There's always Alt+Tab. Keep an innocent-looking window open in the background and use keyboard shortcuts to instantly switch to it when someone approaches. Ke

There's always Alt+Tab. Keep an innocent-looking window open in the background and use keyboard shortcuts to instantly switch to it when someone approaches. Keep your reading/writing window itself small, with a small font. Read and write in the terminal, since the UI is unfamiliar to people. Or disguise your reading/writing material as another application such as Microsoft Word, Outlook, or maybe even an IDE. (Thinking of sites/apps like MSWorddit, this particular one might not work anymore though: https://github.com/pcottle/MSWorddit https://github.com/pcottle/MSWorddit) If you're up for it, you could learn a new language and do your reading and writing in that language. Ideally choose a language that you have studied before or want to learn, and that's close enough to your own languages to get started quickly, but different enough so as not to be commonly understood in your area or have too many recognizable words (cognates). Hopefully a combination of those and the other approaches people have suggested will work for you.