Writing on a deadline can be a slippery slope. One minute you’re typing away as if there are dragons breathing on your fingertips, and the next you’re watching cat videos on YouTube, blissfully unaware of the hours passed—and there’s no return.

If you’ve ever faced down a blank word processor one late night in college, you know about writing. Writing doesn’t budge. Writing is a sneaky task that tends to creep up behind you and whisper in your ear that there’s nothing to worry about, that your deadlines loom at far away, harmless distance. It’s the sort of task that can be hard to grasp your fingers around and know with absolute certainty that it won’t unexpectedly morph into an unsatisfactory form as it taunts and daunts and haunts us. Even the most skilled must wield a sharp eye and a quick whip to not let writing get the best of them. Alas, when those of us charged with the task of producing readable content run low on caffeine and high on distractions, we must rely on a sturdy selection of tools to pull us through the mist.

Of course, driving a writing project to a deadline doesn’t have to sound like a piece from a Stephen King novel, but it often does—especially if your work environment is less than peaceful. While it would be both unfair and inaccurate to describe the flow of projects at Radii as chaotic, things here stay consistently busy, particularly (and most inexplicably) around my desk. Coupled with the inherent ease of falling into dis-focus when penning a lengthy work, distractions are the active entropic force of writing. So I bring out the destroyer of little distractions and interruptions alike: OmmWriter. It's a nifty program designed by a Barcelona creative agency to help writers concentrate, and OmmWriter Dāna 1 is free for you to try out.

“Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Paraphrased from Einstein’s Razor

This is where OmmWriter excels: it keeps the writing process as simple as possible without over-simplifying it to the point where you lack the features you actually need. OmmWriter is about what it isn’t. For example, when you open OmmWriter, you won’t find lots of fonts and styles to play around with: you’re given a selection of four fonts and font sizes, three choices of background shade (all of white), and three choices of background music and sound. The last feature, the audio, is the only that could be counterproductive—but thanks to their foresight, it only plays as you keep typing.

One of my favourite features is OmmWriter’s full screen-only nature; unlike Microsoft Word, it doesn’t give you the choice of flipping through your tabs and open programs. Not only does this help pull you into the writing mindset by putting the racing blinders on, it creates a very beneficial side effect. With OmmWriter open and all other programs hidden, the responsibility of checking email constantly is paused, the guilt of media negligence minimized. It’s a breath of fresh air to be able to de-multitask (if only for ten minutes) and simply write.

In short, OmmWriter takes away your ability to spend too much time adjusting the options while you write; that deadly feels-like-you’re-accomplishing-something-but-you’re-left-with-a-blank-page zone disappears. It cuts to the heart of the matter: OmmWriter lets you write, no excuses.

Recommended for the writer who writes.

Not recommended for the cat video enthusiast.