Published: Apr 29, 2026 by Richard Sezov
In parallel with developing this new writing methodology, I started to notice new patterns in myself that I did not like. I was becoming much more easily distractable. I found it harder to concentrate on any given task, and it felt like my productivity was going down. I began to have days that would end and I would scratch my head and wonder, what did I do all day?
After soul-searching, prayer, and keeping a log of my activities, I realized the new, modern world of the 2010s was affecting me. I had a smartphone blaring notifications, email and chat pop-ups on my computer, multiple social media accounts to check, and more. I hadn’t become distractable; I was distracted. No wonder I struggled to concentrate; I was getting interrupted all the time! I embarked on a project to become more efficient and increase my productivity, purposefully.
I started by examining how I used to work, before all the distractions. I pulled out my wife’s old DOS machine, still in the basement. It was like a time capsule, still in its state from the 1990s. It booted to the Hard Disk Menu, where you could choose from the programs installed on the machine and run them, one at a time. One of those programs was my almost forgotten, beloved old word processor, WordStar.
I realized several things. In the DOS world, there was no such thing as multitasking. You didn’t just sit down at your computer to do something and then get distracted by web surfing, social media, or anything like that. You had an objective in mind before you touched the computer. Then you would sit down, boot it up, and do that one thing, and one thing only. You couldn’t run email and a word processor at the same time; you worked with your email until you finished with it, and then if you had something to write, you closed your email and fired up your word processor. You couldn’t have a chat program running in the background that interrupted you from your task. If you wanted to chat or go online, you had to make that your objective: you’d open a terminal program and dial a BBS (Bulletin Board System). You would do that one thing (interact with the BBS) and then get off. There was none of this getting something partway done, getting interrupted, bouncing to another task, finishing that, forgetting what you were working on first, checking social media or email, remembering what you were working on, and on and on.
In the old DOS world, if I wanted to write, I sat down at my computer and wrote. If I wanted to play a video game, I played a video game. If I wanted to go online, I dialed up a modem and went online. If I wanted to write code, I wrote code—surrounded by books that documented syntax and APIs. I never tried to do any of these things at the same time, because it wasn’t possible. By design, your computer couldn’t distract you. I decided I wanted to design my modern system for this goal, to keep it from distracting me.
Because I use Linux and the KDE Plasma desktop, I had all the tools I needed to design for myself an interface that would help me focus on the task at hand, without getting distracted by other things. I turned off almost all notifications, especially new email notifications and all chat notifications except for direct messages. I would not allow these things to interrupt me; I would check them when I had a break between tasks. I certainly would not allow websites to send notifications in the browser.
I isolated email and chat to separate virtual desktops, so they wouldn’t even be visible unless I navigated to them. I created a separate virtual desktop for “work,” where I’d run my text editor to do my writing or to write some code.
I did the same with my phone. I removed social media apps, along with their notifications. I decided if I had to access social media while on the go, I’d use the phone’s web browser. The only things allowed to make noise were phone calls and texts. All of this helped greatly to reduce distractions, help me focus, and get my productivity back up.
During this process, I happened upon Robert J. Sawyer’s WordStar essay. The essay is dated, with much focus on contrasting WordStar and WordPerfect. Most writers today haven’t used WordStar or WordPerfect: Word is their tool, because it became the default word processor on Windows. But if you ignore the contrasting between word processors in that essay and focus on what he says about the design of WordStar and its strengths, he reveals an elegance in its design that, though a user of WordStar in the past, I hadn’t appreciated until Mr. Sawyer pointed it out. Right click the link to his essay above and read it in another tab; it’ll get you thinking, especially about the long-hand page metaphor. Then come back here.
I’d already been switching my Control and Caps Lock keys for years; any old hand at WordStar knows the most natural place for Control is where your left pinky can reach it easily. I considered trying to use WordStar to write my Markdown documents, but abandoned that quickly. Sure, you can run WordStar in DOSBox or DOSBox/X, but it’s kind of a pain. DOS character encoding is much more limited than the UTF-8 I was using on Linux. And of course you have the CR/LF (carriage return/line feed) issue between DOS/Windows and Linux. I decided to customize my infinitely customizable jEdit text editor to use WordStar key bindings. As I remember, this was tedious and took me forever, but it was doable. jEdit didn’t have some of the WordStar functionality—particularly the block commands—but I had everything else working.
Something still felt unnatural. When I started this docs as code journey, I’d set out to use the best programmer’s tools to write documentation, and though jEdit was super-powerful, it wasn’t widely used, and its community is small. Some of the guys on my team had abandoned jEdit for other editors, such as TextMate, Sublime, and Atom. These modern editors had beautiful integration with Git, easily accessible diff tooling, and robust and active plugins ecosystems.
I set out to find a new editor that would have all this, plus the long-hand page metaphor Robert Sawyer talked about. I had no idea that when I found one, I’d use it to create my own word processor. But that’s for the next part.
Part 1 of this series is here.
Part 2 of this series is here.
Part 3 of this series is here.
Part 4 of this series is here.
Part 5 of this series is here.
Part 6 of this series is here.
Part 7 of this series is here.