I joined
750words.com last week, and I'm enjoying it.
It's like a giant Twitter text box that keeps a running word count but doesn't share your words anywhere and also keeps some neat stats* and gives you badges for stuff. So, not at all like Twitter. But found it via
qui_oui's Twitter feed, so I can be forgiven? (Plus, the site has a combo birds-and-bowling scoring-and-badges thing that I'm enjoying, so tweets maybe aren't that far off? Yeah. /overthinking) Anyway - I like that there's a running word count displayed for me so I don't use checking the word count as a distraction.
*Time-to-completion, wpm, how many times you were distracted, etc.I've got 6 days in a row now of making it to 750 words, and while not all of it is brilliant, it's 6 x 750 words typed out that I probably wouldn't have typed. I used it to bash out some thoughts and plans in prep for yesterday's So-What-
Are-Your-Research-Questions? meeting with my interim supervisor. I used it to go through some possible responses to questions in my rapidly-approaching job interview (in ~2.5 hours? - for an hourly-paid and supervisory job at the place where I've been volunteering). I haven't used it to write an entry for here, but I suppose that's not far off.
(Yesterday I mused about a Mythbusters versus Top Gear crossover, but decided that would be a Very Bad Idea since one show is people being perky about science and the other is people being grumpy about cars.)Since the site keeps stats, I could see that over the last five days I've had the window open
for hours in the background while I'm noodling off somewhere else. Today I decided that I'd try tossing words in all at once - and was able to get up to my limit (while muddling through some theoretical stuff for my thesis) in
18 minutes.
18 minutes to type 750 coherent words? Put that way, it hardly seems a chore at all. Wish me luck for tomorrow!