For years I’ve wanted a writing machine that would combine the best parts of a typewriter and a word processor. After months of tinkering, a friend and I just finished building one. We call it the DocWriter. It’s a typewriter that sends its keystrokes in real time to a Google Doc.
The standard way to run a book club is to have everybody finish the book before meeting to talk about it. You have one meeting per book. The discussion goes on for one or two hours before it runs out of gas, and then the group picks the next book, and you agree to meet […]
The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you'll finish more stuff per unit time. But there's more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you'll be inclined to do more. The converse is true, too. If every time you write […]
If you’ve ever typed anything into a Google Doc, you can now play it back as if it were a movie — like traveling through time to look over your own shoulder as you write. This is possible because every document written in Google Docs since about May 2010 has a revision history that tracks […]
The way I thought you used a dictionary was that you looked up words you've never heard of, or whose sense you're unsure of. You would never look up an ordinary word -- like example, or sport, or magic -- because all you'll learn is what it means, and that you already know. Indeed, if […]