I’ve discovered I require complete focus when I’m trying to write. I’m sensitive to noise distractions, a bing, ding, or dong from an incoming notification can derail my entire train of thought. This means a phone is your worst enemy when you’re trying to get your thoughts down on a page. Turn the phone off, it’s ok, your FOMO hurts worse than the social ostracization you’ll receive. Find a quite spot. Music works for some but personally clouds my thinking. Do what works best for you but set yourself up for success by being in a productive environment.

I’ve also becoming increasing aware of the intrusion of spell check as a detriment to writing productivity. Spell check used to be a thing you did after finishing writing your word document. There was a “Spell Check” mode you enabled and it visited each typo one by one and made you accept or reject suggestions. Nowadays, spell check is everywhere, enabled by default, and active ALL THE TIME. Immediately after you make a typo, there’s a red squiggle under the word alerting you to your mistake. We never asked for it, but this “feature” is a distraction, not an enhancement. Although we’ve come to accept spell check as a benefit, it’s important to ask yourself if it’s really serving you.

It’s distracting to have a red squiggle appear under a word, even if it’s misspelled, because it’s not relevant at the time of it being written. I like to go back AFTER I’m done writing and fix my typos. During the process, spell check is a hamper on my writing “flow”. My brain fixates on the red squiggle, nagging me to fix it, to free it from it’s immortal prison so it can disappear back into the ether from whence it came. I’m unable to continue, an invisible force beckons me to go back and fix it, which knocks me out of my train of thought and makes it really hard to write anything of value.

If you’re like me and get distracted easily, then try disabling your spell checker during your “flow” section of your writing process. Just write. Get the thoughts out of your brain onto the page. It doesn’t have to be pretty or well formatted or make sense, or be spelled correctly, it just has to be out of your head and on the paper. Then later go back and edit it so it reads well and makes sense and doesn’t have any spelling errors. You’ll be surprised at just how much more you can get done with this technique.

I’ve figured out how to disable spell check for my setup so you don’t have to. I use StackEdit to write my blog posts, which is great because it already does most of what I want (and it’s free). The spell check is not actually a StackEdit feature but a Chrome feature (because StackEdit is a chrome app), so it’s as simple as disabling it from your chrome settings. Expand the Advanced tab at the bottom, and toggle off Spell check. Bingo, bango, bongo, the red squiggly is no more! Hurrah, you can write without feeling like your brain is going to explode from watching the red squiggly flash with every new character you type. Now you have no excuse not to become the next Hemmingway.

~Reid