Using a portable word processor to actually write instead of procrastinating
Now that I’m not writing as much during my day job — I’ve moved from The Atlantic’s political reporting team to the Product team — I’ve realized something obvious in retrospect: It is exceptionally difficult to write once you fall out of the routine.
When your editor expects three (or more) stories a week, you still procrastinate — but you always manage to buckle down, find your focus and bang out some copy.
But now that I don’t have that deadline pressure, I’ve found that my writing process goes something like this:
- Have a vague ambition to write a blog post;
- Open up Google Docs;
- Write about 50 words;
- Remember something I wanted to Google;
- Immediately open a new tab to look it up;
- Get lost reading Wikipedia or Twitter for a half hour;
- Sheepishly close Google Docs and clean the apartment.
I know some people who turn off their internet connection to avoid getting distracted. But for me, it’s equally tempting to open Textmate and puzzle over a coding project. Basically, I will take any excuse to avoid writing (and I’m not the only one).
During a particularly meta Google procrastination sessions, I happened across Freewrite, a free-standing word processor that bills itself as the first “smart typewriter.” It looks pretty neat — an e-ink display paired with a high-quality keyboard that wirelessly connects to Dropbox and Google Docs. Whatever you write, the Freewrite displays and syncs to the cloud, with no internet browser to distract you.
My colleague Ian Bogost reviewed the Freewrite last year, and came away impressed. “I can’t overstate how liberating this feels,” he wrote.
There’s only one problem. It’s very expensive — almost $500. That’s a bit too much for me, despite the German engineering.
But I wondered: Did someone else already make a crappier version of this, maybe in the 1990s or 2000s, before cheap laptops were ubiquitous?
It turns out they did. Meet the Alphasmart Neo2.
This fella first launched in the mid-2000s, and was particularly popular in schools. (You can see that legacy in the plethora of math- and typing-related “applets” accessible from the main menu.) But it also makes a great lightweight word processor, not all that different from the Freewrite.
- The keyboard is a good size, about what you’d expect from a 15-inch Macbook Pro. It’s satisfying to type, if not revelatory.
- The display is decently large LCD screen, fitting four lines of text (or more, if you change the font size).
- It’s powered by three AA batteries. I’ve been using the Neo2 for about a month and it still registers as being at full power.
- Quaintly, it only holds eight “files”, which you switch between by tapping the “file 1,” “file 2”, “file 3” (and so on) keys.
- To transfer the text files to your computer, you connect the Neo2 to your computer with a USB cable, essentially making it an external keyboard. When you click “send,” it literally re-types what you wrote. (There’s also a Mac utility that allows you to transfer files more sensibly.)
- It weighs about two pounds — less than my MacBook Air.
- And best of all, it only cost around $40! You can find them (used, of course) on Amazon and eBay.
Using the Neo2 has definitely helped solve my distraction problem: When I sit down to write, I now put my phone in a drawer, close my computer, and start typing.
It’s also made it a bit easier to power through copy. When I’m drafting something in Google Docs, I’m liable to edit and re-edit while I’m writing, doubling back to change something a few paragraphs earlier. With the Neo2, I can only see the about 40–50 words at a time, and while you can scroll up and down (and copy and paste), it’s a bit laborious. So I’m finding myself writing all the way through, and then going back to edit at the end, which feels more effective.
No, the Neo2 has not made it easier to start writing. That’s still a challenge. But once I get going, I’m far less likely to stop.
EDIT: Yes, I wrote this post on the Neo2 first!
