In my never-ending quest for productivity-enhancing tools, I came across an appli­ca­tion called Write or Die. The very title very much appeals to my no-nonsense approach to get­ting things done (both the cap­i­talised and non-capitalised ver­sions, for the fans of David Allen’s pro­duc­tiv­ity sys­tem of the same name).

The con­cept is sim­ple: give Write or Die a tar­get num­ber of words and a time limit, and it will, depend­ing on how severe you have the options set, “yell” at you if you’re falling behind the tar­get num­ber of words per minute. You can set it to sim­ply change the colour of the back­ground to an increas­ingly angry red (sur­pris­ingly effec­tive), or set it to pop up and nag you if you’re get­ting behind (I find this a bit annoy­ing, and not in an effec­tive way either). Or, you can let it get nasty: dis­abling save until your goal is reached; dis­abling back­space; forc­ing full screen or always-on-top; or, if you’re a ser­ial pro­cras­ti­na­tor who believes in tough love, you can set it to start delet­ing words (the so-called “kamikaze” mode).

I gen­er­ally find the progress bars at the top of the writ­ing space (one bar shows the num­ber of words, while the other shows the elapsed time) with the red­den­ing back­ground is enough to keep me typ­ing and not allow­ing myself to check email/Twitter/feeds/Facebook/the real world until I’ve reached my mile­stone. But I can eas­ily see that some other peo­ple would really need the more hard­core options.

There’s a free online ver­sion, but it seemed like so much fun I quite hap­pily shelled out $10 in Pay­Pal for the full ver­sion, which is an AIR app. It keeps stats — the num­ber of words writ­ten, the amount of time, aver­age words per minute and per ses­sion, etc. There’s even a game built in as well, where you can pit your­self against other Write or Die users.

I drafted this blog post in the appli­ca­tion (I set myself for 400 words in 15 min­utes, although I stopped the ses­sion and pasted it into Live Writer to fin­ish off before I’d got to the end. One fea­ture that would really make it great for me would be spell-check — just the red-wriggly-underline type check­ing like in Word and Fire­fox. But then again remov­ing all dis­trac­tions to you just ham­mer­ing out words – espe­cially ones that appeal to the obsessive-compulsive – is the whole point of the tool.

If you’re a geek like me and mak­ing things into games helps to moti­vate you, Write or Die is highly recommended.