said, I do agree that it's a niche tool and probably not the right one for a lot of people. [edit] wording - not enough caffeine yet.
samstave 11y ago
There are times when my mental dictionary/thesaurus goes offline and I blank on a word/phrase or spelling.... For that reason alone - I would not be able to use this app too well.
- 6stringmerc 11y ago
  That makes a lot of sense. I've done pretty extensive writing on an IBM Selectric III typewriter because I love the mechanical sound of the machine. A lot of the fun comes from having a great pace and firing off letters and words to make a percussive noise. That said, I still often 'space out' when trying to collect my thoughts, sort of like in a trance while the machine hums at my fingertips. I like being able to take breaks to consider phrasing a word choice, which this app doesn't allow for at its root, which makes sense based on the type of 'push' the setup is more useful for in general.
- jewel 11y ago
  That's precisely the sort of distraction that this app forces you to ignore. Just insert something like <another word for crap that starts with e> and keep writing.
  - samstave 11y ago
    I like the cut of your jib.... That should be something I should practice. Thanks.
anigbrowl 11y ago
Yeah, I wrote out ~4000 words longhand and filled a whole small notebook for a personal project earlier this month...but it took me a couple of days and a lot of long pauses to think about what I was writing.
- csydas 11y ago
  It's going to be a case by case scenario. Not everyone is at the same level of writing or able to arrange their thoughts coherently in a timely matter at all, especially given that most people's experience with writing tends to be in incredibly short concise bursts. (e.g., twitter, Facebook, reddit, with the latter having an unofficial max length before you get a tl;dr from most readers). Some writers are like you; they take their time, think about what they want to say, then they say it. Others tend to be burst writers, where a few thousand words appear in the editor under an hour. My experience as a TA in university is that a lot people who are otherwise perfectly competent communicators are poor writers simply because they're afraid to commit words to paper. They overthink how they want to convey their ideas or aren't sure how to logically arrange it and spend more time mentally planning and never committing something. It's probably why there's so much dread with paper writing even at the University level, especially given that many courses even within the sciences put a lot of weight on the reports as opposed to the work done. (This, admittedly, comes second hand from observing my roommates and g/f deal with Biology, Chemistry, and Physics papers and getting frustrated because of how heavily weighted the papers were on the class rubric) The advantage to something like this, if you can muster up the courage to just write, is that it gets you used to just being fine with whatever you put out. It's not necessarily about quality as much as it is quantity and getting you used to putting out bad work and not letting that fear be crippling. I had exercises like this in High School where we were given journals and 50 minutes to respond to a long prompt on the given book we had read. They were difficult exercises, but well worth the effort.

by slindz 11y ago

chinathrow 11y ago

> it's easy to picture it being great for somebody. In my opinion, it's very hard that this app is great for somebody - yes I know, just one data point. But I think it's really useless with the imminent erasure of text.

slindz 11y ago
I was thinking it might make sense for people who have to do a lot of brainstorming. If your job is to come up with new ideas and you're having troubles getting started, you could fire this up. It's like playing a game which might make it a little easier to flesh out new ideas. Where your text might disappear, the thought work that went in to that forced session can be rebuilt without much effort. That said, I do agree that it's a niche tool and probably not the right one for a lot of people. [edit] wording - not enough caffeine yet.

samstave 11y ago

There are times when my mental dictionary/thesaurus goes offline and I blank on a word/phrase or spelling.... For that reason alone - I would not be able to use this app too well.

6stringmerc 11y ago
That makes a lot of sense. I've done pretty extensive writing on an IBM Selectric III typewriter because I love the mechanical sound of the machine. A lot of the fun comes from having a great pace and firing off letters and words to make a percussive noise. That said, I still often 'space out' when trying to collect my thoughts, sort of like in a trance while the machine hums at my fingertips. I like being able to take breaks to consider phrasing a word choice, which this app doesn't allow for at its root, which makes sense based on the type of 'push' the setup is more useful for in general.
jewel 11y ago
That's precisely the sort of distraction that this app forces you to ignore. Just insert something like <another word for crap that starts with e> and keep writing.
- samstave 11y ago
  I like the cut of your jib.... That should be something I should practice. Thanks.

anigbrowl 11y ago

Yeah, I wrote out ~4000 words longhand and filled a whole small notebook for a personal project earlier this month...but it took me a couple of days and a lot of long pauses to think about what I was writing.

csydas 11y ago
It's going to be a case by case scenario. Not everyone is at the same level of writing or able to arrange their thoughts coherently in a timely matter at all, especially given that most people's experience with writing tends to be in incredibly short concise bursts. (e.g., twitter, Facebook, reddit, with the latter having an unofficial max length before you get a tl;dr from most readers). Some writers are like you; they take their time, think about what they want to say, then they say it. Others tend to be burst writers, where a few thousand words appear in the editor under an hour. My experience as a TA in university is that a lot people who are otherwise perfectly competent communicators are poor writers simply because they're afraid to commit words to paper. They overthink how they want to convey their ideas or aren't sure how to logically arrange it and spend more time mentally planning and never committing something. It's probably why there's so much dread with paper writing even at the University level, especially given that many courses even within the sciences put a lot of weight on the reports as opposed to the work done. (This, admittedly, comes second hand from observing my roommates and g/f deal with Biology, Chemistry, and Physics papers and getting frustrated because of how heavily weighted the papers were on the class rubric) The advantage to something like this, if you can muster up the courage to just write, is that it gets you used to just being fine with whatever you put out. It's not necessarily about quality as much as it is quantity and getting you used to putting out bad work and not letting that fear be crippling. I had exercises like this in High School where we were given journals and 50 minutes to respond to a long prompt on the given book we had read. They were difficult exercises, but well worth the effort.