Bloggers of the world, it’s time you acknowledged your forefathers! Let us all raise our glasses high and acknowledge the Blog-father, Doogie Howser, M.D.

Ok, In truth this has precious little to do with Doogie Howser, where ever our little [I suppose he's not so little anymore] protégé may be right now. But rather more to do with a mental connection spawned off of a new piece of software I am testing using right now called Dark Room.

I’ve been obsessed with increased efficiency in my creative/productive endeavors lately. Everything from a minimal but useful selection of tools hiding in my heads-up display for Yahoo’s Widget Engine to tabbed command line interfaces. These tools keep me organized and quickly informed. They keep my desktop clean, too. They don’t however do much to keep me distraction free. My RSS Aggregator tends to flash something new at me every thirty minutes or so. Same with my mail indicator. And then there is the temptation of the time murderer that is the Web. For all my increased productivity and information access, I was continually multi-tasking, to the detriment of the things that wanted my focus, like a blog entry.

Well, via one of my usual news feeds came a post regarding a piece of software for the Mac called WriteRoom, specifically designed for “Distraction Free Writing.” I flashed with jealousy and moved on with whatever it was I had been doing before I saw this. About 3 days later, the same news feed presented me with a link to DarkRoom; a WriteRoom clone for Windows [Written simply cause the programmer liked the idea, but had to use a PC.]

I downloaded the app, sat down, and fired it up for the first time. One second later, my screen was black, sans a blinking cursor at the top of the screen. It’s slightly jarring, honestly. No menus, no toolbars, just big, black empty space [Even more empty space on my Widescreen]. But once you start writing it’s true beauty shines. The complete quiet away from all my tools and gadgets allows me to focus on pure content.

Heavy multi-tasking is a requirement of my job and a talent I use to my advantage. I tend to require [and largely enjoy] real-time processing of near-continuous data streams from varied sources. Despite this, having the ability to background “it all” and focus my energies on just one thing when I need/want to is already proving to be a true tool to my creativity that I’d rather not do without.

Technorati Tags: Dark Room, efficiency, Distractions, Text Editor