[WRITING] "Can an App Really Cure Writer's Block?"

[rfmcdonald]

Last November, Bloomberg's Seth Porges wrote about some interesting-sounding writing apps.

Just about everybody has spent some time in the proverbial "zone," when time seems to melt away as you painlessly chug through challenges with a sense of satisfaction and purpose.

This “flow state,”as it was first named by social scientist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Ph.D., in his 1990 book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, is familiar to anybody who has ever felt their fingers take control as they played piano, wrote a novel, or stacked Tetris blocks. It's the same otherworldly force that brings rhymes to rappers out of seemingly nothing and makes the work clock seem to move in fast-forward. This is, as the poet Marshall Mathers put it, when you “lose yourself.”

This is state is more than just an abstract concept. When people reach flow, they undergo physiological changes, including an increase in the part of the nervous system associated with relaxation, a recent study by a team of Swedish researchers found. Other studies that have looked at heart rate and breathing patterns back up the link between flow and calm. In other words, flow is real, and it really can help bring us that sought-after sense of happy productivity.

But can we switch flow on with simple software? I recently tried out a pair of new word processing programs that are designed to do just that, at least when it comes to writing. Both try to do the same thing: tune out distractions and stop you from overthinking what you write. To this end, the programs minimize your ability to edit—or even see—what you are writing, keeping you firmly in the present as you tap out words. Editing and polishing are for later—once you’ve fought the tyranny of the blank page and busted through your writer’s block.