Why Productivity Gadgets Won’t Save Us
Technology isn’t standing in the way of our creativity; we are.
There’s this ad that keeps coming up in my Instagram feed lately. It’s for the Freewrite Traveler, a dapper little chiclet pad full of cute white keys that bills itself as “the world’s best portable typewriter & word processor.” It costs $599, although it is temporarily on “sale” for $369.
A cursory glance at the website shows that Astrohaus, the Manhattan-based creators of the Freewrite Traveler, wants you to think this gadget is a single-stop shop for curing writer’s block. By merely purchasing the Freewrite Traveler, Astrohaus suggests, your creativity will be uncorked and your words will start flowing like wine. As hinted by the product’s previous name, the Hemingwrite, this is a gadget for people who want to be the next legendary writer.
As a writer myself, I’ve got to admit that whenever this ad pops up, I spend way too long watching it…which is probably why Instagram’s algorithms keep squirting it into my feed. I look at this tiny little techno-hipster pocketbook, and I immediately imagine myself on a Latin Quarter veranda, smoking a little gold-tipped cigarette and sipping wine as I hammer out the final chapter of my long-delayed first novel.
Yet despite the elegant design of the Freewrite Traveler, I know that Astrohaus is—well—full of it when it implies that this device is the key to unlocking my creativity. And I know this because I, like so many writers, have fallen for this siren’s song before.
From a design and technology perspective, there’s nothing about the Freewrite Traveler that is superior to any other device I own: Except for its WiFi capability and tiny e-ink display, it is functionally identical to the Neo2 AlphaSmart, a $29 old-school word processor that can run for months off a AAA battery and which I similarly purchased at the recommendation of a cultish online community as the perfect tool to “unlock” my creativity.
Same with the Das Keyboard, a beautifully chunky mechanical keyboard on which I’m currently typing this article. I love it: I’ve probably written hundreds of thousands of words on my Das since I bought it a few years back. But has it unlocked my creativity any more than the Magic Keyboard that shipped with my iMac? I doubt it. Those words would still have been written on other keyboards. The only thing the Das Keyboard changed was the preciousness I felt writing them.
Same goes for the iPad Pro with Smart Keyboard, currently collecting dust in my office. And the used Olivetti Valentine with the squeaky qwerty keys that I’ve only ever used to write a single hacky love letter on gossamer-thin paper. Ditto for my $400 Parker Fountain Pen, a dozen Moleskines and Moleskine-likes, and perhaps $10,000 worth of software sales over the last 30 years, for everything from Wordstar (a 1980s-era word processor program that Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin is still using) to Scrivener, an app for long-form projects like novels.
All are products that I bought because they promised (explicitly or implicitly) that they were designed to unlock my creativity. Yet while I love many of these devices, and admire their design, I can’t honestly say standing on the other end of sometimes decades-long relationships with them that they have made it any easier for me to practice the self-dentistry-like sadism of putting one word down after another.
It almost makes you wonder: Why are companies so good at selling our own creativity to us? And why do we keep falling for it?
I think the nature of being creative is to be disappointed in one’s ability to create. That’s weird if you think about it. No one who fancied themselves a gardener would be frustrated with their own gardening ability. Then again, if you fancy yourself a gardener, you can’t will a tomato plant into existence. All you can do is plant the seed, care for it, and nourish it. You understand it is the toil that makes it grow.
That’s something that a lot of creatives have a hard time understanding. The seed of a great idea comes to you in a flash: Almost immediately, in your mind’s eye, you can picture it when it grows. It’s fleshed-out form is so vivid in your imagination, you almost believe it’s real already.
But it isn’t. If you want it to be real, the drudgery begins: the endless grinding away, trying to give birth to this imperfect copy of an idea that, in your mind, already has such crystal-clear resonance. And that drudgery is almost a promise to be disappointed, because at the end of that journey, inevitably, you’ll be left with a reality that is imperfect — an end product that seems like a pale and warped reflection of what you originally set out to create.
Over the years as a journalist, I’ve spoken to dozens of creatives. Writers. Artists. Musicians. Designers of all stripes. And when they let their guard down, over a drink or two, they all admit to feeling in some way like this. Because the gulf between inspiration and creation is vast. And those compelled to cross it often find themselves arriving at a different place than where they meant to go.
Is it any wonder, then, that marketing products to blocked-up creatives is as old as creativity itself?
What I’ve finally started internalizing is that design can’t solve the creativity problem, any more than it can cure schizophrenia. Because the real thing that stands in the way of an artist’s creativity is, well, the near-certainty of disappointment.
It’s interesting to me, in the 21st century, that what so many products designed for creativity are selling is the idea of minimalism. Of a creative journey spent distraction-free. Past its undeniably cute design sensibility, that’s ultimately what the Freewrite Traveler is selling. Not a tabula rasa for creativity, so much as a lock box for it. Open your laptop to write, and you’ll be distracted by just so many things, ranging from the feel of the keyboard to the web browser just an alt-tab away. But buy a Freewrite Traveler, and you’ll only get what you need to pleasantly type word after word.
Like I said, I’ve been falling for this sales pitch for decades. And as Instagram’s algorithms know, I’m still a bit of a mark. But what I’ve finally started internalizing is that design can’t solve the creativity problem, any more than it can cure schizophrenia.
Because the real thing that stands in the way of an artist’s creativity is, well, the near-certainty of disappointment. That in the translation of your beautiful idea from your head into corporeal form, it will inevitably seem less perfect, less good. And so creatives of all stripes dither and delay and procrastinate, all to stretch out the period before they become disillusioned with their so-called creativity as long as they can.
Minimalist design can’t solve that problem any more than maximalist design can. Because creativity is already so minimalist as to be nearly immeasurable: It’s productivity that creatives both want, and avoid. And from that perspective, some stripped-down gadget promising total focus can never really satisfy the creative. We’ll just find new ways to dither. Because despite what we tell ourselves, focus isn’t really what we want. It’s absolution.
Besides, at the end of the day, our concentration issues have nothing to do with the fact that our devices do too much, that push notifications are constantly pulling us away from ideal hyper-productive flow. A study from University College London found that humans are hardwired to follow the path of least resistance, to procrastinate when there’s work ahead. In other words, notifications and distractions aren’t the culprit getting in the way of our productivity. The issue lies within ourselves, and the only gadget that can break us out of that cycle is a sensory-deprivation tank.
Magenta is a publication of Huge.
