Enter the DarkRoom for increased productivity.

To me the key to productivity lies in simplicity and avoiding distraction.
I am glad that last month I found out about Dark Room at DoshDosh.com.
Dark Room is a no-frill, minimalistic full-screen text editor. Its main purpose is to let you focus on your writing and kill all distractions that come with other full-featured editors.

I started using Dark Room last month and I believe it has increased my productivity by many folds. When you start the program it covers your entire monitor screen, hiding everything from you. All you see is the dark background and the text that you are writing. There are no visible toolbars, cute icons or any other fancy-shmancy add-ons. This really helps you to concentrate on the task at hand, that is writing a post or an article. I even use it to write simple Java programs.


You can customize the background and text color but I like the default setting of green text on black background. Of course, you can not format your document in Dark Room. But this should not be a problem. Just complete your work, save the text file and then open that file in your full-featured word processor to make it look nice. The important thing is to capture your thoughts and keep them flowing without any distractions. You can always spell-check and format your document later.
Dark Room is for Windows. Mac users can try WriteRoom. Both these editors are free.

DarkRoom requires  Microsoft .NET framework. If you prefer not to use .NET framework try JDarkRoom, which is the Java implementation of DarkRoom. It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.