Using the distraction free machine

 

When I did my annual personal technology review at the end of last year, I mentioned that I hadn’t made as much use of the distraction free machine as I’d hoped, in part due to my actually finishing the documentation of Dow’s pharmacy.

Since I had my sclerotherapy last week that’s changed. 

For the first few days I found it difficult to sit for a prolonged period at my desk to write, so when writing, I sat with my leg up on the sofa with the distraction free machine on my lap – hopelessly unergonomic I know – and caught up on my blogging.

And it’s been good.

As I said at the time the machine is nice to type on and it’s of a size to sit comfortably on my lap, making it as an ideal writing machine.

I’ve been using Libre Office as a writing tool rather than a text editor such as kate or gedit to create either simply structured plain text or markdown to feed through a conversion tool such as pandoc.

Once finished I send the text to OneDrive using Emailitin, where I finish it off on my windows 10 desk laptop, and then cut and paste it into a blogging tool such as open live writer for Wordpress, or in the case of blogger simply paste it into the edit window, and tweak the formatting if necessary.

I’ve been being a good little vegemite and making sure I walk my ten thousand steps a day (as counted by my fitbit) with the result that I’m healing nicely and can now sit at my desk for an extended period, but having started seriously using the lightweight machine I’ve kept on using it.

It’s quite a pleasant way to write, with either ABC Classic or Radio National burbling away in the background. As I say it’s unergonomic, but pleasant.

One of the advantages of working this way is that it is truly distraction free.

While the machine is connected to the internet there’s no web browser or email client running unless I actively want to run one, perhaps to check something, which coupled with my withdrawal from social media, it’s a good way to work.

I also make a point of leaving my phone in the study while I’m sitting downstairs writing, or working on something, something which also makes for a distraction free environment.

I’m very tempted, once we’ve cleaned out the old garage which is going to be studio for J with a bit of extra desk space for me to bugger about with film photography, to find a half way decent second hand sofa to allow me to continue working in my lazy distraction free writing ...