Shh! I’m Concentrating

I’m writing. At the moment, that’s all I want to be doing. It makes me happy.

I’m not doing anything else. Just writing.

I’m calm, I’m focused. It’s probably the first time in a very long time.

My thoughts are always somewhere else.

When I’m writing, I’m thinking of something else, not just the words and the sentences. When I’m listening to music, sometimes I think that I’m on the stage, being the artist, performing for thousands of people. Other times, I’m at work, at my desk, doing the daily work routine. It’s hard to stay focused, it’s hard to concentrate.

I need to eliminate distractions.

But you don’t need to be quiet, I shouldn’t have hushed you. That’s because I already have a solution.

The solution.

Sometimes I discover software, that at first glance seems to be worthless, stupid or at least weird. And before the testing, I just don’t understand why I would use it.

Then, after the testing, I realize that the software is close to perfect.

That’s exactly what happened when I first discovered Concentrate, a software for Mac.

This is a software that helps me to eliminate distractions, and helps me concentrate.

In just a few minutes, I added a profile called writing. When I launch Concentrate, all the software on my Mac shuts down, and only two applications are running (they launch when I click on the profile). That’s WriteRoom and Spofity. The first one is for writing, the latter is for music. That’s because I need music when I’m writing.

I discovered that when I’m writing, I usually do a lot of other things other than writing. I check my email, I surf the web, I look at my Twitter timeline and a lot of other stuff as well. Concentrate stops me from doing this. It stops all the applications on my Mac, and I can’t run other applications other than the ones I have added to my profile.

As for now, I only have one profile, and that’s for writing. I can add as many as I need.

When writing, I set a timer, for how long I will be writing. Usually the timer is set for 25 minutes. After 25 minutes, I’ll be able to run all the other applications on my computer, and I get a message on the screen and a sound is playing. This way, I know when I should take a break.

Concentrate is an awesome software, it’s a software I really need. Without it, you guessed it, it’s hard to concentrate.

But I still don’t understand, why is it so hard to stay focused without it?