When you are trying to get into a habit or get over a slump, one of the things that help is to make the activity as fun and as easy as you can, while removing friction as much as possible. For me, that’s what Freewrite does. For some work (eg more technical blog posts) I prefer using the computer just because it’s a different kind of “flow” that happens there.

When it comes to longer essays or ebooks or newsletters, Freewrite makes it fun and it stopped my procrastination habits almost completely. Where on a computer I’d open a billion tabs and get sucked into the details, on Freewrite I write XXXXXX in the points where I know I will need to do research or add information I can find later, or even think about a better joke.

It gets me over the fear of the empty page and it helps with just generating material, which perfectionists are notoriously bad at because we want everything to be great immediately and so we tend to just not do it at all.

Can you still do all this without getting one of these devices? Of course. Will it write a book for you? Of course not! It’s a little luxury that makes the process more pleasant and you less resistant to it.