Flowstate is billed as the “most dangerous app”. It’s hyperbole, of course, but there’s a grain of truth to it. The software is a writing and note-taking tool, and is a beautiful way to jot down your thoughts, especially on mobile. But its key feature is the ability to set timed writing sessions in which any text you’ve put to the page will disappear if you stop writing for more than seven seconds. Yes, really.
You can pick from one of five fonts and you then set a timer between five and 180 minutes. As soon your fingers stop producing keystrokes of any kind, the text will begin to disappear. After seven seconds, so long as you don’t hit a single key to bring the text back, your page goes blank and the timer resets.
The software induces a constant terror, but with each passing second you feel a strange weight lift off your shoulders. For people who are easily distracted, Flowstate could be a godsend. If you have what you would consider a normal and healthy workflow for your writing, the app could seem pointless, and needlessly risky.
Filmmaker and screenwriter Caleb Slain, co-created the app with software developer Blaine Cronn. He wants the app to become both a way to journal your stream of consciousness and a tool to help writers find an untapped source of inspiration.
Slain and Cronn designed their writing software to induce what’s called ‘flow’, a psychology term for a state of mind in which you disconnect from your sense of self and enter an ultra-focused mode of being. The goal is to achieve a milestone or produce something remarkable by preventing your own thoughts from weighing you down. It’s a well studied phenomenon, especially in areas like sports and music.
The term flow was coined in the 1970s by Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who described the feeling in a 1996 interview with Wired magazine by saying, “The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”
There are a number of conditions for achieving flow, according to Csikszentmihalyi, like a clear task at hand and an environment devoid of distraction. If you’ve ever felt “on fire” or “in the zone,” even doing simple tasks like cooking, ironing, or cleaning, you’ve been in a flow state. Above all, the most important condition for flow is the presence of a formidable — but not impossible — challenge. Slain wants you to think of each timed writing session in Flowstate as a personal contest to overcome.
Timed writing prompts are a staple of creative writing education, and committing yourself to set amounts of writing time each and every day is a technique employed by the world’s most prolific and accomplished writers. Slain was introduced to a new twist, however, In a class taught by screenwriter Stewart Stern, the man behind classics like Rebel Without A Cause and Ugly American. The idea was a competitive timed writing session to turn the activity of writing nonstop into a kind of endurance test against your peers. “My pen doesn’t stop moving because my neighbour doesn’t stop writing. So we keep going,” Slain says. “In the past, this has only worked because of social pressure. But in a digital realm, you could find a way to trigger the same thing.”
After a certain amount of time, Slain says the psychology of flow kicks in and you start writing without thinking, almost as if you’re watching someone else perform the task. “We call it a drug that takes 15 minutes to kick in,” he says. The duo have tinkered for about three years now on the project, self-funding it save for a $5,000 seed investment from a friend in venture capital.
Source: www.theverge.com
