Writing here on 200wad works, because it became clear when 200wad went down for a while yesterday. You don’t miss what you’ve got until it’s gone.

So 200wad went down for a bit yesterday. I was forced to write my 200 words for the day somewhere else while waiting for it to come back up again. Since my Gmail was open, I instinctively opened up a draft and started typing from there. And gawd, it’s sooo bad.

The draft email window is small and doesn’t quite stretch across the whole browser window. So that means I can see my emails in the background, and it’s super distracting. There’s so many other buttons, search bars, and UI elements (even the text editing ones!) I can see that I don’t need right for writing, but by virtue of their colour, contrast and placement, they are calling out for my attention. I feel like I can’t think clearly with that UI noise hovering in my subconscious field of view. So the opposite is true then. The clean and minimal interface of 200wad really does work. It really does help me focus better and write more productively.

There’s also no word counter to look at in Gmail so I feel like I’m typing ‘blind’. When do I stop? When I’m done with my point? Or when I reach 200? Of course I could copy and paste this in a Word doc and do the word count from there, but there’s something about the immediacy of the word counter on 200wad that helps me better pace my writing, even if I don’t plan on stopping at 200. So it really does help!

It’s funny how the downtime actually inspired this post. You don’t really appreciate what you’ve got until it’s gone. Thankfully, it wasn’t gone for good.

Glad that 200wad is now back up again. Happy to be back here writing!