Minimizing distraction while writing

A round-up of my favourite First Draft Pro features for focused writing

You’ve cleaned your workspace, sorted the mail, paired all your socks and still have to meet today’s word count…

Focused writing has been very much on my mind lately, so this week’s post is about:

1. Minimizing distraction while writing in First Draft Pro

2. Some upcoming changes to our free plan

The elusive magic of focus

I’m endlessly trying to minimize distractions while writing. But, I often struggle to summon focus. Do you need crystals? Candles? Should we develop the ritualistic practice of wearing the exact same sweater, at the exact same time of day, with our overworked laptops angled at exactly 45 degrees to the left of our favourite spoon?

When I designed First Draft Pro, I wanted to create an environment that made deep focus more accessible while writing. I took a lot of inspiration from the clean interfaces of focus and productivity apps and tried to blend this into the writing experience.

Here’s a round-up of my favourite features for maintaining focus! I even put together a virtual demo →

Focus Features in First Draft Pro

Keeping your eye on the prize

Stay focused with goal setting. Chart your progress and keep up your motivation with daily word count and project goals:

• Set a target word count to get you typing every day and build consistency into your writing practice.

• Set project goals to monitor your overall progress and make sure you stay on track.

Making sure you haven’t lost the plot

Working on a twisty thriller? The first goal of any mind-bending plot is to retain your sanity. Here's how to keep track of what you're writing in each scene:

• Create an outline. Plan your story and sketch out your pivotal scenes with our outlining features. If something’s not working, you can drag and drop cards to move chapters and scenes around at any time.

• Organise scenes by plotline. Plotlines are a great way to keep track of specific storylines, character arcs, or scenes written from a specific point of view.

• Use scene prompts. View your outlined scene sketches in the panel on the right of your page and use these as prompts as you write. Always see what scene is coming next, so that you know exactly what you’re writing towards.

Minimising context switching

Once you’re finally in the writing zone, there’s nothing more annoying than having to shuffle your notes around, scroll back to the previous chapter, or search 50 open browser tabs for some crucial detail.

By keeping your outline, manuscript, and project notes in one place, we’re able to reduce needless context-switching.

Concentration, are you ready? If so, let’s go!

Collapse the right side menu to remove some of the clutter and streamline your working environment. Or, activate deep focus mode, turn on dark mode, and use typewriter mode to zone in on your story.

Write from anywhere, offline

Offline editing allows you to work on your manuscript when you don’t have WiFi – or if you just need to tune out Threads for the day.

Activate it either automatically or manually:

• First Draft Pro will automatically switch into offline mode if your connection drops. As soon as you're back up and running, it will automatically go back online.

• If you want to switch to offline mode, simply use the toggle at the bottom right of your screen. While you're offline, your changes are saved locally and will sync to the cloud as soon as First Draft Pro is online again.

Is distraction always bad, though?

Please allow me to present two exhibits to the jury:

“To be with the one I love and to think of something else: this is how I have my best ideas” – Laurence Sterne

“Distraction arises from an excellent quality of the understanding, which allows the ideas to strike against, or reawaken one another. It is the opposite of that stupor of attention, which merely rests on, or recycles, the same idea” – Diderot

Isn't it lovely to think of distraction as creatively productive? Getting distracted is, after all, just being interested. We notice things, we pay attention. Which is to say: we're writers.

So: stare out the window. Notice the birds and the way the light hits the leaves. And, when you return to the work, let us help you create a (slightly) more focused writing practice.

Upcoming changes to our free plan

Our goal with First Draft Pro is to build the favourite writing app for fiction, non-fiction and academic writers. With any new product, there’s a fair bit of figuring out what works best for pricing and plans.

Five months ago we did away with our 14-day free trial and launched a forever free plan instead.

We did this because:

• We want writers to be able to use our specialist writing software, even if they can’t afford to pay for it.

• We want to give you a proper chance to see if our app is a good fit for your writing process before committing to an upgrade.

In the next few days we’ll be changing our free plan to add some additional limits. We’re trying to find a good balance, and our aim will always be honouring the intention of the free plan.

Here’s what will change:

• You will be able to create 2 projects on the free plan (and unlimited projects on the paid plan)

• You will be able to create 1 plotline per project on the free plan (and unlimited plotlines on the paid plan)

• You will be able to create 10 notes per project on the free plan (and unlimited notes on the paid plan)

If you’re on a free plan and overshoot these limits, you’ll have to upgrade your account once we make this change. Your subscription helps us to build more great features, so thank you for supporting our work!

Here’s an overview of the free plan vs the premium paid plan.

If you upgrade before the end of March, you can take 20% off an annual subscription using this voucher code: LEVELUP

Here are instructions for redeeming the voucher code.