I only started blogging earlier this year but quickly encountered the problem of being easily distracted when writing posts. With any website simply a click away I frequently found myself writing a couple of sentences, only to then break away and check out the breaking news or how my latest social media submissions were doing.

The result was that each blog post would take forever to write. And not only would it take ages to actually write the post but the constant distractions would result in a disjointed post… they were taking a long time to write and the quality was lower.

I’d end up spending a lot of time editing posts (still with the frequent distractions!) and unsurprisingly blogging wasn’t the most productive or even enjoyable experience. I needed something to focus the thought process, to block out the email and web clutter.

How was this achieved? I discovered the Dark Room - an extremely simple yet remarkably effective text editor.

When it comes to features there’s nothing particularly special about the Dark Room. In fact, it’s almost featureless. However, it’s in its simplicity that’s lies its beauty.

The Dark Room is simply a text editor where you can write your blog posts before saving them in a Notepad format. You write on a black background with green text (the text color can be changed, which I’ve chosen to do) but there’s no ability to bold text or add links. All formatting has to be done at a later date when you import your post into your blogging platform.

This basic nature and black background really helps to focus the mind. The Dark Room has been criticized for being uninspiring but I find that it has the opposite effect… it’s so simple and basic that the only inspiration you have is through your thoughts, rather than through on-screen distractions.

Alternatives to the Dark Room

There are a number of of other text editors which can be used, each with their different benefits.

Windows Live Writer is one desktop application which aims to make writing posts easier through providing many different features. However, it’s a little too over-engineered for those who are just looking for something to cut out the distractions.

There’s also Notepad++, an editor geared towards coding, and Metapad, an upgraded version of Notepad. Perhaps the most promising other content editor is WriteRoom. It’s similarity to the Dark Room means that I’ve never actually tried it out myself but it is a popular alternative.

Have you ever found yourself easily distracted when writing? And what text editors do you use to write your blog posts?

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